Happy HTML Day (I'm machine knitting Edition)
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 Eileen walked us through some of the basics.
- The parts of the machine (Brother KH-840s. Punch card reading cuties from the 1970s!)
- Choosing yarn
- Threading the machine with tension
- Casting on with "e-loops", comb and weights
- Knitting rows, managing weights
- Moving stitches horizontally and vertically, making holes and ladders
- Blending colors and swapping colors
- Increasing and decreasing the number of stitches not-at-the-edge
- Casting off (the hardest thing we covered, probably)
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:
- A long run of purple and green blocks, with a mix of clean color changes (where you cut one yarn and start antoher) and blending (where you knit with two yarns at once!). This run also includes a "flap" where I used vertical stitch movement to "close up" a small block of green.
- A long run of purple yarn with holes and "wrinkles". These are tests of moving stitches horizontally (holes) and vertically (wrinkles).
- An unraveling run with one block each of purple and green. A failed attempt at casting off.
- A small unraveling block of purple. A failed attempt at casting off.
- An unraveling run with two blocks of purple divided by a small block of green. A failed attempt at casting off.
- A non-unraveling block of purple. My one success at casting off!
- An unraveling block of purple. A failed attempt at casting off.
- A run with a large green block and a large tapering purple block. Practice at increasing and decreasing stitches. I decreased down to one stitch lol.
- A small unraveling block of green. A failed attempt at casting off.
Thank you for reading. I hope to post more knitting projects. I hope to read your HTML Day creations!
'til next time!