Cast on rag-best idea ever

I really hate casting on. It never works right and I end up having to undo tangles and redo several times. Even using the Brother comb, I don't always get it on the first try. Then I remembered permanent waste yarn. I'd already made one for my Bond--just cast on as usual with the hem and knit several rows in a color you'd probably never use; then secure the open stitches and remove from machine. Next time you start a project, use this with ravel cord and never have to cast on with elastic cord again.

I finally made a cast on rag for my standard gauge after Diana (diananatters.blogspot.com) made a video about it. All you do is cast on however many needles you want it wide, make a hem deep enough to insert weights, hang hem and knit a few more rows. Secure the stitches somehow--I passed yarn through them--and remove from machine.

Next time you cast on, hang stitches from this "rag" on needles and insert weight into the casing. If you have a Bond, a rod or two makes a perfect weight. Knit a row of ravel cord and cast on according to your project.

I've only used it 4 times, but I already know I'll never go back to the old way of casting on.

Felted Cloche

I wanted to make a felted cloche because I wanted a winter had that didn't squeeze my head, but the only patterns I could find were for hand knitting, and I only found a couple of those. I adapted a hand knitting pattern intended for bulky yarn and this is what I came up with.

I think it looks more like a bowl than a cloche when I'm wearing it. I think I need to re-block it so the sides don't flare out as much. If I make it again, I need to make the brim wider.

Here is the pattern:

You'll want to have a garter bar on hand if you try this.

Head 20.5 inches, gauge 6.95 stitches per inch, 12 rows per inch. I felted it by washing in hot water with 20 minutes agitation followed by a cold rinse and then putting in dryer. This resulted in stitch gauge shrinkage of 11% and row shrinkage of 21%. The gauge given above was measured after felting. My swatch before felting measured 25 stitches and 38 rows (measuring 40 sts and 60 rows), and 28 stitches and 48 rows afterwards. I knitted at a tighter tension, T8, because I wanted firmer fabric after felting. The wool was recycled from a thrift shop sweater so I don't know the weight except that it was approx. sport weight.

Closed edge cast on 144 stitches.
Knit 31 rows.
Decrease evenly to 124 stitches.
Knit 2 rows
Decrease evenly to 108 sts
knit 30 rows
decrease evenly to 96 sts
K 5R
Decrease evenly to 84 sts
K5R
Dec evenly to 64 sts
K5R
Dec evenly to 44 sts
K5R
Dec evenly to 24 sts
K5R
Dec evenly to 12 sts
Knit 1 row
Cut yarn leaving tail long enough to sew seam and thread through remaining stitches.
Pull stitches tight and sew seam
Felt and block. Starch or sizing will help set the brim.
If your fabric is hairy after felting, a disposable razor is good for removing fluff.

Here is how I blocked it:

I put 2 folded bath towels over a quart jar for 4 layers of fabric. I put a small mixing bowl over the jar and stretched the hat over the bowl. The bowl was 2" larger than my head. Don't know if that's good or bad. I pinned the brim to the towels and stuffed washcloths under the towel where the brim wasn't round to fill it out. I soaked the wool with water, then saturated it with starch. The starch will foam if you use the aerosol kind, so pat it into the fibers. Then I waited 3 days. Even though the hat isn't stiff, it still holds its shape well and hasn't gotten floppy.

To make it look less like a bucket, I stitched a ribbon around the crown.

The wonderful wonderful knit contour

One of the first things I disliked about hand knitting was the wordy patterns. I've been sewing since I was in middle school and sewing is a very visual art. It's easy to visualize how a garment will turn out by looking at patterns, and pattern instructions tend to be well illustrated. Knitting patterns, on the other hand use all kinds of cryptic abbreviations and the user is required to meticulously keep track of the location in the pattern, which is much easier said than done, especially considering one row could take me 20 minutes to knit. Lose your place in the pattern, and experience the joy of ripping back, assuming you actually CAN find where you deviated. And then there's the question of getting all the stitches back on a needle without dropping any. Fun.

