Playing with Machines Again

Brother Knitting Machine KH 800 in action

My Mom was given a knitting machine by a friend who was cleaning out her basement, it sounded kind of fancy.  I offered to teach my Mom how to use it, but our recent get-togethers were focused on other things (eg. I am expecting).  When she came over to help me bake traditional Slovak Easter foods for the holiday, I figured I could at least set up my Knitmaster and show her the basics.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts and on the associated info page, my Knitmaster is a very humble sort of knitting machine.  It’s a standard gauge (meaning it can handle lace-weight through DK), but it’s functionality is limited to plain stockinette unless you are willing to do some very tedious hand-manipulation.

I had considered upgrading to a punch card machine last year, but I really couldn’t justify the expense.  My humble Knitmaster was an eBay bargain at $46 including shipping.  I’d likely have to pay at least $500 for a gamble on a basic punchcard machine.  Spare cash being limited as it often is, I gave up on the idea after a few months of Craigslist and eBay stalking.

So last week I showed my Mom the wonders of machine knitting on my Knitmaster.  I demonstrated various techniques on a piece that started as an attempt to machine knit a baby cardigan.  She also got to try out casting on, binding off, and basic rows.  My crafty buddy Emily also stopped by and got to try out the knitting machine.  Emily is a scientist by trade, so I think the precision and mechanical nature of the knitting machine were intriguing to her.

The next day I got a call from my Mom.  Maybe it’s the impending grandma-hood and the baby sweater I was trying to create, maybe it’s the fact that my Mom just won a circular sock knitting machine from ebay, or maybe it was the fact that my machine is kind of simple and her machine was a bit more complex.  Whatever the reason, she made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.  She asked if I would like to swap knitting machines with her!  So the pic above is “my” new Brother KH 800 Knitting Machine, “on semi-permanent loan to my collection” as we like to say.

So far, I am thrilled!  The Brother Knitting Machine had been in a friend of my Mom’s yarn shop, then it was given to another friend of hers who does charity knitting but apparently never got into the knitting machine aspect of production knitting.  A basement needed cleaning, the machine went to my Mom, and voila!  A free upgrade for me!  It is in fairly good shape (a few needles are missing, apparently swapped out and moved to the ends when bent).  It has a lace cartridge and takes a 12-stitch punchcard.  Alas, the couple of books that I have accumulated on knitting machine patterns are for 24-stitch punchcards, but I think most can be modified.

Compared to my Knitmaster, there are a lot of pieces to set up on this machine.  Flipping through the PDF manual I found online, I was able to figure out most things.  I am slowly building up my abilities with the new functions.  I like making hemmed edges on it – the cast on is so easy it feels like cheating!

The only major difficulty I am having so far is that the punchcard mechanism is not “reading” the cards correctly.  Some of the needles that the card says should be selected are not selecting – I can do it manually, of course, but that sort of defeats the purpose.  The PDF manual is missing some pages, but it doesn’t appear that it ever had a page that detailed troubleshooting the punchcard.  Hopefully internet research will help, but I may be relegated to taking things apart and seeing what happens.

I’m heading for a day-long knitting workshop this weekend with my crafty buddy Emily.  A couple of classes and a vendor area… Watch out now – I’m heading into the danger zone!

Until next time, keep those needles (and needle beds) clicking…

Travel

Today my honey of 10 years left town on a short business trip.  In all our time together we have only spent a night apart on a couple of occasions.  This trip will be two nights and there was a flight involved.  So last night I quickly whipped up some knitted luggage identifiers to mark my old suitcase set for him.

knitted luggage id

Safe travels.

Drumcarding for color

Restarted cardigan

At the rate I’ve been posting, you would think I haven’t been crafting. But no, the sad truth is that I’ve just gotten terrible at taking pictures of what I’ve been doing lately. So as I suddenly remembered to take pics today, here you have a post at last. I restarted my frogged top-down lace cardigan, and it’s going much more symmetrically this time around. I spun some funky art-yarn (not pictured, sorry) with my lovely lincoln longwool locks and some sari silk fibers, and then made two wall hangings (also not pictured, again sorry). What reminded me that I’m a craft blogger and I’m supposed to keep to a regimen of taking photos of my processes and projects, is the absolutely stunning colors that came out of my drum carder last night and today… But I also didn’t take pictures of the drum carder, the carding, or the batts… Again, sorry. The good news is that as I was oooing and ahhing over my beautifully saturate and multi-hued singles, my husband said ‘hey, you should take a picture of that’. Suddenly I remembered that I should have taken some pics earlier in the process. Blogging is hard (no, not really, I just forget sometimes).

