Playing with cables, and pyjamas for a rhino

So not a title I ever thought I'd use, but there you go! I think I purchased Bill King's excellent book all about machine knitting cables not long after it came out, and thought I'd have a bit of a play with it. As always, I had the urge to jump in around page 30, which probably explains my initial lack of success, but I did get there in the end!

First up was what I'm going to term "missing needles" all over cables. The sample above is worked over 20 needles at T8 (MT+2 for this yarn, which is a 4ply acrylic). It's worked by moving stitches 3 and 4 (I counted from the end nearest the live yarn and carriage) onto the empty needles immediately outside the knitting (and towards the carriage). Then move stitches 8 and 7 into the gap left (which crosses them over stitches 6 and 5), repeat all along the bed. Knit 5 rows, and then do the same crosses but in the opposite direction. This produces S cables, because 20 divides by 4, so you are always moving the same stitches back and forth.

My second attempt was over 18 stitches - same again, but at the end of the cross you will have two stitches and a gap of two needles. I just moved them in so as not to generate a ladder. Knit 5 rows, and cable towards the carriage every time, and then your crosses will always be in the correct direction. This produces an attractive celtic braid, and because 18 doesn't divide by 4 you are now alternating the needles you're moving.

I decided this might make quite a nice hairband, if I crossed every 3 rows instead of 5, so made this - somewhat pressed, to make it lie flat, it's now waiting for some elastic! I started and ended with about 20 rows of stocking stitch at T6 and then cabled for 108 rows - luckily I can figure out my three times table this high, though 81 always feels like a prime number to me for some reason...

This was a short attempt to work a 6 x 6 cable, using the ribber "press off" technique to generate extra localised yarn before the cross. In the book one is supposed to move six stitches over 2, knit 2 rows, and repeat a further two times. I think perhaps I didn't add enough needles on the ribber bed (the book indicates two isolated stitches, perhaps it should be read as 3 stitches together?) because there was no way I could cross 6 over 2, but I managed 6 over 1, 6 times. I think the technique needs another attempt, because clearly it was working! I didn't take a picture of the back but you get horizontal "floats" of the poor, tortured stitch that is moved.

And finally, the rhino - Bertie (Roberta), a colleague's daughter's toy, needed some pyjamas, so I ended up drafting a pattern for some by hand. Not quite the rever collar I had hoped for, but she's a very strange shape and "modern" jersey pyjamas would have been permanent, owing to the size of her head!

I've also got a new definition of annoyed - knitting up to the second buttonhole on a top-down cardigan (Drops Agnes), some 4", only to realise that said buttonholes are on the "wrong" side for a woman. Oh well, it was a good test run of the pattern I suppose!!

Current mood: annoyed

Knit on through all crises...

Front of "Take a turn". It'll look better when it's made up, I promise!

The cheat sheets, all three of them - I didn't bother creating one for the back, because the cables all start on the same row and as luck would have it the first twist was R206, so I just used my six times table and ignored the 200 for each twist. As it happened the carriage was on the right for start of the armhole, so next time I might pencil in L and R after the fact. H is short for hold, C is for cable, I used D later on for the neck decreases and would use I for increases - not applicable here. The scribble says "Mark" - you mark the cable gutter four rows before the first cross. If you don't have access to a spreadsheet program you could easily draw this up freehand. Well worth the ten minutes it took to do.

The hopeful geranium - I bought this for £2 at the supermarket, it was all alone because it hardly had any flowers on it. This is the THIRD time it's flowered this year, and it cheers my view every day. There was a third sprig but alas I poked around a bit, trying to give it more space, and it snapped off. I have no idea what the number on the calculator is about, I sometimes wonder if it's got limited intelligence and is trying to communicate with me somehow. 

A few weekends ago, we went for a quick ramble, despite the lowering darkness on the horizon. About twenty minutes in, we got caught in a short shower, and took refuge under a tree. We were treated to this rainbow, which was actually continuous (alas it didn't all fit in my smartphone's viewfinder so you'll have to take my word for it). Probably only just visibile - Rugby Cemex is about where the pot of gold should be. The rainbow was a lot more neon in person, alas the camera never does it justice. 

Current mood: happy

One foot in front of the other...

Well, four sleeves and three backs later and I have enough parts I'm happy with for a lambswool sweater. Yes, there's been some frogging. It never ceases to amaze me that although I'm great at passing my MK skills onto others, I rarely seem to be able to take my own advice re swatching, measuring, taking my time to double-check things. Must be the smell of the yarn - turns me into a bull in a china shop! Perhaps it's because I have to be precise and detailed as part of my job, and my subconscious rebels when it's "my time". Who knows? 

