Hit me baby one more time..

Tuesday 26 March 2013

Knitting (but not how you are probably imagining it)

When I tell people we have a class about knitting they immediately imagine our teacher Flora as some grey haired old biddy, with all of us sitting around in a circle with our knitting needles and our tea having a nice natter while the click clack of needles softly sends us into a meditative stupor. Sadly, Thomas procrastinating near my knit machine is about as close as it gets to this. Its actually a really fun class, we have big knitting machines which manipulate the needles- setting up takes time but once that's done you can knit fairly quickly and easily. Its a fantastic room to work in because its dominated by textile rather than fashion students so it's much calmer and more artistic- we always play radio 2 in the background.

This is what the carriage on the knit machine looks like. Its set up to knit a continuous welt, which is essentially a circle with the V shapes on the outside and the waves on the inside. If you kept knitting for a long time you could make a tube and then climb inside it and live in it like a caterpillar.



This is my favorite knit as it comes out of the machine. Its held under tension by big ass weights in a comb. This is called a selective ripple stitch on alternate needles - basically I've missed out every other needle when setting up, then knitted some stitches more often than others to get the shell look.




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