Machine Knit charity stuff

It's been so cold here, all I feel like doing is staying in and knitting. I suppose that's a good thing, although this winter is getting mighty long. It was -12 F when I got up this morning. Brrrrrrrrrrr.

I've been using up some yarn, as usual. The scarves are just 60 stitches of 1 x 1 rib, about 600 rows. This time I've been using 3 strands of fine yarn: one tan, one gray and one variegated. Makes kind of a nice color combo. I think it would work for a boy or girl. The headbands are probably for girls, tho.

The hat is doubled, English rib. It should be toasty!


So, that's five more items to add to my charity goal. One of these days I'll count how many I have and how far I still need to go. Funny how those cones with the fine yarn never seem to get smaller.....

Machine Knit Fight Song

Here are some scans of the Wittenberg scarf. Their colors are red and white.
I think I got pretty close to the shape of the letters in the logo. You can see with the capital letters in the main part of the scarf, the wrapping of the design was minimized.

The artistic license, if I can call it that, was to have the words wrap around the scarf so you have to know the fight song to realize what is being said. Kind of silly, but I hope she'll find it amusing. It will be warm for sure. It turned out to be 7 feet long and 10" wide, doubled. We're only half way through winter---so there are some challenging days ahead. Kind of depressing.

I hope they are not fussy about their logo---I'm not selling anything with it, so hopefully it will go under the radar. It's just a gift for a friend who is an alum from that school.

Do you like my funky "fringe"? I have an aversion to the stringy kind, so this is my substitution. Everyone has their weird things, right? That's mine.

It Fits!

My daughter sent me pictures of Oliver in his sweater today. It's tighter than I thought it would be, but the puppy has grown since I saw him at Christmas. She said he likes to lie on the couch in his cozy new sweater and listen to jazz. How cute is that? He's a funny little pooch.

Here's the sweater sans dog:


Now that I have an idea of his size...I might need to knit him something else. California is cold in the winter. Ha!

DesignaKnit Lettering

Now, why didn't I think of this before?

I am making these scarves with words on them. The first one (black and white) I used lower case lettering and capitalized where appropriate. With two plain rows between lines of text, I had rows with just a few stitches in them and gargantuan floats. Think the bottom of a 'y' or a 'g' or the tops of 't' or 'h' for some examples. So, thinking I could get more stitches to appear across the row, I moved the text up so some things sort of overlapped. Still had gargantuan long floats, had to do a lot of wrapping with separate lengths of yarn, very very tedius. Looks ok on the front, but harder than machine knitting is meant to be. I didn't want to do dbj so felt I was stuck.

Then, while fooling around designing the second scarf, I did all the text in capital letters. There are two plain rows between each line of text. Voila' no trailers hanging down or sticking up!!! Such a simple thing and it will make knitting the scarf 10x faster!!! See the screen captures below:


Even if you don't use DesignaKnit but use some other method of inputting designs (text) into your knitting machine, I'm thinking this might help you.

Near Disaster with my 970 knitting machine

Last night I was knitting away merrily on my 970, making a scarf for a friend. All of a sudden, the carriage froze to the needle bed---almost as if someone had soldered it to the bed. My heart practically sank to the ground. No kidding. No matter what combination of buttons I pushed, that carriage was not going to move. I had 407 rows knit out of 650, fairisle, lots of hand wrapping of long floats. Bah. I did manage to get the scarf off the bed by lifting stitches off the hooks that were frozen in time. Called a friend to see if she would go with me to St. Peter, to Knit and Sew World, to see if Shawn could repair it. She said she would and even called Amanda at her home (Amanda works there) to let her know we were coming in the morning.

It's about a 1 1/2 hour drive (on a clear summer's day) from my house to St. Peter. Miserably cold today with lots of arctic wind, below zero temps. I had some thoughts about maybe this was a foolish thing to do, to drive in this weather, but machine knitters are stubborn, doncha know. I met my friend a half hour from my house and we continued on together. The drive was slow, but not as bad as it could have been. A few cars were in the ditch on both sides of the road. We made it safely.