If you don't have a charting device, you'll still be using a wordy pattern with a knitting machine; it's just easier to keep up with your progress because machine knitting is orders of magnitude faster than hand knitting. You still have to count the number of rows between increases and decreases and shape armholes on certain rows, etc. I have to do this when I use my Bond and it's still icky.

Enter the knit contour. It is built into some machines and is an external attachment on others. This is a wonderful contraption that looks like a typewriter drum and advances an outline of your garment as you move the carriage. You put a scale drawing of your garment into it like you would put paper in a typewriter and dial in your row gauge. It looks like this:

Other people have written articles that explain the principal much better than I can, and there are videos of people demonstrating it (susyranner.blogspot.com) but the basic idea is that because it advances at the same pace and row gauge as your knitting, there is no counting and you never lose your place! If you can draw something, you can knit it without having to devise a pattern first. The little ruler at the bottom of my pattern in the photo is for stitch size. The numbers on the scale tell you what needle you should be on. If you're using a half pattern, then your left and right end needles should be the same number as the pattern indicates on the scale. As the garment outline changes, you increase or decrease as necessary to make your end needles correspond to the scale. You determine your stitch and row gauge by knitting a swatch of a specified size in your stitch pattern and measuring between two points with a special ruler. Then you select the stitch scale that matches your gauge and put it into a little holder on the front of the drum and set row gauge by adjusting a dial on the contour. All this stuff will be included with your knit contour (if you're lucky--I wasn't). So there's no counting of stitches and rows, either! It's all streamlined and easy! Not only that, but if you aren't satisfied with your finished garment, alterations are as simple as drawing new seamlines on your contour pattern. No recalculating necessary.

To make the pattern in the photo above, I scaled up a schematic for a hand knitting pattern. It is half of actual size, however, because my contour is half scale. Some are full scale. I drew the basic outlines in ink, using the largest neckline I thought I would ever wear. Then I drew another neckline in pencil that is smaller and only applies to the garment I'm knitting right now. I can erase it the next time I use this pattern, I can change the side seam to add ease, change the ribbing to a hem, make fitting adjustments to correct badly placed seams, etc. All kinds of changes are possible from this one pattern. 

If you're a cut-and-sew knitter, using a pattern in the contour will tell you exactly how big your blank needs to be so that you don't waste more yarn than necessary.

Having a go at custom punchcarding

I found this great design at machine knitter's treasure chest and immediately began planning a garment around it. Now that all the supplies have arrived, I spent the day marking and punching my first custom card. Okay, not the whole day. Marking and punching cards is easy enough, just be sure to draw row and column numbers on your paper template before marking the card for punching. I tend to get lost in charts with lots of tiny rows and columns, so I was glad the marking went smoothly. This is the design, done in LB 1878 in Natural and Charcoal:

But this is what my machine was doing:

And on the back, I had this garbled mess with the MC being almost all floats:

It was happening when the carriage went one way but not the other, which suggests that the problem was only in one of the memory banks. I'd had this happen before but it seemed to go away on its own. It was never this bad. What's really perplexing is that the problem only seems to affect tuck and fair isle.

I opened up the carriage for the third or fourth time since I got the machine 2 months ago. It has suffered water damage so when I first got it, the cam lever wasn't moving most of the parts on the bottom of the carriage because they were all frozen in place. It took several tries at maintenance before I found and freed all the moving parts. I gave it what I thought was a thorough cleaning and oiling and everything seemed to be functioning normally. My first sweater was done in slip and the carriage performed perfectly, and the fair isle sample I knitted after working on the carriage came out fine, but for some reason, that wasn't the case today.

All I could find that could possibly be wrong was a small collection of fibers wrapped around the spindles of the memory banks. I put it all back together and did some more knitting, and it knitted the pattern perfectly. I hope I'm not going to have to take the carriage apart every time I knit fair isle. I haven't tried a tuck test, so I don't know if that stitch is still affected.

