Basic, Basic Basic

That is the name of the class I am taking.
It is kind of a 'get ready' class for the Master Knitting courses.

I have been knitting for about 2 years now and have decided to take my knitting a step further. Well, ok, maybe MANY steps forward, but I am starting with one step at a time.

The TKGA is The Knitting Guild Association and they offer many corresponded classes. The Basic, Basic, Basic class is set up as three lessons. You are given instructions to knit certain things (swatches) and then you send them off to have them evaluated.

I have just completed the swatches for the first lesson.

Here are the swatches before they have been blocked. The lesson was seeing the some different styles of doing increases and learning some basics of reading the stitches.

Here they all are all blocked. I have only blocked lace shawls before so this was a little different. With the shawls you wanted to aggressively block them (or stretch them out). With these swatches the idea was just to flatten them out without flattening the stitches.
Here is an excellent video of this technique.

These next five pictures are just the individual swatches. You (and I) can enlarge them to better see the things that need to be improved. One of my major problems that I can see (with my untrained eye) is that my tension is not consistent. That is something I will have to really pay attention to as I work through this course in preparation for the master classes.