I always forget how hard it is to look back on a finished project and remember all the steps it took to create it. Once it’s done, it’s done. Out of sight, out of mind. I’m hoping that the most important details come back to me, because I know I struggled through this process and felt compelled to write and record those experiences. I am still feeling grateful for each opportunity to puzzle through the problems and learn from my mistakes and feel that sense of accomplishment when I figured something out.
Nervously, I pulled the yarn through the tension masts on the knitting machine. I was excited and scared to see how this would go. I know my machines. I know they like to cause trouble and make easy projects difficult. This should be a breeze. Only 2 colors. No need to make increases or decreases. No changes to the carriage settings. Just push and pull the carriage, knit with focus and pay attention to your color changes and weights and it should only take a couple hours to make the main piece of fabric that will become the Goya Shawl. 1440 rows. 7 pattern repeats across. No, 6. Wait. if it’s 6 then the center one won’t be centered. is that ok? what’s the width of one triangle… ok, and then times 6 is… and times 7 is… which is closer to 24” width… how big will the button band be? ok so then if there’s 6 triangles across it’ll be too small but with 7 it’ll be too big…but the button band could be skinnier? do we really need the button band? yes. ok so how many pattern repeats? how many needles did i start working with?… Focus, now, you got this.
My notebook is at my side so I can write down every step I make in case I have to start over, or want to make a second shawl just the same. I follow the cast-on steps in the book exactly as they describe - first row, gauge 0, main bed knit one direction, ribber knit the opposite direction, repeat, then knitter and ribber both knit at the same time. Reset carriages for pattern knitting, gauge 5, click, pop, pop, snap, slide, click, click, spin. Ok, all set. Double check the punchcard is beginning at the right spot. Check. Yarns properly threaded, check. Color A is in the first slot of the color changer and threaded through the nearest mast head. Color B is in the second slot of the color changer and threaded through the second nearest mast head.
Casting on went fine. Phew. Setting the punchcard and carriages up for jacquard knitting went fine. I’ve got my weights on and properly spaced. (Weights are exactly what they sound like, heavy chunks of metal and plastic that attach to the knitted fabric with metal claws to hold the fabric taught against the needles so the yarn doesn’t jam in the carriage.) The first few rows are knit and look good and so I will just keep up the knitting rhythm: zuh zuh clink chunk, pop zuh zuh clink chunk, pop zuh zuh clink… these are the sounds of the carriage being pulled and pushed across the needles (zuh zuh), the click of the color changer letting me know I’ve hit the end of the row, and the (chunk) sound of the button that selects the next yarn color, the pop of the punch card reader advancing itself to the next row,
pop zuh zuh clink chunk, pop zuh zuh click chunk, pop zuh— KaCHUNK — the heaviest weight narrowly misses my bare foot as the carriage jams and half the knitting falls off the machine. fuuuuuuuuuu…… what happened?!
Somehow, the yarn didn’t catch in the carriage so instead of knitting a row of stitches, the machine knit a row of nothing which made all the stitches fall off the needles. Maybe the yarn had a knot in it and pulled too tight and I didn’t notice. Maybe I had the yarns through the mast heads in the wrong order and they got tangled? I double checked the manual to see if it mattered. Yup, it does. And I had it wrong. I had it in the order of color B then color A in the color changer and color A then color B in the mast head. Needed to be B-A and B-A so the yarns don’t cross and tangle. Duh. Ok, fixed that, double checked the yarn for knots, got going again.
I was about 30 minutes and 100 rows into the knitting, wondering to myself how many decibels the metallic grinding sound of the machine is and whether or not I should be wearing ear plugs, when things went awry for the second time. I don't remember exactly what happened (maybe half a row of dropped stitches), only that I had to make an important decision. Fix the mistake or take it all off the machine and start again. I decided that fixing the issue would take as long or longer than just re-knitting the piece, and that a repair never looks as good as not needing a repair at all. So I started over again.
Third time’s the charm, right? I got going pretty good, and then the carriage started to feel weird. It wasn’t moving as smoothly over the needles as it had been. It felt and sounded really chunky and took a lot of effort to push and pull the carriage across. I checked all my settings, the tension on the carriages, mast heads, and yarn changer. I checked that my yarn was wound properly into its ball, not too loose or too tight or getting tangled. I nervously continued to knit and worried that, again, the whole thing would fall off. It didn’t make sense to me that knitting would suddenly be so difficult.
