It’s been a busy day today setting up the Taunton Machine Knitting Club stand at Craft 4 Crafter’s exhibition in Exeter. The Club is pleased to have recently become a branch of The Knitting and Crochet Guild, making us part of the wider UK knitting community.
The display features work by most club members including lace, intarsia, knitweave and double jacquard. Throughout the three day exhibition members will be demonstrating different techniques such as cables, bobbles, shaping and short row knitting.
The display is finally ready, and I am not climbing a stepladder again today!
I will be giving a talk on Friday about my books, ‘The Knitting Book’, ‘Translating Between Hand and Machine Knitting’ and ‘Single and Double Bed Machine Knitting; the Designer’s Guide’.
The table will have to be large enough to fit four copies once my latest book, ‘The Machine Knitter’s Guide to Partial Knitting’ is published later this year.
This is something I used to struggle with when first starting to machine knit, and to be honest, it still sometimes needs a bit of thinking before I get it right.
So I put some information together which I hope will be useful to others who find the holes and blanks a bit confusing. It also has some helpful ways to read what is actually being read by the card-reader, rather than what is visible above it.
Lets start with the fundamentals:
Knitmaster/Silver Reed (KM/SR) machines only knit pattern from the punchcard when the side levers are at the triangle and the pattern cam dial is set to the relevant stitch type; F, S, T etc.
Brother machines only knit pattern from the punchcard when the KC dial is set to KC, KCI or KCII, as appropriate to the machine, and when the relevant pattern cam buttons are pressed, MC, tuck, part etc…
However, on both makes the needle positions are the same
Pattern cam setting
Punched holes
Needle position
Blanks
Needle position
2-col-in-a-row
knit with 2nd colour
UWP
knit with MC
WP
tuck
knit
UWP
tuck
WP
slip/part
knit
UWP
slip
WP
On both Brother and KM/SR machines, the punchard line being selected is hidden inside the machine. Seven lines below on a Brother, and five below on a KM/SR.
Brother machines, both punchcard and electronic, pre-select needles before knitting the row. Therefore, the pattern can be interrogated by looking at the needle selection in conjunction with the needle positions listed above.
KM/SRpunchcard machines have a card reader with feelers. These are selected according to the punchcard pattern but the actual feeler action is hidden behind the carriage. The pattern line can be manually interrogated by locking the punchcard.
Hello there. I am keen to know my readers, and meet people who own a copy of either of my knitting books, ‘Translating Between Hand and Machine Knitting’ or ‘Single and Double Bed Machine Knitting; the Designer’s Guide’. Obviously meeting people in person might be tricky, so I have been wracking my brains about how to do this and settled on trying to set up an image gallery of people who own a copy of one of both of these books.
It would be wonderful if you could post a photo of yourself holding your copy, and with your knitting machine as well if it works for you. If you prefer not to be in the photo yourself, a photo of your copy of the book sitting on top of your knitting machine would be lovely, and a piece of your knitting as well maybe? Please also add a brief review if you have time, its always useful to get an insight into how readers see what I have written and feedback helps me develop my approach for future books.
I can only think of Facebook or Instagram, but I’m sure you will have other favourite places to post. It would be good if you could add the hashtags shown below so that I can find your posts. I will start the ball rolling on Instagram.
Vikki Haffenden 