Here’s an old project, still underway:

That picture was taken over a year ago (September 2007).  There
has since been progress — but only a couple of inches or
so.   And this is the first piece of the sweater — there’s a
front and 2 sleeves to go after this piece is done.

It’s from my own design, and there are 2 reasons it’s particularly slow
going.

1. the patterning is inobvious — it’s painstaking to memorize a
   chunk of the pattern so that I can knit a row without having to look at
   the chart for every single stitch
2. there isn’t anything like enough contrast in value between the
   different yarns to give this the punch it should have

So, I’m picking at it from time to time, between projects, pressing on
to finish but not with enough energy to actually make significant
progress.

The first issue is a matter of lack of experience in pattern designing
— I have gained a new appreciation for the value of building
interesting things from simple building blocks (e.g., easily repeating
motifs that build up in clear progression from one row to the next).

The second could easily have been handled by, say, doing a SWATCH, with
the real yarn, instead of relying on the colours I had chosen to
represent the yarns in the knitting design software:

Sigh.  Lesson learned.

Here are a couple of closeups to admire the yarn, which is Green
Mountain Spinnery Mountain
Mohair.  I do think it is a wonderful yarn, and this is not
the first time I’ve used it.

Failed contrast	Glowing mohair

 
     

Of course, I could, and perhaps should, pull it all out and do
something more successful with the yarn.  I dunno.  The
overall project is over 2 years old.  Do I want to restart the
whole design process?  Or plug away until I have a finished object
to declare victory?  I guess I’m stubborn, and want to finish the
original design:  I think it will be perfectly wearable, just not
spectacular.  But at this rate, I could pull it out, redesign and
reknit it before I ever finish this original plan…

I feel I’m not making a lot of knitting progress this year.  
Maybe that’s really a “latter half of the year” problem.  Looking
at my completed
project gallery,  it’s not like it’s empty for 2008.

Sometimes, I guess you have to look back at a progression of things
(trees) to get the picture (forest).  I know I can look back on
certain years and see almost no knitting output — and further
reflection reveals that they were very busy and distracting years
(usually not in a good way).

What is notable about the gallery for this year is the prevalence of
small projects:  travel
projects.  That would be because of the wild travel schedule this
year.  This is borne out by the almost complete absence of
progress on knitting machine projects — you have to be on the same
continent as the machines in order to use them!

So — how do you look back and measure progress/distraction?

I believe I finally cracked the mystery of getting my Brother KH930 to
knit lace properly.  I’d struggled with this before, to no avail.

Brother knitting machines have a separate lace carriage that is used to
transfer stitches.  That is, you use the regular carriage to knit
some fabric, switch to the lace carriage to transfer stitches from one
needle to another.  This is what creates the equivalent of “knit
together” and (on the next knit row) yarn over.  It can take
several passes, depending on which way the stitches are meant to lean.
  The electronic program you’ve selected controls which stitches
get slipped where.   And, once they are all set up, you go back to
the regular carriage and knit a row, two or more.

Simple, yes?  And — fraught with peril.  Lifting stitches
off a needle is rarely a challenge for the lace carriage. 
Depositing them on the appropriate other needle is sometimes less
successful.  My experience was that I’d get along mostly okay and
then the machine would drop one stitch in 10.  Well, that’s A
LOT!    More than you can reasonably keep an eye on to
fix if you notice a stitch that looks like it’s about to take a suicide
dive on the next pass.  And it just made a nasty tangle instead of
lace.

I looked at any number of things — more weight on the bar pulling the
fabric; less tension; more tension; bent needles… no use.

The following swatch was worked bottom to top.  You can see things
started out poorly (though this is hardly the worst example).  And
then I Figured It Out, and things worked almost perfectly.

I suppose I should work a few more efforts before declaring absolute
victory, but here’s the key thing that seemed to make a (logical)
difference:  I ran the fabric being knit down over the ribber
needles (i.e., I covered the ribber needles with a piece of cardboard,
and kept the knitting in the front of the machine instead of having it
drop down between the ribber and the main bed.  Put another
way:  remove the angle of the backwards tilt of the main bed
introduced when you attached the ribber.

Or, perhaps most succinct:  use the ribber OR the lace carriage,
but never the 2 at the same time.

That is, for anyone not up on their “l33tspeak” for knitting:  a
Knitting Machine — Finished Object!

It’s posted
in my drafty gallery.

