Category: Meetings

Advanced Use of the Ribber

This month the topic was “advanced use of the ribber”,  April, Margaret and Frances demonstrated various techniques:
Double Jacquard – this technique creates a fairisle like fabric with no floats knitting all needles on both beds. To create this, it helps to use a double bed colour changer on the Brother Machines or the general purpose colour changer on Knitmaster machines.
It is important to follow the colour changer instructions closely, as you must start from the correct side to sequence the colours correctly.

Racking stitches on the ribber bed to give a zigzag pattern on the purl side of the fabric, and hand transferred lace holes round a diamond shaped block were created by transferring stitches between the ribber and the main bed.

The blue samples were machine knit quilted fabric, this used the ribber with patterning, either punchcard or electronic to create “pockets” which were stuffed with polyester toy stuffing, Depending on the punchcard used a variety of designs can be knitted, it is important that the designs have solid areas for patterning. Margaret also demonstrated the Brother ribber transfer carriage.

After the initial talks, everyone was encouraged to watch the demos in groups and try out the techniques for themselves.

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Rectangles were this month’s theme.  Anu started us off with some ideas she had used for garments – a lovely  hat in a subtle grey and purple fair-isle, all  mode with rectangles and using a drawstring to create the crown, then a stripey poncho which was widely admired.

A list of related websites:

[simple-links category-“anu-links” orderby=”title” order=”ASC” title=”Links to Rectangle Ideas” category=”31″ show_image=”true” image_size=”medium” description=”true” remove_line_break=”true”]

She then covered some ideas for bags found online – a windmill pattern and a Masa bag plus some others created specially.  Margaret had tried some of these ideas and showed us the results which were very intricate looking but simply made from rectangles folded in clever origami ways to make 3-D shapes.

Various other members had brought along garments and other items made up from rectangular pieces.

Anthea showed us two jumpers she had made from strips of rectangular fair-isle together with some very thin strips to give a rolled effect to decorate the seams. These had been well used over a number of years as they were warm and cosy.

After coffee, we had great fun getting into groups and trying to construct garments and other items from some rectangular pieces that members had brought along.

It was a very creative evening and we all enjoyed ourselves.

Here are all the ideas we came up with – we used pegs and pins to fix the garments together – just to give an idea of what is possitle.

Show and tell

Items were brought along for the show and tell from Barbara who had made several pairs of pretty baby bootees and a baby cardigan.  Gill R brought a pretty hat and Gillian made a Fiddle Muff for our charity collection – more of that next time.  Also see link to apattern for  a chunky machine on the home page.

Show and tell – Barbara’s booties, #1	Show and tell – Barbara’s booties, #2

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The theme of this meeting was The Ribber,  April and Frances demonstrated techniques using the ribber and Margaret brought along her Garter Carriage so that we could see it automatically caste on and create a rib using garter stitch.

This session concentrated on some of the straightforward techniques  for the ribber  including setting up the machine and a future session is planned to cover some more advanced ones.

Various machines were available to try out the techniques.

We also held a raffle with some very nice prizes including a hamper.

This was a club night and both April and Frances demonstrated various techniques for adding textures and surface decoration to knitted items.

April demonstrated how to inset spiralling cords into a seam of a garment.  See the instructions under Knitting Notes in the menu.

Several machines were available for members to try their hand at these techniques.

On 9 September, Vivien Graham was our guest speaker. Vivien (whose real name is Vivien Cooper) runs a successful knitwear design business, mainly using lambswool and merino to design and knit jackets in a myriad of styles and colours, which she then felts. Vivien can make garments to measure and regularly attends craft fairs to sell her goods.  Her website is www.viviengraham.co.uk.

Vivien started off her knitting career at age 9 when her brother bought her some knitting needle and wool, and became an avid hand knitter, knitting everywhere she could.   Years later, after seeing a demonstration of a knitting machine she bought one for herself and started knitting garments in cotton.  After completing a knitting course at Southampton Institute of Further Education in Fashion Design she started selling her garments at craft fairs, and took up a permanent stall at Stapehill Abbey in Wimborne. Over the years, Vivien has collaborated with designers and retailers, who have sought her design and production skills.  Vivien now sells her garments mainly through craft fairs and repeat custom.

Vivien gave the club attendees advice on felting, some key points included:

1. ALWAYS do a tension square, as the tension can be affected by each different batch and colour of yarn.   For instance an orange yarn may felt up differently from a green yarn, and the same yarn you bought last year compared to this year is likely to have a different tension. Always knit a tension square of [60 x ?].
2. Once the tension square is complete, felt this by putting it in your washing machine on a 30 degree cycle (Viviens machine usually takes about 1hr 15 minutes to do this). Do not add anything else in the washing machine as this will impact the tension square, and you would need to replicate exactly with your finished garment.
3. You should always spin the garment on as high a spin as possible eg 1400-1800 to remove all excess water, this is because when you hang it up to dry you do not want the weight of the water to drag down your garment and distort/lengthen it. Remove the garment and hang it up as soon as the spin cycle is finished.
4. If you are not happy with how much it has felted up, you can put the garment back in your washing machine on a quick 15 minute wash to felt it up a little bit more.
5. Once the felting is complete, iron it and you can measure the gauge/tension to work out the size of your final piece.
6. For washing a felted garment, Vivien recommended hand washing, then spinning as high as possible before hanging up to dry. If you have a specific hand wash option on your washing machine (one that just swishes the garment back and forth rather than rotating it) then you can use that too, but not the wool wash 30 degree option as this would felt your item/shrink it more.

Vivien had a large collection of jackets and colours on display for attendees to view and try on, and a selection of unique handmade buttons on sale.

This month we had a speaker – Rosie Rees – who talked about knitting with beads.  Knitting in only one of the uses she has for beads as she runs a beading classes and a craft club in Surrey.

She showed us how to use a fine crochet hook a 0.75 or 0.5 to incorporate beads into the fabric and brought various samples she had made.

A second element of the talk was how to choose the best beads for knitting.  One of the key points was to have a large enough hole in the centre to put the crochet hook and the yarn through.

Japanese #8 are good for knitting  whereas the Czech size #5 which had smaller holes were also good.

Also mentioned were the way size values differed: US beads are sizes as say #6 is 6 beads to the inch whereas the others have entirely different sizes.

Rosie brought along lots of suitable beads both Japanese and Czech in a whole range of lovely colours and sizes.

This meeting we focussed on crochet, many garments knitted on the machine can be finished or enhanced by using a crocheted edging so to encourage everyone to practice their skills Margaret and April organised us into groups by ability and we tried out various techniques.

https://youtu.be/OkjAfqQ9up0

Quite a few people brought along garments and other items they had crocheted for this display.