wildcard: knitting machine

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i participated in the machine knitting for this week’s assignment.

when approaching this week, the assignment i gave myself is to try to knit something in an expected and unexpected way and compare the results. basically, experiment what methods can be used to achieve the same thing with some slight variation.

this week was especially exciting for me, because i am an avid hand-knitter! I wanted to see the differences between hand-knitting and machine-knitting. alex was really great at giving a thorough introduction into the history of textiles, how the knitting machine works, and the different types of projects that could be achieved on it.

initially i came into the week wanting to make a pillowcase for my chair for the final project, but since i wanted to do more knitting stitch experimentation, i decided on a tubular scarf with my name on it as well as several stars surrounding it.

the stars were the section that i wanted to experiment with — how could i get the star pattern to appear in different types of knit stitches. the most obvious one was to replicate how my name was appearing on the scarf — a switch from knit to purl stitch. next, i made a test case using front left and front right, changing direction the way the star changes direction on the edges. lastly, i made a test case of using back right and back left. all the designs were made in knitskel (http://w-x.ch/knitskel/)







taking these ideas to alex, we attempted to put the pattern into the software that programs the knitting sequence for the machine, and we got some errors. these were in areas where the front right and front left/ back right and back left stitches were meeting. there were problems in these occurrences of the needles having to hold multiple stitches that could lead to drops and errors. these were solved by adding in some misses or extra knit stitches to get the right needle movement. finally there were no errors, and we ran the test piece shown below.

a slow motion of the machine moving is shown below:

the front/back left and right stars did not come out as I was expecting. they weren’t the worst thing in the world, but they certainly weren’t the best. it formed more of a lace pattern than i had imagined. i think in my head the star would have been making more of a cable formation, and there was a bit of that, but not as much as i would have liked. the knit/purl star was much better, but also was more subtle than i would have liked — alex explained that for that to stand out more, a smaller edge line would make a more defined star.

we made the necessary changes — deciding to only use knit and purl for the stars — and proceeded to knit the tubular scarf shown below. much more success!! i’ll be stylish this winter.







i was surprised by how slow the machine was at knitting (not to be taken for granted, it is still much faster than hand-knitting, but slower than i had imagined).