Category: The Club

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.

This month’s meeting was devoted to creating a garment using holding position and short rowing.

Margaret brought along some copies of the machine knitted version of Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Surprise Jacket (originally a hand knit pattern) and we sat in groups around various machines and each group took it in turns to knit one of these baby and doll-sized jumpers.

Two members brought in garments made from Bill King designs that had been published in Machine Knitting Monthly over recent years. These were a blue shrug by Tricia and a grey loose cardigan by Margaret, both made using short rowing/holding techniques, plus several people also brought in versions of the surprise jumper that they had made at home to show how it would look after it came off the machine.

Machine knitted  Surprise jacket pattern can be found here.

The finished items are like knitted origami as they look extremely odd – needing pressing and folding to the final form and the only seams that need sewing up are one on each shoulder.  These little jackets can be finished with ribs or hems and a button band.  Several variations are given on the pattern.

At the end of the evening each group had completed a jacket except for sewing up and we had all enjoyed ourselves and learnt about this technique.