No pictures to show yet as the next task is to join one shoulder, sew and cut a neck hole and apply a neckband, then finish up the garment. I hope to do most of that this weekend, though if the weather's fine I will be making the most of it outdoors.

 

I just wanted to share a picture of how I did the cables - I added a "sacrificial" needle every 5th row, and then dropped it to do the cable. The machine is at half pitch so there are two needles for the cable "gutter" - any other way and it was too tight / left an unsightly gap. Doing the transfer on odd rows meant it was impossible to forget which way I was crossing - the first cross of the centre two stitches was always towards the lock. Genius! 

Current mood: working

The second time's the charm (almost)

Well, after an aborted attempt last night I got the first sleeve done, with (I thought!) no mistakes. Thanks to an ingenious suggestion from both a German and an American member of the Passap machine knitting group on Ravelry, I've now got a trick which makes working cables fool-proof. It's a hint that's so neat it's in the "why didn't I think of that?" category. When working a cable which alternates left or right, make the cross happen on an odd row, and cross towards the lock or carriage position. In this case, I did a left cross when the lock was on a row ending in 5 (lock on left), and a right cross when the lock was on a row ending in 0 (lock is on right). Lost track? Just look at where your lock is. Genius! Of course, as the increases are every 6 rows, it means a lot more stopping and starting, but never mind! An example of a lovely poncho was shared, which had a panel of about 10 cables up the front. 

You noted I said I thought I'd made no mistakes? Well, on each cable row I brought an empty back bed needle into work, to add extra yarn for the cable cross. In most cases I remembered - but not always. My partner came in to talk to me and I missed one - and the yarn must have snapped. Luckily the stitches didn't get very far and it's been (almost invisibly) repaired with a length of yarn. Only another knitter might spot it, and I'm hoping that once the garment has been washed it'll disappear. It's lambswool so it will felt and become self-securing. Hopefully!

Maybe I should invest in a "do not disturb" sign - as the Cog was coming to tell me about his latest guitar pedal, it felt cruel to be rude! He'd ordered one via Amazon, which turned out to be faulty (it buzzed as soon as it was plugged in) and clearly it was not even brand new nor well-packed. The second one came from PMT in Birmingham, well-packed and worked immediately with no buzzing. He did make me chuckle, showed me a page with a guitarist's version of the engineering flow chart. "Is it buzzing? Yes? You are a bee!" I used to have a print of that flowchart on my desk, back when we still had places we could pin things. 

The mood's apathetic. I'm trying to focus on staying positive and on things I can control. Little wins - watching good films and having laughs with my sweetie. Clearly I can't control how others behave at the moment, however much that might hurt me. We will all be changed by this I think. Let's hope it's for the better. 

Current mood: apathetic

Magic cables, faux cables and the PM10 punching machine

Well, this month's meeting of the Needles of Steel (Warks) MK club went ok, all things considered. I declared last month, in a somewhat rash manner, that I would demonstrate magic cables. So last week I had a quick hunt in various places and discovered that the only actual magic cable pattern I have is for the Passap (and the technique is different, it uses racking). Two copies of the same one, too!? As luck would have it, someone must have brought a pattern to the Manor House club a while back, and I sneakily photographed most of one page of it with my smartphone. So that was all I had to work with. That, and a photo I found on Pinterest.

Magic cables is a technique by Ricki Mundstock - where you make faux cable effects by knitting with a tuck stitch card and manually hanging tucks on particular needles to produce the magic cable effect. The website disappeared sometime after June 2014 so is only available here via the wayback machine. I think the patterns probably show up on Ebay from time to time. I think the pattern I used may have been from the Children's Collection, but it's a guess as I only had a picture of one page.

So the technique is a tuck one,  a card that is mostly holes - a perfect job for the PM10 punching machine, seen here on the left.



Now, this is a great little machine - a cross between a punch and a typewriter, it will punch or skip (via that orange knob) a row of holes fairly quickly. So that's a pro. The con is that it doesn't have the safety pilot pin that comes with the hand-held punch, so can quite easily punch a hole off-centre - and if you're near the end of the card, expect some drunken punching before you realise it's dropped off the cogs that hold the card in place. So I had to finish up with the hand punch anyway. Another con is that these machines are quite heavy and rather expensive.