Thanks to MK Treasure Chest for such a great pattern!

These socks suck!

These green socks were my first knitting project of any kind to be completed. They were knitted circular on the standard gauge with a seam at the toe and to close the ribbing (see diananatters.blogspot.com for detailed instructions). I must have made eight practice socks before settling on the right sizing, tension and gauge. I was never able to make a sock without two lumps on either side of the toe seam and I neglected to tighten my tension while making the ribbing and the socks don't stay up. Plus, despite the small stitch size, the purls still feel like pebbles to the bottom of my foot. My next sock attempt is going to involve pile knitting.

First machine knit sweaters completed

Just finished assembling my first machine knit sweaters. The purple one was knitted on my standard gauge machine in a slip stitch pattern. The green one was manually patterned on my Bond.

I found this sweater and its finished measurement schematic as a hand knitting pattern, so I copied out a full sized version and then drew it half scale for my knit contour. Having neglected to make a ribbing swatch before starting out, the ribbing came out way too tall. It was intended to be 6". The whole sweater is generally out of proportion. It doesn't show up on this dummy, which is made for average sized people. I'll have to make some adjustments to the pattern before trying again. The purple part is 2/9 80% wool/20%nylon. The band is 2 strands of lace weight 100% merino in light gray.

This one, I found on the Bond website, but there were only HAND KNITTING instructions! I had to make some calculations and hope that it came out somewhat close to the right size. I ripped apart 3 backs before I was satisfied. It is 100% acrylic.

Update: SIMPLY SOFT YARN SUCKS. It gets hairy after the first washing and goes downhill from there. The sweater never looked this good again. Like they say, if you're going to put this much work into something, don't use a yarn that won't hold up.

Understanding yarn weights

Here in the States, we only have loose designations like "sport" or "fingering" to help us understand the thickness of the yarn for sale. Hopefully other countries have managed to do it better. Anyway, cone yarn is a far, far better deal than balls but its labelling scheme is completely different. I won't go into details because the explanation is somewhat lengthy and not relevant to my point. The size of a coned yarn is given as a fraction that indicates plies and number of yards to make up a certain weight or something. You will see sizes like 2/16, 3/8, 2/20, etc. The important information is how many yards make up a pound, which should be included in the product information. A 2/20 yarn may give 5600 yards per pound.

Now put it into perspective. Using a yarn you are familiar with, get the ball weight and yardage from the label. Find the weight in ounces if it's not given, and convert it to pounds. Find the total yardage in one pound.

For example, a 50g ball of "fingering" weight yarn contains 231 yards. 50 grams is 1.76 ounces so 16/1.76 is 9.09. Multiply 231 by 9.09 and you have 2099.79 yards per pound (ypp). Compare to a 2/8 cone yarn that has 2240 ypp. The ypp goes down as the yarn gets thicker.

Now determine the price per pound to learn just how bad a deal hand knitting yarn really is. A lace weight ball may cost $7 (and up!!) for 25g. That works out to $127.26 per pound (6764ypp). A 2/30 yarn has 8147ypp. Most coned yarns are $20-40 per pound depending on how fancy the yarn is. Since cone yarn is sold by the pound, the yardage and number of plies doesn't affect the cost. Plus you don't have to worry about dye lots or not buying enough balls for your project, as you will likely get many projects out of one cone. You can also double up finer yarns if you can't find a cone yarn of a suitable thickness for your project, opening up all kinds of interesting color and texture combinations.

Altering patterns for short people--what no one wants to tell you

In the clothing industry, "petite" cuts off at 5'3". That means that those of us who never managed to get that tall are left out in the cold with ill-fitting shirts. Although I'd be surprised if petite shirts actually did fit a 5'3". If you are really short like me, you probably find coats and shirts made of woven fabrics incredibly uncomfortable. It feels like there's a rope around your biceps whenever you try to raise your arms as your sleeves cut into your upper arms. And you've probably noticed how the shirt pouches out above your bust because there's too much fabric there.

