Teaching adults is a different

sort of challenge from teaching children. I think I have said that before.
I taught a workshop yesterday. It was a very brief introduction to the knitting of the Victorian era, part of the "Queen Victoria Challenge" for this year's state Royal Agricultural and Horticultural Society Show. 
There were eleven people who made the effort to turn up - despite the extreme heat. (Believe me, if it had not been for having committed to do it, I would not have been there in the heat.)
But I talked a little about how Victorian era patterns were written. It was in the early part of Queen Victoria's life that patterns came to be available on a commercial basis and they were quite different from modern patterns. They really resemble not much more than vague instructions. Assumptions were made that people knew how to do many things - or could, at very least, get help to do them.
And then I gave people a pattern to try for themselves. It was a pattern for a border for a bedspread. The idea was that they would try to knit one very small unit of the border but do it on much finer needles and with much yarn because so much the Victorians knitted was finer than the yarn we now work with.
Nobody finished working out how to do it but they all took their pieces home to try again. I hope someone does puzzle it out. I have puzzled it out and I know someone who could not be there will puzzle it out. 
It's a challenge though and it was very interesting to watch the different ways people approached the problem. One member of the group knits in the "continental" style and she found a different problem from everyone else in following the instructions. Some people worked together while others worked alone. They asked questions of me - which I tried not to answer to readily as they had to work it out for themselves. They asked questions of each other and that was good. 
I'll be interested to see if anyone turns up in a fortnight with the motif knitted. 
And I must do my own before then.