Anyroad, I finally got the card done - with a few repairs, because I made a few mistakes - and started to try and knit the pattern. Bearing in mind I was working from a photograph of a pattern, I thought I'd read that the left hang-up was an 8 row repeat, and the right hang-up a 6 row repeat - it didn't work, it was confusing, and I ended up watching the needles on the card and letting IT tell me when to hang up the stitches, and then marking that with an arrow on the card. You have a three-row tuck that happens on one side, and then when another needle is back at B position for two rows, you hang that tuck onto it. Having blown up the photo today, the instructions are kind of correct - I was reading the 6 as an 8 - but you can't do a left hang AND a right hang every 6 rows (as the pattern states), it's either one or the other, not both. This technique works great on knitting machines that pre-select the needles to B and D for you (ie Brother and Toyota machines). For other machines, you'll have to learn to look for which needle to hang the tuck on. It'll have three loops on it.

The result - a panel of ordinary tucks in the centre, and a faux braided cable either side:


Whilst we were on the subject of faux cables, I demonstrated something Bob showed us at Manor House last month - a sewn cable. You knit stocking stitch with some needles out of work:

1111111.1111.1111.1111111 where 1 is a needle in work, and . is out of work.

and then using two ends of the same thread, sew from the left gutter (the out of work needle column) to the centre gutter, come out again about 4 rows higher on the right gutter and sew into the centre gutter again, repeat all the way up. Tighten the yarn and you get this:



You can see the thread at the bottom.

I got all of my yarn out of the knitting room, and invited my members to buy anything that took their fancy - this is what was left, which is now cluttering up the garage, much to the Cog's chagrin:



The destash would have gone much better if (a) I didn't have a major penchant for loud, space-dyed acrylic, and fancy yarns, that nobody else wants and (b) my Rav stash inventory was actually correct.

And in the interests of completeness, this is my final parked hand-knit project, a glittery shawl for the woman (me) who never wears shawls. Nope, the RSI or whatever it is has shown no improvement, so the cross-stitch is romping along at the moment.



Current mood: indescribable - having discovered what I have and haven't got in my actual stash, do I knit it up or offer it for sale online? Hmmm....

Dream week 2012

I'm almost tempted to put NOT! after that title - not because I didn't enjoy the week, but because I didn't get much sleep, and the one night I did, I managed to have a nightmare about the cat going missing - I was always too hot, too cold. Ruddy insomnia - I can never get the hang of hotel beds somehow, and nothing seems to knock me out. Well, copious alcohol does, but it's not a restful sleep and anyway it wasn't that kind of event!!! Maybe it was just so inspiring that my brain refused to switch off at night?! :)

Decided to do a one-post recap this year, as I didn't have much time to put the laptop on and do a day-by-day breakdown this year.

Well, the week began with my getting to the Crewe area in good time, but then spending an hour trying to find the hotel - himself has borrowed the satnav - and eventually giving up and heading for Metropolitan. I can always find that shop, perhaps it's the yarn-radar?! The poor eyesight doesn't help, as Northwich and Middlewich look very similar to Nantwich on a signpost and all the "wiches" are in that area! It means salt flats, apparently!

The first lecture was a very interesting one about dyeing from Fiona Nisbett, a weaver, spinner and handknitter. Alas I'm not sure there were enough handouts - I did get one sheet, haven't had a chance to look at it yet. Monday night's entertainment was a magician with a difference - he explained the psychology of distraction, but we still can't figure how he made a silk hanky get from his hand into someone's handbag.

Tuesday I had Beryl Jarvis talking about mosaic knitting, and how to design a mosaic pattern and generate a punchcard pattern for it. After lunch it was alternative edgings with Anne Smith - as it was called "Cutting Edge" I have to admit I was expecting cut and sew, but it was quite interesting nonetheless. Lastly a lecture with Iris Bishop - lots of inspirational techniques. Tuesday night it was a fashion show by Clair Crowston. By all accounts, it was a little long - not sure we need to see a garment in more than one colour - but I can't really comment as I went to bed early hoping that a "run up" of a quiet read would help my sleep (it didn't).

Wednesday it was a practical with Beryl - I had decided to do a simple "skull" pattern, and amazingly managed to punch out a card first time with no mistakes (there's a first time for everything!).


Tuck (top) makes his eyes pop. Slip (bottom) is more square and precise.



I think you'll agree, the card looks nothing like a skull. Incidentally, the right hand side of that card just knits a waffle stitch pattern which is quite nice as it is! :)

After lunch, it was hands-on with Iris Bishop - she's been experimenting with DK and thicker yarns using tuck lace and knitweave.


