Not Dead, Just Busy
Oct. 31st, 2005 07:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kniteracySchedules, Swiggles, and Machine Knitting!
Working three days a week has changed the way time gets managed around here. There's less time to do the things I have to do and consequently less time to do the things I like to do, like writing in my journal.
Recently, journaling has been eclipsed by work, folk clubs, practice, and taking care of things around the house. I'm still baking all our bread or as much of it as I can, and we've had a couple of really nice meals at home lately (J found sirloin steaks on sale at Sainsbury's, so I have had a little red meat, hooray!).
Our normal (if you can call anything around here normal) weekly schedule goes like this:
Monday: I'm home. Bread baking, practice, housework, a little writing if I can fit it in. J has scheduled many Mondays off, so he often works on a DIY project.
Tuesday: I'm at work from 9:30-6ish, with major flexibility at the beginning of the day because of transport things. We eat cheap takeaway at the office and G has a frozen pizza at home for dinner, because Tuesday night is Sharps and that starts at 8 at the House and runs 'til 11. We get home late and are too exhausted to do anything except hug G and fall into bed.
Wednesday: I'm at work from 9:30-6ish. We rush home and have a quick dinner together; then J and I run off to Eltham for Folkmob, which runs from 8:30ish to 11ish (sometimes later), then come home eithe by train or bus, depending on hos late it is. We are too exhausted to do anything except hug G and fall into bed.
Thursday: I'm at work from 9:30-6ish. There's no folk club on Thursday nights, so we come home at the regular time and that's the night everybody expects me to cook something fabulous for dinner, so I spend a lot of time in the kitchen.
Friday: I don't work on Fridays, so if the weather's good, Friday has become laundry day by default, though we get lots done on the weekend, too. Friday night, we really like to have takeaway and play a game or something at home, but that isn't always possible, so sometimes we have leftovers.
Saturday: It's a toss-up what we'll be doing on Saturdays.
Sunday: See Saturday.
This week differs from most weeks in that I had to work on Friday and will have to work today as well (I'm switching days off because the Talis Fairy's C is with us for a few days and while leaving one thirteen-year-old boy at home alone is OK, leaving two of them together could be a recipe for disaster. So J has today off and I have tomorrow this week, which means we won't go to Sharps and we'll probably get C to the train station on Wednesday, though Tuesday afternoon/evening is a possibility depending on what else we're doing.
Whew.
Now, special stuff that has happened:
First off, I have a gig in Eltham in December. I know you probably already knew that.
Secondly, we had a Swiggle on Saturday, which was mostly lovely.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hrrunka already pointed out the one bit of trouble I and most people who kinda wanted to play some music had with it, and even that wasn't all that big a deal, really. I think it was mostly due to people who wanted to talk staying in once it got dark outside because it was chilly outside, but I also reiterate that I think there'd be less intrusive chatting if these things were held more often, say, once a month. That way people wouldn't be as busy catching up with one another, because they'd see one another more often.
Third, I am going to be doing a harp weekend for some Far Isles people in November, so I'm preparing some workshops for that, even though I know it will be mostly the usual 'beginning the harp for people who have had their harps for awhile now' workshop. Hopefully there will be enough slightly-more-advanced students that we can get into some meatier topics over the course of the weekend, so I'm preparing a couple of those too, and looking forward to a weekend of harp immersion.
Fourth, I have a new-to-me toy that pretty much took up my whole Sunday, which will be why I haven't exactly been the prolific journaler this weekend.rinioth messaged me on IRC a week ago or so and said, "Hey, you still interested in a knitting machine?" and I was like, "Shyeeah!" His wife apparently bought one something like 15 years ago, used, and then never used it much herself, if at all. I'm going to natter about this for awhile, so feel free to skim.
This is a Knitmaster 260K knitting machine, which is a very basic machine that doesn't have a ribbing attachment or anything like that, although I believe you can approximate mock rib with it. I'm not sure if you can get a ribbing attachment for this machine. Yesterday, J,pola_bear and I (mostly pola_bear and I) worked really hard to make this thing work, went through all the introductory material in the three manuals that came with it, searched through the boxes of magazines and patterns and really old acrylic wool that probably were part of the legacy of the machine when rinioth's wife bought it, threaded it up, fixed the needles to knit a starting swatch, and could not, for the love of little chocolate truffles, make it work properly. It would cast on beautifully, then not transition to the knitting row settings well at all. It would drop tons of stitches and leave loops at the back and then the carriage would get more and more tangled as we went along. I was really beginning to think, by the time pola_bear went home to her mum and I came upstairs for a frustration cuddle with J, that there was a really good reason rinioth's wife hadn't gotten much out of the machine: It was absolute junk. After a long cuddle, I decided to go back and try it again, and I asked J, another pair of eyes, to come and just make sure I was properly troubleshooting.