The clothing industry apparently assumes that ALL people who wear a given size will have the EXACT SAME bust-to shoulder length. For us short folks, this translates into sleeve caps that are way too long and side seams stopping 2 or 3 inches below our armpits. The solution is both simple and secret. Amazingly, alteration books largely skip right over it. All you have to do is shorten your pattern between the bust and shoulder and reduce your sleevecap by a corresponding amount. Redraw your cutting lines and you're ready to go. You'll find that necklines are far more tolerable as well. The method that worked best for me was to remove enough material above the bust to bring the top of the side seam to within 2 fingers' widths of my armpit. Your pattern's neckline will probably help you determine the best place to make the alteration. The armscye seems pretty flexible about placement but you may want to put it above the sharpest part of the curve to make redrawing the cutting line easier.

I have tried this alteration on a fitted shirt with a one-piece bodice front and it worked well, but I haven't been able to satisfactorily work out how to do this on princess seams. My fear is that I won't redraw the curved seams correctly but I haven't actually tried.

My knitting journey

I'm really small. Small enough to have specific fitting issues that are largely ignored by the clothing and patternmaking industries. It's one of the reasons I sew, but not the only one. So I thought, why limit myself to sewing? I could have a go at knitting a custom sweater. I'm not one for slow tedious work, and I had a feeling going into it that it probably wasn't my cup of tea.

I taught myself to knit and purl and cast on and bind off and whatnot back in March. I finished the back of the sweater around mid-summer, while simultaneously attempting to knit socks. I don't mind telling you, knitting is BORING. Sitting still for hours at a time, doing little fiddly loops and needle manipulations while trying to keep track of the pattern and the increases every 8th row 20 times and...
I knew there had to be a better way but I didn't know what it was.

Completely by accident, I came across a Bond sweater machine on ebay while researching something else and was intrigued. I got myself one and had an entire sweater knitted within a couple of weeks, although not assembled because unfortunately homemade sweaters are apparently hand sewn together.

screw hand knitting

From learning 2 knit

The Bond is considered a "hobby" machine--made mostly of plastic and completely manual, very basic, so I began to learn about "real" knitting machines. They are some of the most fascinating contraptions I have ever seen. Of course I had to have one, so I got a model from the early 70's with punchcard capability. I could go on and on about the ingenious mechanics involved in selecting needles and making the different stitches, but I won't bore you with all that. Just fascinating...
The Fair Isle pattern in the photo above was manually knitted on the Bond, which wasn't exactly easy. My "real" machine can work 2 colors (and even more) effortlessly and with the proper tension.

what a beauty!

This is a slip-stitched pattern from a punchcard

Old school felt Christmas ornaments

Maybe you remember making these as a child--take some pieces of felt and stitch them into festive shapes adorned with sequins. Several years ago I remembered making some back in the day and decided to design a set for myself. I still have more designs in mind, but the projects just keep calling, "enough of that, work on me now!"

ornaments

Singer 306 Treadle Conversion

Messing about with this 66 got me thinking: why not a treadle with built in zigzag? Janome sells a treadle version of one of their basic machines for Amish customers, but it has too much plastic for my tastes.

It seems that Singers were like GM cars--they stayed the same for a very long time. I guessed that most of the black Singers and many early colored models had the same basic shape and castings, whether external motor or treadle. There are always bolt-on-motor-types sitting on thrift store shelves.

I made a trip to our local thrift store, which never lets me down. They had one labelled “Fleetwood”, but it didn’t ZZ. I was about to give up when I remembered one in a ratty case that they’d had forever, sitting on the floor in a remote corner. When I opened the case, a roach went scurrying for cover. The machine looked rough, but it was the kind I needed.