Shawn dropped what he was doing and worked on my machine for a good 3 1/2 hours. He replaced the timing belt (the cause of things not moving), did a general tune up, blew out mounds of fluff from the inner sanctum, replaced a few doohickys that weren't functioning optimally, cleaned and shined it up and gave it a new coat of oil. My CB1 had a stubborn #1 on its keyboard so I was either avoiding patterns with the number 1 or pressing that button long and hard. He fixed that too. He said my timing belt was getting close to cutting some wires for the electronics and it was good this happened when it did or the repair would have been much more extensive. For all he did, the bill was very reasonable. I would recommend him to anyone. He has tons of Brother and Silver Reed parts and knows both machine brands inside and out. They ship parts all over the world. He even repairs and advises Karen Allen with her mk business. (Karen -the actress in Indiana Jones series who also machine knits.)

Here's the address of Knit and Sew World's website:
http://knitsewworld.com/
When you click on the Knitting Machine tab, you'll find an informative article about a recommended routine for oiling your machine.

Anyway, I'm a very happy camper. Now I just need to unravel some rows and get that scarf rehung on the machine. I have a deadline to meet. Doesn't every machine knitter do gifts at the last minute???

Two Machine Knit Ski Headbands Done!

I still have my charity birthday hat resolution going. Knitting the hats every now and then, hoping I'll reach my goal by next December. This is the latest addition to the collection---a really quick knit for a ski or cold weather headband. It's 17 degrees (Fahrenheit) below zero as I type, so anything warm is appealing. Winter hasn't shown any signs of relenting yet.

This was a 15 minute headband! Seriously! I have knit two sizes, but since it goes so quickly, you could adjust for the recipient. Knit rows of 1 x 1 rib, change to Fisherman's rib, then knit more 1 x 1 rib. Machine: Brother Standard gauge with ribber. I used Mary Lou's Symphony yarn, which is no longer manufactured.
Finished sizes: Child 16", Adult 17" unstretched. Knitting is very stretchy but you'd want it snug to stay on!

The basic idea for this headband came from an old (1998) Purls of Joy seminar book, the pattern was written by Karen Hoovestol. I adapted the pattern for my own use, changing the way it is cast on and bound off, also the number of needles used, rows knit and adding a child's size. I'm thinking that even though the pattern is at least 13 years old and a pattern given out for a seminar that I probably should not have given specifics. (Sorry about that. I removed the pattern.) I don't know how to get ahold of Karen to ask permission to use it, so I'm feeling more comfortable just describing it a little. I think you could figure out how to make it and it would be nice if you could make some for charity too.

An aside...Because it's too cold for man or beast, I've been walking inside the house. I do a round trip through living room and kitchen. It's about 40 steps. Am aiming for 20 rounds each day. Not so much, but better than nothing and it warms a body up for a while. How I love winter!

When Your Knitting Machine Gives You Lemons...

Make a pillow. How lucky was this? I had enough rows to make something out of this ex-scarf, rows that had the correct patterning. First I counted rows and marked off the same number for "front" and "back" with strands of red yarn. If you click on the picture it should enlarge and you will be able to see better where the red yarn markers were stranded through.



Then I stitched across where the red yarn markers were---twice---and surgically removed the messed up snowflakes. Pinned front to back...



With the sewing machine, right sides together, I sewed three sides shut. Turned it right side out, stuffed a pillow in and hand sewed the final seam shut with the main color yarn. Here's the front:And the back...Not perfect, but at least it didn't end up in the landfill, nor did an old pillow no longer in service.

My good friend Candace came to my rescue with suggestions as to how to get along better with my SR 860, Silver Link 4 and DAK.
* My pattern of 140 stitches and 578 rows (80,920 stitches) was too large for the system to handle. (My Brother 970 wouldn't have blinked an eye, but o well.) Solution: download and knit a pattern this size in several sections, like 4 or 5.
* Knit really slowly so that the signals have a chance to get through. She said she can actually hear the row changing. Not the click that you hear when you've gone far enough with the carriage, but a different sound. Will have to try to listen for that.
* Turn off any screen saver or virus program that is likely to come on and interrupt.
* Get a laptop with Windows 98, 2000 or XP and use it exclusively with DAK. No internet. (Probably won't happen soon since we have too many computers around the house as it is. Unless I find a really good deal....) 98 is supposed to work the best.
* DAK was designed originally to work with Brothers, so the adaptations for Silver Reeds are not perfect. (Ha.)
* Check out Knitwords 30 and 31 for articles titled "Messing With Matthew" where Mary Anne Oger talks about the Silver Reed systems and DAK. (Matthew would be Matthew Bragg, creator of DAK.)

Thank you, Candace. I really appreciate your help and maybe these suggestions will help someone else.

I think I might need to move on from the 860 for a while. Not fun to have to work so hard on a project, but I guess it was worth something because I learned a bunch.