Fairisle with the Humungus Cone of Chenille Yarn

What an afternoon! I decided I would try knitting a scarf with this chenille I'm trying to use up, but do some fairisle. I have the Silver Reed 860 and the Silver Link 4. Still trying to develop a (good) relationship with this machine. Well, I had my pattern done in DAK, a modification of the Dale of Norway Peace design. Thought I'd knit it flat and seam it while watching a movie tonight. Ha! Got my yarns set up in the 860. Turned on DAK, hit the interactive knitting button. Nada. Nothing. Of course I've only knit a few fairisle things with this machine, last time about a year ago, so I could not remember for the life of me how to do this. I've downloaded to my Brother 970 millions of times and it has always worked so slick for me. After 30 minutes of frustration, I remembered this was not the computer I used when I did get it to knit interactively. That machine died and I had to switch to an extra XP computer we had sitting around here.

For some reason, it popped into my head that there was a driver involved. And it wouldn't have gotten installed on this new/ old computer. So I went hunting in my closet where I keep knitting supplies (the equipment kind) and found the DAK USB Driver. Another 30 minutes have passed. It's on a floppy disk, so I had to also hunt for the removable floppy disk drive. Found that, plugged everything in. For the longest time, nothing happened. Windows tried to install the driver and it said it was unsuccessful. Said the device might not work. Then the driver suddenly installed itself and all was hunky dory. Another 30 minutes have passed. Then the DAK disk said it had to upgrade my hardware. HUH?? I was sure some virus had taken over. But I didn't dare turn things off since it might be legit. It was.

Back in the DAK program, I went to set up for the Silver Reed 860 because it's set for a Brother 970. Believe it or not, the program found an available "virtual" com port all on its own. I guess the USB cables use a "virtual" com port. And I don't even know what I'm talking about. Then it was on to reading the help file. 30 more minutes down the drain. Got enough out of it to go ahead and knit a swatch.

Here it is after hours of fiddling. My 8" wide x 5" tall swatch. Could have knit that by hand 5 times over in the time this all took. But now I think I have it and next time will go more smoothly.

Not being familiar with the knit from screen process and not being comfortable with this machine, I decided I needed to eliminate the plain rows in the pattern so I don't have to switch out the yarns. The design suffers some, but I'm going with it so that I can get it done tonight.

I bet that next time I want to knit with the 970, I'll have to hunt for a new com port to work with that cable.

My, this is a boring post and you're probably thinking I'm one stubborn woman. A lesser woman would have given up by now, yes? My ulterior motive is to have a record of what I did so that next time I have to install this monster, I'll know what I did. If I have success with the scarf, I'll post a picture. So far it isn't biasing or worming. So that's amazingly good.