Swatch out!

Ran across a few swatches made with a SilverReed 280 punch card knitting machine while doing a little tidy up in the sewing room.  These are not swatches for taking a gauge measurement for garment making, but rather just swatches to check out various pattern cards used in the pattern reader.  Most of them are for patterns that I manually punched myself, so doubly important to make sure that I did them correctly!

And these next two are from cards that came with the machine, or with the lace carriage (which is purchased separately). Not worried about these being punched incorrectly, but I like to see how the pattern looks in actual wool.

Most of the self-punched cards were done from old manuals downloaded from the Pattern Library  at Knitting Machines etc. There are card templates at other sites too, most noticeably a Russian machine knitting site, but I haven't tried them -- just a bit leery of Russian sites these days. There are also a few internet vendors with pattern cards, but availability is somewhat sketchy as these are mostly old stock -- as always, Mr. Google is your friend.

Now, maybe I need to actually put one of them to use in a garment, hmmm?

And continuing on...

More machine knit sweater goodness, this time an exploration of patterning using the punch card capability of the Silver Reed SK-280.

I used two cones of fingering weight (2/9) Shetland wool from Gardiner of Selkirk, Ltd.  This was a closeout from Webs, many moons ago.  I don't remember the price now, but it was a great bargain.  However, it sat in the stash -- mostly because it wasn't pleasant to hand knit, and it that point I didn't have a machine that would handle that weight of yarn.  Fast forward -- now I do!

The body of the sweater is plain stockinette, the ribbings are hand knit, and the sleeves are knit in a fair isle checkerboard design.  It was my intention to shape all pieces, except the neckline, with full fashioned increases.  However when I started my first sleeve, I saw that the floats from the fair isle pattern, plus the increases gave the edges of the sleeve a somewhat ragged look.  This may be inherent in the type of pattern I was doing, or due to inexperience on my part, but it was not satisfactory.  So, I did a few calculations, and knit up two separate pieces of patterned yardage for the sleeves.  Here you can see the yardage with a pattern drawn on freezer paper and lightly ironed onto the fabric: 

 

This method does waste a bit of fabric, but as you can see, not too much --

 

 

 



After cutting the side edges of the sleeves (top and bottom of sleeve were left on waste yarn), I ran it through the serger to finish off the edges -- scary, but it seems to have worked just fine.

 

 

And here it is all nicely finished --

 



The patterning on the sleeve portion worked out at a different gauge from the plain body portion -- I believe that is typical for fair isle.  A little more math let me work out separate patterns for the sleeves, and I made it easy on myself by selecting simple drop shouldered shaping. 

 

 

All in all, a simple project that turned out to the wearer's satisfaction.  And that is always a good result!