Three drum-carded rovings

So here are the three beautiful rovings (when I finally remembered to take a pic I had terrible lighting and a short leash on my uncharged photo device). If the colors are hard to discern, they are blue/light-blue, muted blue/light pink, and blue/purple/bright pink. The fibers in them are largely assorted alpaca that I had dyed blue/purple/green/red with my friend Emily earlier this summer. A dash of mohair and linoln longwool from the same dyebath, some KnitPicks roving for stability and color depth, and a tiny bit of angelina sparkle. Using the awesome Deb Menz Color in Spinning book as a guide, I carded two of the rovings for a subtle blend, and one of them for a blend that should have some long but subtle color variation.

singles on the bobbin

Alright, lousy pics are almost worse than no pics at all. Anyway, I started spinning up the singles from one of the rovings and I am really excited about the color. I’m going to try 3-plying a bit of it for a hat, and then the rest might be left as singles for a bolero ala the Craftsy lace cardigan style. Next time I’ll do better about the pics. Until next time, keep those needles clicking…

To the frog pond!

The big mistake! The increases are all screwed up here

Let me start this story by explaining that typically, I am not much of a “Type A” knitter, especially if it’s something I’m knitting for myself.  If there’s a mistake, I’ll think of ways to correct it as I go along, or see if it can be ignored.  I embrace the wabi-sabi, let go of ego, accept that the screwy details are rarely noticeable when the whole is good, etc.

There is a very old “meme” if you will, one that predates the intertubes – it’s about humility.  I had heard that it was from quiltmakers, but googling implies that it’s just a story fondly embraced by crafters the world over.  The story goes that great quiltmakers (or Persian rugmakers, or Native American beadworkers, etc) would intentionally introduce one flaw into their nearly perfect work as a sign of humility because only God’s (or gods’, or Great Spirit’s, etc) work could be perfect.  I have always joked that I never need to worry about spiting the gods with my excessive perfection, because my work is full of mistakes, but if the gods are equally concerned over excessive mistakes, I might be in trouble.

This time, however, the mistake demanded instant frogging.  This one was too big to finagle my way through with stitch witchery.  So what did I screw up?

I’ll do a full review of my first Craftsy class experience later, after I’ve completed more of the class, but here’s a quick sum up of the Crazy Lace Cardigan class I have started taking:  Great class, terrific hand-outs, engaging teacher, but having some issues with their mobile site.  On the mobile site, you can’t (currently) fast-forward, skip ahead, or otherwise navigate through the different “lessons” in a single video.  The class as a whole is divided into 14 videos, but some of them are over an hour.  My lunch break is only 1hr, and that includes procuring and eating food.  I want to do Craftsy class on my lunch break.  This has all conspired to make me impatient with the classes on occasion.

Its not that the classes are poorly paced either, it’s just that the class is meant to teach a broad range of experience levels, and sometimes they go on for a few minutes about stuff I already know, and on my tablet I can’t skip ahead.  But you know what is awesome?  When I sent tech support a message to let them know I’d like to see them improve that aspect, they told me they already had mobile apps in the works and ready to release in a few weeks!  So hooray for Craftsy!  I can’t wait to see if this new app addresses my issues!

So that brings me to my problem with the knitting.  I was heading to a fun craft night with one good friend and a bunch of gals I hadn’t yet met, and I was debating what project to bring.  I wanted something that would really keep my attention, in case I was out of the social loop, but nothing that would look too rarefied because I didn’t want to weird anybody out on the first meeting.  So to prepare, I skipped ahead a little on the Craftsy class.  That’s where the Big Mistake came in.

I reviewed the cast-on, and then grabbed the pattern and did a quick scan to see if there were any techniques I needed to know.  Rather than watch that section of the video, I just grabbed a good stitch reference book and headed out the door.  It looked pretty good, and I was cruising along feeling that this was a very pleasant pattern and that I would be done with the top yoke part in no time.

