Heck yeah, I’m retro-posting. Hello from the future!
It’s August 3rd, 2025 and time for more machine knitting!
I started the day practicing some of the techniques from day one of the class.
I have forgotten the first technique Elaine taught us for the day, but it let us work in a second yarn by hand as each row is knit. Seems like maybe a cool way to work in wires or conductive thread??
Next up, we learned about putting working needles in hold, aka short-rowing, which allows you to “grow” sections of the knitting by adding rows just to one section, while other parts of the work stay put.
Next it was time for two-color patterned knitting with fair isle, powered by punch cards!
The knitting carriage needs several adjustments to begin following the punch card pattern.
Then… knit a bunch of rows! Here’s a little video.
When you’re done patterning, you can snip the contrast yarn, turn the carriage back knob back to ‘NL’ and disable the ‘MC’ button, then proceed knitting in your main yarn color as normal.
After a lunch break, we spent most of the rest of the time practicing what we’d learned so far. Near the end, Elaine taught a few important techniques that you do off the machine.
Note to self, or anyone who wants to book some studio time to do some machine knitting at the TAC:
And that was the end of the class! I learned so much, but mostly that I have so much yet to learn.
Besides the big swatch of worked-in yarn, here’s the rest of my swatches for the day!
From top-to-bottom, left-to-right:
Will I continue my machine knitting journey?? Stick around to find out! Subscribe in your favorite feed reader, and so on, and so forth!
Happy HTML Day!
I'm taking a two-day machine knitting workshop intensive, so I did not have the energy to join the folks at the Valentino Jr. Park meetup.
Instead I am writing this post (in HTML) while watching along to Jenn Schiffer's "HTML Day From Home (hdfh)" stream.
The workshop is Machine Knitting 101, from Brooklyn's Textile Arts Center's line of Machine Knitting classes and workshops. Today, our instructor Elaine walked us through some of the basics.
We bought a knitting machine, a Brother KH-930e, back in, checks notes, =chokes= like 2011 or 2012?? Enticed by Becky Stern's post on on hacking the KH-930e. As it turns out, the electronics hacking was NOT the difficult part of working with one of these machines! After some rounds of buying replacement parts and maintenance, we got a couple of little projects out of it, but found it challenging enough to work with that we stopped messing with it. But, we still have it, and I'm excited to try again!
Here's a photo of the workshop syllabus, as well as some of my debris from today's workshop.
From top to bottom, left-to-right:
Thank you for reading. I hope to post more knitting projects. I hope to read your HTML Day creations!
'til next time!