Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Try, try again...

After work today, I took my ten little thumbs to the knitting room for another go at the Studio 700 for Enchanted Edgings.  It's such a fun little puzzle, but you would not believe the tangled mess hanging from my machine and the pile of tangled messes lying nearby.

I am running into the following problems:

1.  Neither carriage will read its first row from the left.  They are designed to start on the right.  I suppose I could insert blank rows to get the carriage to the other side, which of course, adds more passes and more possibility of the yarn catching as it's carried from one side to the other.  So far, this is holding me back from using my two carriages idea.

2.  The lace carriage wants to drop stitches if it moves an edge stitch.  It runs so beautifully when the end cams are installed, but take 'em off, and pretty soon a bunch of stitches are pulled loose.  You can't have that with long edgings.  You're not going to want to start over after 400 rows because of an irreparable mess.  Hmm.  I am certainly open to suggestions.

Full-fashion decreases may not have this issue, but at some point there are just so many passes of the lace carriage that automatic edgings become impractical.  I will probably experiment with that.

3.  My Studio likes a little more weight than the Brother, at least while running lace.


I do have two pretty edgings, Fairy Godmother's Lace and Sea Serpent, that are made without end needle transfers.  Those scallops are created by just changing the direction of the transfers in an every-other-needle lace.  I can easily reinterpret them for the Studio/Silver Reed/Knitmaster machines.

I adore the Studio lace carriage.  It grows on me every time I sit down and play with it.  It's sooo smooooth.  The single pass lace is so fast!  That single pass, knit as you transfer lace, might make some very nice edgings with just a little hand manipulation.  That might be a fascinating project for a while down the road!

5 comments:

  1. It's very nice. I love stich with lace carriage.

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  2. For a Studio punchcard machine you have to run the carriage past the card reader to get the pattern memorized into the carriage. Since the card reader is on the right this usually means starting on the right. However, if you are starting your knitting on waste yarn, you can kindof cheat the machine. Insert the punchcard and lock it on row 1. Make sure both side levers are at the dot. (this lets the carriage read the pattern, but not do anything with it)When you are finished casting on your pattern will already be memorized and you can start on whichever side you want.

    You also need to make sure that the carriage completely clears the knitting every row and that BOTH memory drums go past the card reader every row. I have had many disasters because I failed to clear the card reader every row.

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  3. Excited to hear you are using the Studio lace carriage as I was hesitant over the edgings Brother book. Hopefully we will get one for this machine???

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  4. I need to do more work, but right now it looks like we can make different edgings but not AUTOMATIC ones. The Brother edgings require only pushing the carriages back and forth. This will be different, I am fairly sure.

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  5. Following your experiments with interest - you're saving this kiwi so much time, doing them "in public"

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