It was a Singer 306W. I had no idea Singer ever made a rotary hook machine for consumer use, and this model even has a cleated timing belt. It’s very like my Pfaff 360. I read quite a few disparaging remarks about these machines but I find it very interesting. It’s an example of Singer’s transition from 15’s to the “modern” age of zigzags and embroidery. It appears to be cast aluminum, so it’s not as heavy as I expected. One really annoying thing about it, though, is that you have to raise the machine out of the table to get at the bobbin. The sliding cover doesn't actually slide.

I popped it into the lousy table I got with the 66. The conversion went perfectly. There really wasn’t much “converting”, as all I did was to swap the motor belt for a treadle belt. My guess that the treadle or bolt-on motor setup are largely the same was correct. The machine runs strong and smooth and is easy to control with the treadle.

Singer 66 Restoration Project, part 2

Step 1: Remove japanning

I bought some Dollar General brand oven cleaner to remove the black paint and decal remainders. It worked well and didn’t damage any metal parts, including the brass Singer badge. After removing the paint, there was some rust to remove and the moving parts needed to be treated from water exposure. Here is the machine completely stripped:

 I think the polished metal is pretty, but that isn’t what we’re looking for this time. Maybe later. The next step is to thoroughly clean the metal, apply primer, and sand. To help distribute the oil, I put the machine in the cabinet and installed my new belt (after wirebrushing the treadle drive wheel). It turns out treadling is very easy and surprisingly precise. I can’t wait until I can sew with this machine. And I love the mechanism for putting the belt on and off the drive wheel. So simple yet so elegant.


Step 2: Prime

Not much to say here. It’s all primed and ready for enamel. Kind of looks like it’s covered in bandages.

more to come...

1912 Singer 66 Restoration Project

Recently, I found a very sad looking Singer model 66 with treadle cabinet at our local thrift store. This would be my first treadle machine, something I’d been interested in for some time, but figured the cost of obtaining one was well out of my budget. I knew it was in rough shape, but I didn’t know exactly how rough until I got it home for a closer look. The machine was almost entirely black, leading me to believe that the decals had been worn off. I couldn’t even see the brass Singer badge on the side. The veneer on the cabinet was ruined, and the treadle had no trace of paint whatsoever, having been replaced by thick rust. All the unpainted metal on the machine had originally been chrome or nickel plate, but on this machine, it was all either brown rust or brown filth. The plating was all destroyed. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture of the machine in its raw state. I traced the serial number to 1912.

A bit of cleaning revealed decals underneath a thick layer of filth, but they were in very poor condition, often rubbing off well before the dirt came off. The colors were the first part to go. This is what it was supposed to look like. (Link appears to be dead now but you can see similar machines by searching ebay or google for "redeye 66")

The japanning over the machine’s entire surface was broken and cracking. It couldn’t have been saved. Where the finish was broken, the metal was rusting. This, and the machine’s fragile decals and ruined plating led me to conclude that I’d either be junking this machine or starting from scratch. Now, mechanically, the machine was quite sound. After a little Kroil, it was whisper quiet and silky smooth. No problems with the moving parts whatsoever. There was no way I was going to part out this thing.

After doing some research online and learning about the process of plating metal, I came to a decision. I will replace the japanning with heavy enamel, I will hand paint the decals back on, and I will replace the nickel plating on the visible parts. The only parts I’m going to replace are the chrome plated ones. As for the cabinet, I don’t know what to do about the ruined veneer. There are several pieces of decorative scrollwork missing as well. I was considering repainting the treadle and dealing with the wood later, as the wood is the part that interests me least about this project. My goal is to accomplish the restoration of the machine (excluding treadle and cabinet) for less than the cost of either a machine in good condition (with GOOD decals) or the cost of replacing the individual parts.

Monetary layout thus far:

Machine & table   $40
Oven cleaner (to remove paint)     $2
Vinegar & baking soda (to remove rust)    $5
Replacement end cover, back cover, clutch knob    $30
Primer    $5