Yes, I have had that knitting machine for just about a year.  Yes,
this is the first completed project from that knitting machine — since
swatches don’t count as completed projects :^) .   The two
major challenges have been: 

• finding chunks of time to sit in front of the machine (since
  machine knitting is not something you can just do for 5 minutes, set
  down, and pick up again a week later, the way you can with hand
  knitting); and
• finding yarns that are really fine enough to work with the
  standard gauge machine (in this instance, a Brother KH930).

For this sweater, I eventually wound up using 2 different yarns at once
— each one is really thread-like.  You can see them in this
detailed photo:

You can also see the effect I got from knitting the two together — a
bit more stripey than variegated, but still interesting.  You can
also see that, even though I was working with 2 strands together, the
stitches are still NOT BIG AT ALL.  This machine makes a very fine
fabric.

The edging, of which you can see some detail above, is a crochet trim I
added after assembling the sweater.

Assembly	Inspection

Yes, well, about the cat… See, I know that some cats are attracted to
knitting.  Guiness largely ignores mine, for which I’m thankful
(though she has certainly been known to hunt-and-capture dangling ends
when near-completed items are tried on…).  But, the blocking
sweater was *wet*!  And, she wasn’t anywhere near that room! 
And I wanted more air circulation to speed the drying!  So I left
the door open and wandered off to do something else. I think some
little kitty alarm must have gone off in the house, somewhere, because
as soon as I came back:  wham, plonk in the middle of this drying
sweater, one very pleased-with-herself cat!

A bit more about the sweater/project history… A long time ago, with
a plastic bed (toy) knitting machine and a very different yarn (Dale
“Svale”), I made up the pieces for this jacket.  And
then discovered that plastic (toy) knitting machines are very finicky
about producing anything like even gauge throughout the course of a
project.  Different sweater pieces were wildly different
proportions than the ones they were meant to line up with.

It was, in fact, that experience, that finally drove me to commit to buying
a metal-bed knitting machine.

So, there is the sense of completing the circle with this project
—  I had to change the yarn and the machine, but I did manage to
complete it, by gar! 

I decided I had so much fun with that — I made another one, this
weekend!

This baby blanket is a finished object from (much 🙂 ) earlier this
year…

The story is that I started out by thinking of making something
interesting with the knitting machine (and, at the time, I only had the
standard gauge machine — which meant I had to use very fine
yarn).  So, I settled on a mess of Dale Baby Ull yarn in these,
umm, vibrant colours.

Time passed, and the baby for which it was intended became more
imminent.  At some point, it became clear to me that I and my
knitting machine were not going to be in the same place for long enough
for me to do anything (interesting or otherwise) with it for this
project.  So, the question was — what to do with it by hand?

Two key facts drove my pre-design thinking:

• Baby Ull has a posted gauge of 32 st to 4 inches (hint — that’s
  great for a sock-sized project, but somewhat daunting for a 32″ blanket)
• The colours are vibrant!

I might have thought of doing something lacy with it, but for the fact
that my imagination was not coming up with anything that didn’t
emphasize the colours to the point of baby-frightening garishness.

So, I let the yarn lounge in my office for a while, hoping that it
would tell me a thing or two about what it wanted to become. 
Presently, the notion of “dragon hide” wafted out of the bag of
yarn.  Dragons are naturallly colourful creatures and the scale
texture could add a lot of interest. 

Which just left me with the small question of how to implement said
scale effect…  My first inclination was to try various shell
effects in crochet, but all I could produce was something akin to angry
granny squares:

Back to knitting… doing intarsia lozenges would have worked, but
would have been fiddly and, I thought, too “flat”.  Not so much
hide of dragon as sock of argyle.    I knew “entrelac”
would produce a basket weave effect. 

Of course, this meant I had to look up how to do entrelac (never having
done it).  And very shortly thereafter, I was educating myself on
how to knit/purl backwards, so as to avoid having to flip the work for
each row of 6 stitches or less.  Cool!  Two new techniques in
one project!

Here is the test piece, in progress:

Essentially — you knit each set of one colour rectangles across a row,
and then fill in the slots with the next colour, coming back the other
way in the next colour.  Each rectangle is knitted as its own
unit, and is attached to the adjoining rectangles (working live
stitches or picking up edges) as you go.  Pretty funky!

This project travelled — it had at least one trip to Europe, and
probably more than one cross-continent trip.  And I wasn’t
entirely sure I was liking the progress as I went:  still too
garish?  I’m not afraid to knit in public.  But I wasn’t sure
I was ready to show anyone this particular project…!

To clinch the dragon motif, I wanted to do the edging in triangles,
like the ridge down a dragon’s back:

No, that is not a logo.

Finally, done, I tried it on my local dragon to see if I thought it had
achieved the desired dragon hide effect:

I’ve posted
this in my drafty gallery.