Oh, my… what a wonderful Tuesday I had!

Dance Morning
First I went to my new dance class at Happendance Studio. This is the school run by the Happendance Modern Dance troupes (they have one company that goes into schools, another that does concerts). Diane Newman founded Happendance about 27 years ago and still is a leader there, although she shares the lead with other excellent talented folk.

Right after my divorce in 1991, I learned about Diane. At that time she had a private studio in DeWitt, a town just north of Lansing. I started to take adult ballet from her and I had not danced in about 16 years.

Many ballet instructors are downright mean. They yell at you and tell you how bad that was and how much you need to improve. Diane is just as loving as they are mean. I am not good at ballet, but it is good for me so I took it. I would fall over on many occasions. Once I was on my way to falling again, and Diane told me how lovely my foot was. This is the kind of teacher I want to study with. She always finds something you did right, and reinforces that. What a woman.

Well, I figured Diane was too busy directing a school and two dance companies, to be teaching people who were not destined to be a prima ballerina someday. Imagine my surprise when I get to the school, and Diane is my teacher. I am so happy!!!

The moves in the class are mostly based on modern dance, which I studied in high school. It’s all familiar stuff though unpracticed. This is another form of dance that I love but am not particularly good at. It stretches different muscles than middle-eastern dance does, which is what I need.

There were seven students, a nice class… a few probably younger than me and most older than me. I think this will be very good for rounding me out in a nice balanced way. I’m just delighted to study with Diane again!

Knitting Afternoon
After dance class, I headed over to the Sheraton where I took a half-day class with Lucy Neatby on finishing techniques (sponsored by Threadbear Fiberarts). My goodness! How wonderful it was!

We worked basically on a few pockets to learn several techniques. It’s amazing how familiar some of this was, considering it was mostly about sweaters and I mostly do socks. We did some grafting, and an afterthought pocket. I do kitchener toes (and grafted a new top on my bag last weekend) and afterthought heels. Gotta love it. A sweater class that relates to socks. I was pleased.

We also did a wonderful knitted picot bind off, a new modified bind off technique that is stretchy (very helpful for toe up socks) and an I-cord bind off that just looks wonderful, but will require a little more practice on my part.

I didn’t take any pictures, and my swatch from class has at least 60 ends on it, it looks like a wig rather than knitting. Just trust me, I loved my class. If you ever get a chance to study with Lucy, do! She is so very creative. She won’t shy away from anything that inspires her, she dives in headfirst. Amazingly creative, focused, grounded, centered, gentle, good at explaining. It was a wonderful time.

The image today is two soft block prints I made on small erasers a number of years ago when visiting my mother in Florida. My computer says the image was created in January 2001 and modified in March 2000. Go figure. Go Microsoft. But that gives us a general ballpark for these images. They were inspired by a ballroom dance book my mother had. The first one is the tango, I can’t remember what dance the second one was.