Briar Rose Alpacas Farm

Mary Stein trying on a garment made by Tammy Noble. The garment was part of our recent Knit-Along.

Some of the alpacas at the Farm.

Today the Sophisticated Stitches club met at the Briar Rose Alpacas Farm in Lincoln University, PA. While it may have been partly cloudy outside, it was sunny inside the shed. Barbara DuVall, the Briar Rose’s owner, really made us feel welcomed.

Tammy Noble, set up her Brother electronic machine and demonstrated with yarn made from the alpacas at raised at Briar Rose. She chose a lace pattern to knit. While Tammy was doing the machine knitting demonstration, I set up my laptop and showed the features of Design-A-Knit, Garment Designer, Wild Ginger’s Boutique and Wild Things software as well as Buzz Tools and MasterWorks II.

In case anyone if you are unfamiliar with Design-A-Knit, it's a great software program that permits a cable connection between the computer and an electronic knitting machine. Design-A-Knit’s garment styler and stitch graphics are great features . The garment styler portion of the software creates a knit garment pattern with a few clicks of the mouse. The stitch graphics portion of the software can create any graphic by generating a downloadable pattern.

My personal machine knitting software favorite is Garment Designer. I like it because it’s really user friendly. The knitting instructions generated by the software is easy to read when compared to Design-A-Knit. Design-A-Knit creates a short hand type instructions, while Garment Designer uses “words”. Anyway I enjoyed the opportunity to show the software’s capability. MasterWorks II and Buzz Tools are embroidery software programs. Any chance I get to play around with these programs is just plain fun for me.

One of our members brought their children to the Farm. The boy got a kick out of watching two alpaca males “wrestle”. It was interesting watching the alpacas fight like cats and dogs.

For refreshments, the Farm offered Alex’s lemonade. The lemonade proceeds are used to fight childhood cancer, which unfortunately took the life of its namesake, Alexandra Scott.

All in all, the members and non-members who met at Briar Rose had a great day at the farm.

Briar Rose Alpacas Farm is open again tomorrow, Sunday, September 25, 2011 from noon to 4:00 PM. Hope you will consider going. It’s great FREE family fun!

Briar Rose Alpacas
575 Kelton Pennock Bridge Road
Lincoln University, PA 19352
Briar Rose Alpacas

The next meeting of the Sophisticated Stitches club will be Saturday, October 22, 2011 from 10:00 AM to noon at the church below. We will have a demonstration on the garter bar hat.

The First United Church of Christ
145 Chestnut St.
Spring City, PA 19475
(Parking in the back.)
One final note. The club members held a knit-along for the Sweet Pea vest by Mary Anne Oger featured in a recent issue of Knit ‘N Style magazine. The photo above shows Mary Stein wearing the vest made by Tammy Noble.

Should anyone need assistance in the Philadelphia, PA area with machine knitting, recommend you contact Tammy Noble. One of the non-member attendees at the meeting today commented that she didn't know Tammy's store, Knit and Sew was in the area and that Tammy could assist her with machine repairs plus provide machine knitting lesson. Tammy is an expert machine knitter on the Passap as well as any Japanese knitting machine. Check out her website, Knit and Sew

Regard,

Donna
donmarie@fast.net