Lucy Neatby's Knitting Essentials DVD

From the bits I'd heard of Lucy Neatby on Knitmore Girls, I was figuring her DVDs would be really terrific. She just comes across that way, a knitting master who is gifted to teach. The few youtube videos I saw confirmed it: she demonstrated a provisional cast-on that got me all excited about starting the Shaelyn shawl--at last!

So this is just to say: I get to be right! She really *is* terrific! And I was right about something else too: it was best to start out with volume one. An LYS (which just happened to be the very wonderful Threadbenders in Grand Rapids) had several of her DVDs and I pondered which one to buy. Shouldn't I skip ahead to volume two, on the assumption I already knew the stuff in volume one?

Ooo baby, it's a good thing I didn't! In the first five minutes I learned some extremely useful things I'd never heard of before! Even though you can use the index to skip to a particular topic, I'm enjoying just starting at the beginning and gazing in slack-jawed amazement at what this gal can do! For one thing, I'm going to be binding off the Lucy Neatby way from now on.

Among the topics covered so far have been different cast-ons, different increases and decreases and their effects, how to read your knitting, making yarn butterflies to control strands of yarn, knitting in ends, and much more--and I'm not even half-way through it yet. She even demonstrates how to use a ball winder and swift, knowledge which gives me confidence to buy a set of my own.

And here is another thing I learned: I'm not going to hesitate to purchase any other Lucy Neatby knitting video again. They are available on the web, but you know how that goes--it's hard sometimes to push yourself to order something cold on the web. If my LYS hadn't had it right there on the shelf, where I could pick it up and bond with it, and have the instant gratification of taking it home with me, I probably never would have ordered one. But now, hee hee ho ho, I am over that particular hurdle. Volume two cannot be far in the future.