Kind of Fun - Prngle of Scotland Animated Video

This is a fun little video that I picked up at the Rhythm of the Needles blog, and I thought y'all might enjoy it.



Of course, I went over to Pringle's website to see what this spring/summer collection looks like. 

Hmm.  A lot of these don't look like knits.  At least, not the sort of knits we make!  Maybe they're very finely knitted fabrics, cut and sewed.

Matched Socks from Self-Striping Yarn

Getting your socks to turn out like a matching pair isn't always easy in self-striping yarn, especially if it's a large repeat of various color stripes.  The other day, I was looking down at my feet and realized that this pair I had made for myself matched up just about perfectly.  Not only that, but look how random those stripes look, since it's such a long time before the pattern repeats again.

So, goofy as I am, I rolled up my pant legs and took a picture.

Yes, there's an element of luck in this.  If you are unlucky enough to get yarn that isn't dyed evenly, it isn't going to match up.  However, most high-quality sock yarn that is dyed in stripes will  have the same length stripes each time the striping pattern repeats.

When you start the sock, start just at the beginning of a new color, that is, try to make that first stitch be knitted in that first bit of the new color. When you start the second sock, you have to wind off enough of the yarn to get to that same point in the repeat, and then use that same color for your first stitch.  That starts both socks with the same stripe, and the rest follows along.  Yes, it usually wastes some yarn, but you can use that yarn later for something else.  I find that when I purchase two 50-gram balls of yarn for a pair of socks in my size (ladies' medium - I wear a size 8 show) that I always leftover yarn.

One more thought - if you rewind the yarn before knitting the socks, make sure that you rewind each ball the same number of times.  That is, if you elect to wind the yarn more than once - for instance, because you think it's wound too tightly or you had to rip out, well, rewinding will reverse the direction of the yarn. 

Great Article About Tension at Susan Guagliumi's Site

Ahh, learn from an expert:

http://susanguagliumi.com/tension-matters/

When I was struggling with my first knitting machine - and lost, since the manual seemed like a poor translation from the Japanese and its sketches were, well "sketchy," I phoned my father-in-law.  He came over to have a look.  He was originally trained as a textile engineer, and he gave me one great piece of advice:  with machinery like this, the tension is critical!  Get the tension right, and everything else is easier.

Get the tension wrong, and well...

Post About Maintenance at Canadian Artisan

This post https://cutlermac.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/often-overlooked-maintenance-the-knitting-arm/ over at Yet Another Canadian Artisan has some nice photos and instructions about cleaning and de-fuzzing your sinker plate to make your machine work much better.

Lint and strings under the knitting brushes will cause terrible edge looping problems and make your machine difficult - or impossible - to use.  Take a few minutes and check yours!

New Video for June

Knitting machines make lace by transferring stitches from one needle to the next, so it's all about the direction.  Wouldn't it be cool if you could easily flip an asymmetrical pattern so it went in the other direction?  Well, you can.  With an electronic machine like one in the video, you push a variation key to reverse the pattern, and you also reverse the position of the main carriage and lace carriage.

With punch card machine, you turn the card over - right to left, not top to bottom - and then you also reverse the positions of the carriages.