Category: The Club

This was the first meeting in the Old Barn Hall in Bookham. Chairman Kathy gave out some notices then we settled down to listen to Margaret’s talk and demonstration.
Title:
Seamless Machine Knitting
With a few digressions and many mistakes

The first digression was a child’s jacket made using a nearly seamless construction, called the “Surprise Jacket”, it was adapted for machine knitting from an original pattern my the late Elizabeth Zimmerman. Many versions of this jacket exist – just Google “Surprise Jacket” to see both hand and machine knitted

versions and patterns. It demonstrated how a garment can be constructed with fewer seams than usual, the idea has also been the subject of several articles by Bill King in Machine Knitting Monthly.

In a second digression, Margaret showed us that when gathering stitches having taken them off onto waste yarn and started to rehang them, the order in which you picked up three stitches to hang onto a single needle could be varied giving different gathered looks. For example, instead of just picking up stitches 1,2 then 3 if the order was 1,3,2 or 3,1,2 say, it created subtly different effects.

The rest of the talk was inspired by a workshop run by Amy Twigger Holroyd which inspired Margaret to develop her own take on both seamless garments and surface decoration (added on the machine rather than by sewing decorations on an item after it had been knitted).

Firstly, a construction method was discussed where the creation of a very flat seam was done by picking up on every other row the lump or “knop” that is created on the edge of a piece when the yarn goes from one row to the next. A chunky machine was used to demonstrate this to the group so it was easier to see the work in progress.

Margaret passed around several samples that used this method. It can be used for picking up and matching rows or picking up stitches. One example she showed us was of a raglan sleeve on a child’s jumper.

Various members tried out this technique.

The second part of the talk was on surface decoration. A technique to add narrow strips of stocking stitch to a plain piece of knitting was demonstrated, the strip had a ladder on the centre needle so that it could be picked up easily. Each strip was picked up so that the right side which had the usual stocking stitch curls on the edges was applied every few rows, 6-8 rows of

the strip was picked up every 2 or more rows giving the ruched effect shown in the photos. Various variations on this theme were shown and several members tried out this technique.

 

Finally Margaret showed us some lovely items she had been making using there techniques.