When someone gives you the pick of a huge lot of cone yarn, and someone else gives you a knitting machine, you would think fate is speaking to you, “You should knit on a knitting machine.”

At Christmas, I picked up 40+ cones of mostly acrylic (some wool blend, some cotton blend) yarn. Each cone ranges from 1000 - 4000 yards! In April, a friend gave me her British Bond knitting machine.

Last night I drug the two out in an attempt to appease fate.

For someone who is pretty good with machines, I found this knitting machine to be the most counter intuitive bucket of bolts I’ve ever encountered. Even worse, the instructions were extremely vague, and there were a few broken parts. There are some internet sites that detail how to use a knitting machine, and they explain how to start the first row of knitting, or “cast on”. These sites allowed me to get around a few of the weird broken parts, and get started knitting.

Despite the “ease” and the “speed” of the machine, I managed to completely fail at this task.

A second attempt is in order. The first and last stitch of every row began falling off. That is probably a weighting problem. The two white objects hanging off the bottom, and the purple clip are all weights. The broken part is a weight that goes between each stitch to evenly weigh down with each row.

I also tried changing plates in the middle of the work and that failed miserably too. It’s not all fun here craft blogging.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 11:00 am and is filed under knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.