Last Saturday I had the honour of teaching a class on Intentional (planned) Pooling at the Lancaster Yarn Shop in Intercourse, Pennsylvania (Lancaster County). It’s a great way to use some of those multi-coloured, handpainted skeins of yarn hiding in your stash and it’s one of my favourite techniques to teach. The bonus of teaching this at Lancaster Yarn Shop is that they have their own line of Kettle Dyed Yarn that is perfect for this technique and comes in very generous skeins of 484 yards.

There were 7 students and 1 dog (Geisha) in the class; Geisha was very well behaved!

The class started by selecting the yarn they wanted to use from the shop offerings, with colourways Rhubarb and Plaid Shirt being the most popular – although Rainbow was also a popular choice. Once everyone had their yarn, everyone spread out and started to assess their yarn. As the yarn is not dyed to be symmetrical, class members had to decide if they wanted to knit their project as it looked in the skein (using a single skein) or if they wanted to use two skeins and have a wider piece that was symmetrical with one row being the circumference of the skein. About half the students decided to do a narrower piece and the rest decided on the wider, symmetrical version. With that decision being made, they moved on to laying out the yarn to match up the colour repeats to establish the length of the rows and mark where the yarn turned.

After marking the turns for the first rows, we calculated estimated stitch counts and everyone got to knitting. Intentional pooling isn’t an exact science, there really isn’t a way to get it to work out perfectly right at the start. Individual knitting tension, type of needle, humidity, how you knit – it can all play in altering tension. The next part of the class was fine tuning all of these to ensure that the colours would line up. For some it required changing needle size, for others it was a matter of learning the tricks to tweak rows as knitting. Soon, the pooling began to show as you can see in Cheryl’s project shown below worked in the colour Rainbow.

Three hours passed very quickly and all too soon it was time to pack up. Barb from the class members sent me this picture of her scarf the next day – she’s made great progress. I think she was bit by the pooling bug, it can be highly addictive!

I’ll be teaching classes on Intentional Pooling this fall at Shall We Knit? in Waterloo, Ontario, both an introductory class and one on working pooling with lace (like the class shown above). You can find a list of all my upcoming classes here. You can also sign up for my periodic newsletter (in sidebar ->) which includes information on classes as well as new designs.