Today at lunch, I noticed a couple of small mistakes.  A missed increase, and an extra yarn-over.  But maybe it would all come out in the wash, so I counted some stitches… that’s when i noticed that the increase sections on the two front points of the v-neck didn’t look symmetrical.  Uh-oh!  I started catching up with the Craftsy video… there it is, there are supposed to be double yarn-overs at every marker.  If you look at the image above, you will note that there are only single yarn-overs.

But here’s the kicker… the pattern is not wrong.  The video would have helped me not make the mistake by carefully reinforcing what the pattern says, but the pattern is written correctly.  This is what I get for ambitiously trying to jump ahead, not reviewing the pattern and stitches carefully, starting a new pattern stitch in a busy social environment, and in general NOT paying enough attention!

So here’s the moral of this story, even though it’s common sense and I really, really ought to know this by now:  read all pattern instructions carefully and really pay attention to the instructions while you are setting up a knit.  And let’s hope that the knitting gods aren’t inclined to smite cocky, hasty underachievers any more than they seem to be inclined to smite those unhumble perfectionists.

Until next time, keep those needles clicking…

Steampunkitude

So much craftiness has been going on. But there has been so little time to share it. Operation Steampunk was successful for the gaming convention.

Steampunk style 1

My embellishments to the jacket I made last year really elevated it into cool territory. My harness gained lots of resin and glitter filled vials, chains, and oddities. I added a “Gibson girl” hairstyle, and topped it with a mini hat that I finshed sewing on the ride to the convention.

Smaller functional details were improved too. The old embroidered purse that I converted into a belt bag was improved greatly by some strap adjustments. The harness gained some new belt holes and resewing straps was much aided by a new leather sewing needle/awl tool.

However, despite these accomplishments, I was really devastated by having my sewing/embroidery machine break in early May. I haven’t had time to take it for repairs. So there are many planned pieces that have moved to next year’s list: embroidered underskirts, bustle/ruffle layer, embroidered lace fascinator, lacey sewn top.

One major new costume detail also arose at the convention -

I bought a corset! Now I’ve got to make the top strap on my harness removable, because there’s way too much visual clutter when I wear the corset. Until next time, keep those needles stitching!

Fiber fair and fairly awesome fiber

I had been eagerly anticipating an opportunity to attend the Great Lakes Fiber Show with my parents for at least a month.  They had given me a refurbished drum carder as a graduation gift and I wanted to reignite my deep fibernerditude with fiber-fanatic atmosphere.  I also needed to diversify my fiber stash to take advantage of my new drum carder.  To get “my hand back in” to the spinning world, I’ve been dropspindling some silk hankies (mawatas) that I had purchased a while back.

Dropspindling from silk mawatas

Dye teasing

I just graduated today, and suddenly I can look forward to all manner of free time.  I’m delighted to be done, and very proud to have a Master’s degree… But I’m also eager to turn my focus to home, arts, and family. 

Our favorite annual gaming convention – and my costuming deadline – is just a few weeks off, so no time for a long post.  Here’s a brief tease of vat-dyeing adventure results:

Seafoam green, plum blossom, and safari grey

The seafoam green came out nearly white (there’s an undyed hankie in there to show the similarity), the plum blossom came out crazy hot-pink on ths skirts (though more dusty rose on some canvas aprons not pictured), and the safari grey came out much warmer and more brownish than expected.  That’s the adventure part of dyeing!  You never know what will happen.  But these base colors are only the beginning.  There will be tie-dyeing, shibori, painting, resists, and more in the future for these garments. 

And here’s an update on the jacket and harness rig that are a staple of my costume.  I’ve been refining both, improving them from what I wore last year.  Adding detail is especially important in steampunk looks.  Adding accessories to the belt/harness have pushed the inspiration into a “faerie hunter” theme, I like that it can be adventurous but not so rugged that frills and lace would be out of the question.  Not sure what might be done before the costume deadline, especially since my sewing/embroidery machine has had a breakdown and needs to go in for a repair and tune-up.

Until next time, keep those dye-baths bubbling and needles a-stitchin’…