What's up.

When my son and his lady friend moved here from Florida, I gave up my knitting room for them. That meant packing away most all of my knitting machines and yarn stash. I decided I might as well take advantage of the circumstances to force myself to learn my White 1602 electronic doublebed machine, so I packed away all my standard gauge machines but that one. It's very nice and more fancy than what I'm used to. I guess the best way to describe it would be that it's a step up in technology than the punchcard machines since it uses an electric circuit and light scanning box to select the needles for pattern stitches instead of the older punchcard technology. The programing also allows for some fabrics that I wouldn't be able to easily create on my Japanese flat bed machines, like doublebed jacquard. My beloved Toyota machine has Simulknit which means floatless fair isle, but that's not quite the same as the doublebed jacquard. The other benefits to this machine are not having to punch out cards, it has 60 stitch reusable mylar cards for more intricate motifs and it also has the ability to knit a single gigantic motif, like a black and white picture of Elvis' face for example, across the whole 200 needlebed.

Anyway, I've been a little intimidated by this machine, I've had it for 8 years? Oh gosh, didn't realize it had been that long, I lucked into it on an eBay auction back before I knew what I was doing and had only been a Bond knitter!! Shame on me, the only things I've really knit on it have been socks and swatches. That's why I decided it was time to stop letting this beautiful piece of equipment get the better of me. I'm still fighting the urge to unpack my Toyota punchcard machine, it's so much easier to go back to what I know than it is to meet the challenge of learning something new, but I am determined and it's paying off.

I knit these socks with it (they don't really count though since I already knew how to do this, they were warm ups and confidence builders I suppose). The little doll dress I knit last spring was started from a swatch that was knit on this machine too.

Some Fingerless Mitts with it (this was an exercise in U knitting to create a thumb hole, highly successful)

This swatch I knit today to see the range of yarns that it would take. My Toyota knits this Lion Brand Soft Baby Sport yarn with no problem, it's what I used to knit up the Wedding afghan for Sarah and Tim's wedding gift, but I didn't know if the White 1602 would be able to handle it. It does! So then I had to try

Lion Brand Wool Ease Worsted just to see, and much to my surprise, it knits too!!! It even was able to do a tuck rib stitch! It needs edge weights that I didn't bother with for the swatch and I think if I were to knit a garment with this yarn on this machine I would try every other needle. I like a little more drape to my knits. But ain't it cool? I just might be able to sell my mid gauge machines after all!

I also knit a face cloth with it, but it was way too large so I frogged it and will try again. I've been having a hard time getting it to knit cotton, with these successes to today, I think I'll get brave and try the cotton again. I think I might just have had it on the wrong tension settings.

So that's what's going on in my boring little life today :) What fun!