I paused to think this through, because I was determined not to lose the work I had already put into it. I couldn’t afford another hour down the drain. I was about to google something like “why isn’t my knitting machine knitting smoothly” when I realized I knew the answer to the problem. Smoothly. It wasn’t knitting smoothly because it wasn’t oiled. It is a machine. It requires oil to function well. Smoothly. I hadn’t oiled the machine before I started knitting.
My body warmed with the realization, a combination of excitement that I knew instantly how to fix this problem without losing my work, and embarassment that I had made this classic rookie mistake. Luckily, I had a bit of machine oil on hand, the oil my chunky silver reed machine came with. There wasn’t much left, but it was enough for now. I did worry that I’d get oil on the finished piece, but that small fear was worth the risk. I oiled the machine and let it sit a bit, and when I started knitting again, it felt smooth (well, smoothER, probably could do with a bit more oil).
Because I had used up the little bit of oil I had and needed to buy more, I decided to do some research to figure out exactly what kind of oil to use on my knitting machine. And, because I used the internet for this research, I found varying opinions on various types of oils (so confusing), including a write up by an actual chemist who used all kinds of sciency jargon to explain why one type of oil works well and another doesn’t, but of course the product he recommended is only found in the UK and I was standing in front of the WD-40 cans at Lowes trying to pick something to use _right now_. There were not many options here! And the options they did have were not mentioned in the knitting forums.
With a heavy sigh for fear of failure and equal frustration that a) I didn’t know which of these few options was best and b) that they didn’t have the one type of oil most recommended on the forums, I picked up a small bottle of “3-in-1” (I think that’s the brand? and the type? I dunno?) multi purpose oil. So far, it seems to work fine, but it really stinks up the place and someone out in internetland says it’ll rust your machine or cake up over time or or or (won’t all oils?). A few weeks later, I was at Britex looking for buttons and they had some Singer Sewing Machine Oil, which I saw mentioned in the knitting machine oil reviews, so I got that, too, and will some day do some kind of comparison write up of the two.
This research led me to a great resource, btw - Knitting Paradise. A forum for machine knitters. Which then led me to a search of other online knitting resources. Like design products DAK (design a knit) and other knitting communities like Knit it Now… Which got me interested in creating my own page (more accurately, repeatedly updated blog post) of knitting resources, mostly as a way for me to keep track of my own research and favorite sites. Like the couple on youtube that makes knitting machine repair/maintenance videos - they are so good!
It sounds like I am totally digressing from my project progress, but that is absolutely the nature of knitting. It’s really stop and go! Knit a bit, hit a snag, investigate, puzzle and problem solve, research, make a discovery, have some epiphanies, knit a bit!
Ok, Back to work! My machine is oiled, I’m carefully watching my yarn consumption, noting how many rows I can knit with navy and with tan before I need to work in a new ball. (turns out to be about 260 rows per skein) I wonder just how much yarn it will take to finish knitting this shawl. Grossly underestimating how much yarn I would need (wait, if you know its 260 rows per skein and you're knitting 1440 rows, isn't it easy to calculate how much yarn you'd need? HINDSIGHT IS 20/20 EVERYBODY), I ended up making 2 additional trips to the yarn store to get more yarn. (Future me wants you to know that I ended up using a total of 9 skeins of navy and 8 skeins of tan. That’s a lot of yarn! so luxurious.) Pro tip: When starting a new ball of yarn, tie the end of the new yarn to the end of the old yarn and pull it through the mast, color changer, and carriage. This makes re-threading a lot easier!
After a little over 5 hours of knitting across 2 different studio days (which were not back to back, so the knitting hung on the machine over the weekend and then some before I could get back to it, thankfully I was present enough to remember to take most of the weights off so it didn’t stretch out too bad in between knitting sessions), I finally finished the body of the shawl. HUGE SIGH OF RELIEF.
I didn’t know how difficult the next part would be. I mean, I was nervous, I wanted to get it just right, but I thought once I nailed down the logistics, the actual knitting would be relatively straight forward. Boy was I wrong!
Please join me for "Production: Part 2, Button Bands" in my next blog post!
-nina
beautifully written as always!