#machknit

[helenknits]

More knitting machine experimentation - fairisle

So for my next machine knitted square (the front or back of the body of this little jumper), I wanted to try fairisle with the punchcards on my machine. I wasn't really sure how they worked, so I read in my instructions how to make them work. After doing about 11 rows (so that the carriage is on the left hand side of the machine), you insert a post behind the punchcard slot, insert the punchcard, join the punchcard together with little joining things, then rotate it round until you are at the starting line. Then you have to change the setting on your machine so it knows to use the punchcard. On my machine I had to press the MC button and turn a knob. 

So that is my finished swatch (after sewing together some of the weird holes that I managed to make...).

There are more than a few issues with this swatch, quite early on I manage to press the button that stops the punchcard rotating, so you can see that there are some repeated lines in the grey pink section to the left of this picture, there are also some tight rows where the yarn got stuck in the tension mast. Interestingly the coloured yarn which was on the right side of the tension mast hardly ever got stuck, while the white yarn which was on the left side got stuck every single row. That suggests to me there is an issue with the left side and in future I will stick to the right side! 

I had some issues at the edge of the work which I think were likely to have been caused by the yarn tension so the stitches weren't formed properly, but I just kept going... and sewed them up afterwards (fairly untidily but this will be sewn to the next piece (coming tomorrow hopefully!)

The last set of issues were caused when I decided to stop doing the fairisle (I ran out of the stripy yarn) and move onto just plain knitting. For some reason I didn't follow any instructions and forgot to set everything back to how it was before I started the fairisle... so I ended up with a complete mess and a huge hole, but at this point I decided I was pleased with my progress I wasn't going to rip it out and I'd have a go at darning the hole back together at the end. So I carefully did another few rows and then moved onto waste yarn for my crochet bindoff. Now my darning is not very good, but hopefully it will not be too noticeable once I have blocked it.

Just for interest here is the back of my swatch:

[dylaniumknits-blog]

Why I love machine knitting -- Part 1

Yesterday, I woke up with the inspiration to knit a sweater for myself.  Being an accessory designer, this is quite a feat for me.  I've only constructed a few full garments before, so I'm happy to have the practice.  I wanted to make a piece that was something I would wear, and not too difficult (this is pleasure knitting, after all).  After much searching, I decided to take a stab at Josh Bennett (a.k.a. boymeetspurl)'s striped V-neck cardigan.

To get some of my creative juices flowing, and to get a real sense of instant gratification, I decided that I would adapt this hand-knit pattern for my knitting machine.  This required a bit of tweaking, but overall has been a success so far.  For my yarn, I stuck with Galway 100% wool, an oldie but a goodie (and a cheapie! $7/200m, yes pls), brown to replace the blue in the pic and a light blue to replace the grey.  After getting home I had to cone the yarn, which was kind of excruciating because of a few tangles, but I worked it out. 

The pattern as written calls for knitting the back and two fronts of the cardi continuously, which would mean having some horribly large number of stitches on the needle at one time.  To avoid this, I separated the left-front, back, and right-front into three pieces, which I will seam together after they're done.

So far so good.  I started coning the yarn at around 5:30 yesterday afternoon.  By midnight, I'd completed all three of the major pieces.  The reason it took that long was because on the right-front, I was a little overzealous with my decreases and totally forgot to change colours for the stripes.  I basically knit a blue stripe that was twice as long as it should have been and had to rip back 12 rows.  Let me tell you, getting a big piece of knitting BACK onto the machine in one of the smallest gauges it can handle is probably one of the worst experiences of life.  just when you think half of the fabric is securely hanging on the needles, it pops off again while you're wrestling with the second half!  UGH.  After about an hour and a half of hanging, latching, and cursing, I was able to get everything mostly back to normal.  You can totally tell where I had the issues because there's one row with a lot of splicing and weirdly shaped stitches.  I may (if I care enough) embroider over those few stitches by hand to clean them up a bit.

However, despite those difficulties, I'm still pretty pleased that i've done about 75% of the knitting work for a sweater in about 6 hours.  Talk about (almost) instant gratification. 

In part 2 I'll show some pictures of progress and hopefully some FO pics to come.  This is just very exciting.