Well, after another frustrating Sunday afternoon making no headway with the lace carriage, I turned to just making fairisle with the machine (it kept jamming, I tell you I was at my wit's end last weekend!). Turns out it wasn't quite seated correctly, fairisle is fine, so that meant that the laptop and all cables were working correctly. When you've an issue with anything, it's best to try and be methodical and find out what is and isn't at fault.
Eventually, I DMed the lovely Andrea from Andeeknits and explained my dilemma. She said without the lace tool add-on in DAK8, there would be no way I'd get the SK840 / LC560 to knit lace. She also said the row tripper just needed bending. So another two hours wasted - thank goodness I didn't go any further, I had taken the top off the machine to see if there was an easy way to stop the machine tripper riding up (it has a smidge of vertical play in it). Luckily I couldn't remember how to get the row counter off - it's directly above. This machine couldn't count beyond nine when I bought it secondhand, so I replaced the row counter straight off ages ago. So instead of having to replace the (perfectly fine) LC560, I just needed to upgrade to DAK9 which now includes the lace tool. So I did, and got the handknit part too just because I might as well.
I've just knit a test swatch - apart from a dropped stitch hole in the middle, it worked well, even to the point of ignoring a lace stitch that appeared on the end stitch - you don't want a hole on the very end stitches, it's also known as decreasing (leading edge) or dropping the stitch (trailing edge). That may just have been luck. Oh, and a careful application of the pliers to the row tripper and it's now tripping correctly. It means some of the Silver compatibility charts I've seen online are wrong (they specify only the LC580 will work here).
I can't play more with the machine tonight as it's watercolours on zoom in twenty minutes, Coventry knitwits on facetime tomorrow night, and the Leicestershire MKC zoom on Thursday. But it's lovely to know, it's all ready and waiting for me this weekend! Now I just need to get rewinding the bamboo so I can swatch on this machine... I aim to do something like this again - but in pink, with a v neck, a bit shorter, and probably not so many different patterns (although...!). The only reason I got rid of it was that I lost quite a bit of weight, and that, combined with the square neck, meant it drowned me and kept falling off my shoulders. You can see I'm wearing a lacey vest under it because it was borderline indecent for work! Sigh, yes, that photo was taken in reception. I miss seeing my work colleagues in person!
Right, well, those pictures won't paint themselves!
Current mood: 
excited
No comments:
Post a Comment