Bit of Brioche

[terriko]

This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.

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?

Comments

[brainwane]

What a great experience! It sounds like you got some "model-rival learning," a term I learned from a book about how baby animals learn in the wild. Very cool.

[terriko]

I had to look up the term because it was only partway in my brain from some psych or machine learning class, but you're right!