On Monday I had the pleasure of talking to Techknitters Machine Knitting Club in Chicago about my book ‘Single and Double Bed Machine Knitting; the Designer’s Guide’. Although this was published in 2024 the UK, it was not published in the USA until 2025 and I was due to talk to the group in December of that year. Moving house and having a lot of building work in progress meant that I couldn’t manage an online talk at that time, so we rescheduled. The new date came around quickly, doesn’t time fly?

Although several members indicated that they already have the book, I decided to discuss the overall content of book for those who do not yet have a copy. During this I explained my thinking behind the plan of the book and the main intention behind my writing. Following on to this, I concentrated on snippets from each chapter.

One of the reviews of the book mentioned that it is unusual to find design development and process included in a knitting book, so I took this comment as the focus of the rest of my talk working with material from the chapters, ‘Designing with Colour’ and ‘Finding Inspiration and Designing Pattern’.

This section of the talk started by looking at extracting colour inspiration from one of the images used in the book, and then reviewing a sample from the book that had been designed using these colours to work stripes. The practical part of the talk was about selecting yarns, designing another stripe, and revising and developing the design. Each step was shown and design rationales discussed. The sample was knitted and a finished and steamed version was reviewed to which the group gave feedback on how it might be improved/adapted. All in all it was an enjoyable experience.

I will be talking to the group again in August about my latest book, ‘The Machine Knitter’s Guide to Partial Knitting; Seamless Patter, Shape and Form’ which is due to be published in Spring 2026 by Crowood Press.