The great knitting machine experiment!

In my last post I shared some car boot sale purchases with you, and among them were a number of cones of wool. Normally I would avoid any wool thinner than 4-ply because it just takes so long to knit up (and even 4-ply is pushing it if it has a lot of pattern in it), but while I was looking at them, I suddenly remembered that I had a vintage knitting machine sat in my wardrobe at home.

I had bought it about 6 years ago for £3 from my favourite charity shop (they used to put absolutely EVERYTHING out, but unfortunately they flooded and never reopened), and after one disastrous attempt at knitting a scarf/tie for James, I never got it out it's box again. The downside of a knitting machine is that it's not terribly portable, and it takes up a lot of space as it's so wide. You have to clamp it to a table top and will struggle to put it away during the making of your project. However, the upside of a knitting machine is that you knit by the row, rather than the stitch. In laymen's terms, it's FAST! So fast in fact that I managed to complete knitting a summer top from 3-ply wool in approximately 4 hours, including the time taken teaching myself to use the machine again.

It really is so simple to do, and you don't need any previous knowledge of hand knitting to be able to do it. The results look like hand knitting, feel like hand knitting, but take you just a fraction of the time to complete. I estimate that I could knit myself a lovely mohair jumper for winter in about 10 hours knitting time. Something which would take me weeks to do by hand.

I'm still only in the beginners stages of using a knitting machine, but the instruction book promises lots of potential for using different colours of yarns combined with some basic stitch techniques for great results.

I bought a retro machine knit pattern book separately from my machine, and reading through it, it seems that knitting machines progressed very quickly in terms of the complexity of designs you can create. You use pattern cards, which I assume you pop into the machine like a cartridge, or perhaps slot onto the needles, to create beautifully intricate fairisles, cables and more. My machine seems to be one of the early very basic models, but I think it will suit me just fine while I'm getting to grips with this great new hobby.

Whilst I love the speed with which I can create a simple garment, I still think there is something beautiful in a hand knitted jumper. Each stitch passed over the needles, perhaps while daydreaming about who you're going to give the jumper to. The finished item sort of oozes love, care and skill. I wonder if I'll be able to get the same effect with my machine? Hand knitting is extremely portable, and you can create very intricate patterns, I love learning new stitches and seeing how a combination of knit and purl can create such varied effects. When you first start following a pattern it's a bit like doing a dot-to-dot picture, where the whole image only starts to reveal itself after you've joined most of the dots together.

I will post about my finished summer top once I've finished sewing it up. It's taking forever!

Have you tried machine knitting before? Are you a complete knitting novice? Would you be tempted to give it a go if you saw a machine for sale? Would you like to see a more in depth post about the process os machine knitting?