As I’ve mentioned before, I love advent Calendars but not so much the fact that they happen in December. But by chance I heard about the Made BySarahS MSKAL in time to join in for a nice May mystery (This post was written at the end of May right after I finished, but it’s been queued for a few weeks.)

This mkal was even more fun than I’d hoped, because it turned out I’d also accidentally joined a mostly Rhode Island-area knitting group full of lovely people. My own Saturday knit group has been out of commission since the pandemic, and I don’t even have contact info for most of them to set up an online thing. I hadn’t realized how nice it would be to have a regular group again, even if I was a weird odd one out on the other coast.

The pattern was a simple cuff down sock (look, another check mark on my 2020 fiber bucket list!) with stripes so there was an excuse to have yarn every other day. The socks matched the beautiful succulent/cactus project bag.

The non yarn days had a variety of teas, sweets, stitch markers… the usual small stuff you can fit in a yarn related advent. The Dread Pirate helped me open some packages and shared some sweets and shook a lot of yarn. One big treat for me: the kitchener stitch keychain, which is definitely a useful tool and one I’d coveted but hadn’t bought for myself.

This kit was exactly what I needed as I was starting to get my feet under me again: Cute little packages, a friendly community, and a simple project that I’ll definitely wear. I’m so glad I did it, and glad I managed to go to many of the happy hour calls even though I didn’t know everyone. It was really lovely.

I’m already intrigued by this hint about the next kit. August!

In this year’s fiber goals, I decided I wanted to give brioche another go. So when one of my favourite designers mentioned that she’d be doing a course via Zoom, it seemed like a perfect opportunity. So I signed up for PDXKnitterari’s course on May 2nd as soon as I could make sure my husband was good to be on toddler duty then.

Zoom is an interesting tool for this. I really liked the “debugging” part in this format: normally a teacher will bend over the work with a student to fix things and the rest of the class works on their own pieces, but because we were all sharing video, we could *all* see what the problem looked like and watch as Michele figured it out. This was super helpful to me for later, because there was so much more for my brain to latch onto since I’d watched and tried to guess myself as we did the class. And it’s always fun to watch a master at work.

I really appreciated the bit of advice that it looks like of like a mess for the first few rows. I definitely would have assumed I screwed something up and probably ripped it back a few times without that hint!

This was also a much better experience for me than my previous foray into online fiber learning because I set aside time during the day instead of trying to fit in a video in my toddler-free evening. That’s on me as much as the format, but it’s good to get a sense of how much of a difference it makes.

And, of course, it helps to have a great instructor who’d put a lot of detail into the pattern *and* had videos for us to watch later if we got stuck. I didn’t need them for the brioche for this piece, but I really appreciated the one on the Russian bind off.

Of course, now that I’ve gotten a little taste, I’m already trying to figure out what brioche thing to make next! And maybe what class to take next?