More knitting!

The huge advantage of a knitting machine is that it enables the knitter to produce large expanses of nice even stockinette stitch in no time. Most knitters (well, yours truly anyway) find knitting large expanses of stockinette a real bore. But it is a really wonderful fabric and I want more of it in my life. So ... on to the machine.

Ends

Start to finish, the cardigan was done within ten days, and that included some time spent swatching to figure out how to knit the edges so they wouldn't roll too much, a day spent learning to use my new linker, and a day of weaving in the MANY ends. Because stripes. (The next time I knit anything striped I will weave those ends in as I knit. Lesson learned.) The actual knitting? Dunno - some smallish number of hours.

After that I was on a roll. The planning, knitting and seaming of the matching top was done within 2 days.

I made the sweaters on my LK-150, a mid-gauge plastic bed machine. I believe these are still being made so can be purchased new, unlike most home knitting machines. While a plastic machine doesn't have the same smooth action as a metal bed machine, it gets the job done. It is very easy to operate and I find it completely unintimidating. The mid-gauge (6.5 mm between needles) means it can handle most hand-knitting yarn weights (from sock yarn to worsted). The disadvantage of this machine is that it doesn't have a ribber, so you must manually reform stitches if you want ribbed bands. This is a little tedious but still a lot faster than knitting them by hand!

The yarn is a DK weight and it's 100% Alpaca. Yummy stuff. My son had given me four skeins of the teal colour and a friend had given me four more of the camel colour and 3 of the curry. One day while stash diving I considered how well these looked together, but they needed a main colour (the off-white is called "putty") to mediate between them and another one (rusty red) for punch.

Sugarcoat

The cardigan is based on a pattern I purchased on Ravelry called Sugarcoat. Other machine knitters had made it and it is a very simple construction. I made it a more complicated task by not using the yarn weight the pattern calls for (sock yarn). I completely redesigned the stripes for my different gauge and my five colours (the pattern calls for four). I attempted to knit the shape that the pattern would have produced, but my dimensions may not be 100% right because I had to make the sleeves longer than the pattern said. This is the complete opposite of my usual experience.

It took me a while to decide how to do the sleeves. As you can see, the pattern says they should be a single colour, but the only colour I had enough of was the camel. I didn't like how a camel sleeve looked.

The photo at left is my trial camel sleeve, pinned in (the purple at the top of it is waste yarn). This trial also revealed the need to shorten and narrow the sleeves.

You see, machine knitting is so fast I could make 3 sleeves and still finish the sweater in 10 days.

The top is completely my own design although I was inspired by some patterns I faved on Ravelry. I based its dimensions on another sweater of similar weight. I wanted it to have positive ease but not to be too sloppy. I got it just right!

Technical stuff:

The back of the cardigan and the shoulders of the top are shaped with short rows. It is unbelievably easy to make short rows by machine!

You can see the slope created by the short rows quite easily within the striped areas.

Edging at CB

I am very proud of the edgings on both sweaters. For the cardigan, I invented a very nice flattish edge by augmenting Diana Sullivan's machine knitted decorative no-roll edge. My addition consists of 3 plain stockinette stitches that are outside the diagonal portion of the edging. These stitches roll like crazy, because that's what stockinette does. Therefore they make a nice ropey rounded edge that I think is even nicer looking than the original edging.

On the top I made a nice self-finishing edge at the arm openings by moving 3 stitches over and leaving an eyelet. The eyelet opening counteracts the roll that these edges would otherwise have.

A cat and a hat

Albert

I could not resist that title, which came to me while I was out skiing today - in my new hat (proof at left).

These are both machine knitting projects made on my LK 150, a mid-gauge machine.

I made the cat (Ravelry link) for a friend, who sadly lost her black and white friend very suddenly in early December. I used a free hand knitting pattern found on Ravelry (The Window Cat). "Using" the pattern means figuring out the shaping and adapting it for my gauge.

I knitted the back first since it is plain black, to check the general shape and size. The front is identical shaping but with intarsia to match the colouration of the inspiration cat. The paws and tail were straight knitting on just a few stitches, and his base is essentially a rectangle. Yellow button eyes give him that baleful look cats so often have. I was very pleased that he came together so well.

My friend was able to find a real kitten to fill the hole left by Albert. He was not very curious about his knitted predecessor, but did consent to be photographed with him.

For quite a long time I've been thinking I should really use some of my (ahem) extensive yarn stash to knit myself a ski hat as the one I was using did not compliment my jacket at all. With the machine this very simple hat was (or should have been) a super fast project as it is just a rectangle (Ravelry link). I used the chart from this pattern, calculated size based on the circumference (21" more or less) and height (8" more or less) of my commercially knit hat, and started to knit. But I had to make it 3 times since I was doing the planning on the fly.

My first attempt, I used the hem and patterning dimensions from the pattern. Too much white. I decided to knit a narrower band of white and start the stranded pattern inside the doubled hem (which is knitted on every other needle).

My second attempt was going swimmingly until I managed to drop 75% of the stitches in a single pass. Oops. (This sort of thing happens fairly regularly in maching knitting.)

Third time was the charm.

I still finished by bedtime, having purchased the white yarn that afternoon.

The consensus among my skiing buddies is that I should make tassels and attach them to the corners (which want to turn down anyway). So it is still technically a WIP even though I have already worn it twice. It's lovely and warm and looks pretty good with my jacket.