These came out ok although personally I'm not fond of bottle green :)

Last lecture was finishing touches with Anne Smith - this I assumed would be about different making up methods, but turned out to be how to make your garment so interesting that people won't notice the finishing! To be honest, I'm pretty sure this lecture was given as a closer in 2009, when it was how to make certain "standard" cards (ie the ones that come with the machine) more interesting by adding beads, changing colours, etc. I recognised the swatches - somewhat disappointing to have it recycled, because I would have picked something else if I'd realised. Wednesday evening we had an interesting talk by Nick of Uppinghams about the process of sheep to finished garment in the industry - I wasn't going to stay, but it was interesting and informative. They leave the garments with a closed neck until after dyeing, because the machinery would chew it up otherwise.

Thursday I was scheduled for browsing time (Uppingham Yarns being in attendance), so I slipped into Bill King's dimensional knitting lecture. I knew I'd fall off the yarn diet otherwise (sorry Nick!). Bill gave a demo of how to do a short-row "wiggle" that can add interest to the Gold Star cardigan. After lunch it was a hands-on with Clair Crowston, doing alternate edge finishes that don't need a ribber - quite appropriate for me at the moment, as the KH950i is ribberless.


Top to bottom: Picot edging, "lace" with show-through, lovely ridgy edging made with lace transfers (I love this!) and scalloped edge, which looks padded but isn't!

Lost some time in this lecture as I managed to completely jam the machine at one point and Mark was called, muttering "Vandals!" :) Then it was back to Bill King for manual transfer techniques, where he demonstrated his ingenious method of doing cables without having to cross both sides - basically you leave a gap at one end and move every other cable over. Ingenious and so simple!

Thursday night was the eagerly anticipated fashion show of the garments knitted for Nick of Uppinghams. There were two bags - and 10 jumpers I think. 90% of the jumpers were a great fit - but the last one, ably modelled by Bill King - turned out to be a cropped top designed for a 10 year old girl (I was sitting next to the perpetrator!). Despite making it impossible for an adult to wear it, Bill managed it and camped it up a treat - it barely covered his nipples. Very, very funny - no idea how next year's competition will top that!



The finished jumper modelled by Nick (see above) was done on a Passap E6000 by Anne Baker. I gather she's sick of the sight of it, so you'll be seeing it at the shows. It contains fairisle of all Nick's interests. I love the little cones of yarn which have "mystery yarns" from previous Dream Weeks. Second prize went to a dark mustard jumper with an all-over garter stitch pattern.

The final lecture on Friday was a talk by Bill and Anne about the history of machine knitting, and how the HP system originated with sewing machines. Apparently Toyota knitting machines were unceremoniously pulled from manufacture when the MD's wife learnt that Toyota weren't number one in the UK market at that point, leaving Jones-Brother and Empisal-Knitmaster-Silver to fight it out. Such a pity, as they were well made and had the Simulknit feature which nobody else had. Bill also showed us an old punchcard - before they were made to work continuously - which meant a great big red STOP line! :)

Good news about the Nottingham show - Harvey Haddon sports centre is being knocked down and rebuilt over the next three years, but the show will run on 14th April 2013 at a new venue, although Alan Hunt is retiring so it will be run by Anne Smith. I hope it doesn't impair the quality of the show, although the venue is smaller so the fashion show won't happen, which is a pity.

Got straight onto the motorway after dropping some folks back to the hotel, and completely forgot to say goodbye to a few people (sorry!). Came home to a lovely bar of white choc and a bottle of wine, courtesy of himself - what a sweetie!

All in all, a very good week! Haven't rebooked yet but pretty sure I will, not least because Ozlorna and Ozism are hoping to be there too.

Got to dash off now as the 'fridge is pretty empty and it's Heritage weekend so I plan on visiting a few places for free whilst the weather is good.

More Dream Week photos here

Cable I'm amazed

This is part of a front knitted on the LK150. Cables are seperated by gutters (needles out of work). Missed the very small note indicating I should have latched these up by hand, will do the sleeves correctly. Did try latching up the gutters, but they were so tight as to be invisible on the right side.

The front and back are made from three pieces - a centre cable part, and a tuck stitch braid. Likewise the sleeves are also in three pieces. So far completed back, front and one sleeve cable section, and one tuck braid.

The pattern is a child's aran-style sweater from the Knitmaster Option 4 book.