This was an interesting meeting as we had a request from a fashion student for knitters to help her create knitwear for her show. Several experienced knitters offered help.
This was followed by the usual notices.
Our speaker this month was Fiona Whitehead from Kingston University, faculty of Art Design and Architecture where she works with students of fashion, particularly knitwear.
Her department has a new industrial knitting machine from Shima Electronics in Japan and Fiona spent two months in Japan learning to use this machine. She described her trip and showed us slides of the factory and workshops as well as samples of the knitted fabric that the machine can create. Unlike our domestic machines which can us a maximum of 2 colours in a row, the Shima machine can use up to 28 colours and is very complex to operate.
Fiona also described how her students start using domestic knitting machines before moving on if they choose to design for the industrial machines.
She showed us videos of the knitwear created by the students for the final shows and Graduate Fashion week, then told us about the destinations of some of the students who now work for companies with household names designing knitwear. Finally, some actual samples were shown and available for club members to examine.
Club members enjoyed this interesting talk and there were many questions afterwards showing the high level of interest in this subject. We would like to thank Fiona for giving us a valuable insight into the other side of our craft.
