Machine Knitting Continues

Heck yeah, I’m retro-posting. Hello from the future!

It’s August 3rd, 2025 and time for more machine knitting!

A two-story white brick building with arched windows on a sunny day. A street sign in the foreground indicates this is the corner of Whitwell Place and Carroll St.
A nice clear morning at Brooklyn's Textile Art Center
Knitting machine on a steel stand next to a small white stool in a workshop with a worn wooden floor.
Hello, old friend

I started the day practicing some of the techniques from day one of the class.

A rectangular swatch about 30 stitches wide hangs from the knitting machine, weighed down by the cast-on comb and claw weights. The swatch begins with blue yarn at the bottom, has a stripe of mixed blue and yellow yarn, then a patch of yellow yarn. The same swatch several rows later. Its been increased to about 40 stitches.
Practicing some naive increasing and a bad rescue of a dropped stitch.

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??

Chunky black yarn with sparkles in it laid across a bed of machine knitting needles.
This chunky yarn! Pull half the needles forward and lay it across them. This also requires enabling the brush wheels on the knitting carriage (not shown).
Yellow and blue knit swatch on a countertop seen from the knit side, held flat with some coasters. Some stitches in blue rows are punctuated by chunky black and white yarn. Yellow and blue knit swatch on a countertop seen from the purl side. Rows of worked-in chunky black and white yarn are highly visible.
The effect is subtle on the "knit" side (left photo), which is generally the outside. The bulk of the worked-in yarn remains on the "purl" side (right photo).

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.

A swatch of knitting with two rectangles of blue separated by a triangular section of yellow yarn.
A triangular section of yellow made by short-rowing in right-to-left. Note how the cast-on comb is now at an angle!
The same swatch wtih a new triangular yellow section and rectangular blue section.
I had to make another triangular section to balance it out. ⚖️

Next it was time for two-color patterned knitting with fair isle, powered by punch cards!

Punch card with a rose-like floral pattern. Hand holding the punch card for scale, with the knitting machine in the background. Punch card inserted into the card reader on the knitting machine. Detail of the punch card with plastic clips joining the start and end edges to form a loop.
I grabbed this floral pattern. The arrow shows you which way it goes in the machine. Once it's fed halfway, you use plastic clips to join the start and end, forming a loop so the pattern repeats!

The knitting carriage needs several adjustments to begin following the punch card pattern.

Knitting carriage on the left side of the machine in 'normal' mode. Switches and knobs set to 'N' and no buttons depressed. Pointing finger indicates that the knob on the back-right of the carriage is to be changed. Knob has been switched from 'NL' to 'KC'
Start with the carriage to the left, turn the knob to 'KC', and knit one row in your main color from left-to-right. This will set the needles for the first row of the pattern.
Carriage on the right side of the machine with the blue main color yarn threaded into slot A. A pointing finger indicates the center 'MC' button, which is not pressed. The center 'MC' button is now pressed. The yellow contrast color yarn has been threaded into slot B.
With the needles set and the carriage on the right, Press the 'MC' button and add the contrast yarn.

Then… knit a bunch of rows! Here’s a little video.

My hand moving the carriage back and forth. The carriage clatters as it moves needs. The punch card reader clicks and advances as each row is finished.

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.

A swatch of fair isle knitting on the machine with the purl side facing us. Loose blue and yellow threads form 'floats'. Photo taken from underneath the machine, looking at the knit ('front') side of the swatch. The pattern produces yellow flowers on a blue background. My masked face is visible, making wide eyes at the camera. The swatch rests on my leg after being removed from the machine. The yellow-on-blue floral motif is visible. As is a snag created by some dropped stitches.
Fair isle knitting creates "floats" on the back (purl) side, which is what faces us while we knit. Seen from the correct (knit) side, the pattern is revealed! Also, it looks like I dropped a stitch at some point and produced a little snag here. Oh well!

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.

Sharpie diagram of a rectangular swatch of 50 stitches by 100 rows, with a row of contrast yarn and 20 rows of waste yarn on both the top and bottom. A hand holds a swatch of red and blue knitting joined into a tube.
The diagram shows one way to make a "gauge swatch", which is required to find out how many stitches and rows produce an inch of finished knitting. On the right is an example of mattress stitching, used to join the edges of knit pieces together.

Note to self, or anyone who wants to book some studio time to do some machine knitting at the TAC:

A cabinet labeled 'Knitting Machine Accessories' Longer shot of a pointing finger indicating this same cabinet among a group of cabinets along a wall.
There's a cabinet for the knitting machine accessories and here are some context clues for finding them!

And that was the end of the class! I learned so much, but mostly that I have so much yet to learn.

Knitting machine tucked away with transparent plastic protective cover.
Goodbye, new friend.

Besides the big swatch of worked-in yarn, here’s the rest of my swatches for the day!

Several knit swatches on a countertop, held flat with coasters.
What a haul!

From top-to-bottom, left-to-right:

  • Blue swatch with yellow short-rowed triangle sections.
  • Blue and red swatch partially mattress-stitched into a tube, with several lace holes.
  • Long blue and yellow swatch with practice sections of short-rowing and lace, as well as a long section of floral fair isle pattern. The end of the piece is ragged from a failed bind-off.
  • Fair isle swatch with blue-on-purple.
  • Fair isle swatch with purple-on-blue.
  • Long purple swatch with sections of blue.
  • Blue-on-yellow fair isle swatch.
  • Yellow-on-blue fair isle swatch.
  • Short blue-on-yellow fair isle swatch with two ragged edges: one from removing the swatch without binding off, and one (I think) because I had a "weird" number of stitches compared with the pattern, leading to some edge stitches being dropped.

Will I continue my machine knitting journey?? Stick around to find out! Subscribe in your favorite feed reader, and so on, and so forth!

#making #machine-knitting
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