Well, we found a couple of things. First, there was a whole bunch of thin, white yarn (not a colour I'd used) wound around one of the rollers that takes care of pushing the needles out ofthe bed and through the yarn. OK, that was problem one. It took several minutes to get all the yarn out of there without damaging the mechanism. Then, we cast on another swatch and had the exact same problem, all over again. J suggested that I try to pick up every single dropped stitch and see if that would help, rather than just hoping it'd work itself out as I continued knitting.
So, that's what I did. Painstakingly, with the little needle tool that comes with the machine, I picked up each and every dropped stitch, using both the machine needles and this little tool. Not only was this time-consuming and frustrating, but I also learned some valuable lessons about the way that knitting machines knit. I can now explain to you exactly what is happening when the needles on a knitting machine make a stitch. Aside from a couple of things getting caught on the posts, which I understand is going to happen at the beginning of a machine knitted swatch, I picked up stitches on four or five rows. With each row, the machine dropped fewer stitches. When I finally had a clean row, I weighted the swatch down and tried to work a little faster -- and what do you know, inside of five minutes, I had knitted over 100 rows of perfect, snag-free, dropped-stitch-free swatch! J wonders if the machine wasn't just gummed up from the snag and years of non-use and needed to re-lubricate itself (we still don't have any machine oil for the machine: that's on my list of things to get today).
Now, I have to tell you, most people would probably have given up, after having followed the directions exactly to the letter and still coming up with snaggy, knotted, non-knitting when they were done. I feel pretty good about myself for persevering, but particularly if that jam was in the carriage whenrinioth's wife bought this machine, I can understand why she never really got into using it: it makes it nearly impossible to move the carriage back and forth, whih is part of why stitches were dropping. It only seems to really catch after the cast-on row, which is why casting on seemed to be simple. I think this is because the needles have to move more during regular knitting. Once that jam was cleared and the machine had knitted a few rows, it really went to town.
Now, I didn't finish that experimental swatch until almost 8pm, and then it was time to make a really late dinner for everyone, after which we played a game of Hell Rail (and I nearly fell asleep on the table), so I have not cast on another piece of knitting. I do not know whether or not it will need to be babied through those first few rows of anything I knit. If I find out that it does need that kind of close attention, I'm not 100% sure I'm going to like this machine-knitting thing. Or I suppose the more accurate thing to say would be I'm not sure I'm going to like this knitting machine. If it continues to drop stitches like that at the beginning, it's going to be more trouble than it's worth.
Speaking of that, whqat is it worth, anyway? That was one of the questions I promised I'd answer forrinioth, so I checked around on Ebay and on various machine knitting sites, and the nearest model I found to this one (a Knitmaster 260) was apparently a fancier model, with a ribbing attachment already included, on a nine-day-out auction, with a starting bid of £50. I haven't seen anything selling at over that. I'll start looking for comparable machines and see which ones are like the Knitmaster. My feeling is it's not worth terribly more than that £50, if even that, particularly if it is going to be so touchy at the beginning of each project. However, I am learning a lot about machine knitting in this experiment.
I suppose it would be silly to wonder if anyone on my friends list has a knitting machine or uses one regularly? The LJ machine knitting community seems to have been deleted, so I can't look there, and I'm not really keen on joining a mailing list (I'm already on more than I have time to read), although I will if it looks like that's the only source of good information. The UK Machine Knitters' Guild web page doesn't have a whole lot of information on it that I can find, but I'll continue looking around, and any pointers, or pointers to people who might have pointers, that I could get would be really helpful.
So now I'm possibly going to go and try that second knitting machine experiment, to see if I can cast on a swatch and move smoothly from cast-on to knitting without a ton of stitch droppage, now that the machine has "warmed up," so to speak.
Edit: With less fiddling than last time but more than I really want to do, the machine handled a wider swatch (70 stitches) handily and I did about 100 rows in five minutes or less once all the glitchies were worked out. I'm getting to where I can "feel" when the carriage has snagged; the yarn feeds through differently when there's a problem. Next experiment: wool thicker than fingering weight!
We're expecting the Hoover repairman pretty soon, sometime between 8 and 10, I think, so hopefully by this afternoon I'll have a working dryer-- or a semi-working dryer: I have found that this dryer is good only for certain things or very, very small loads, which makes it neither time or energy efficient, but that's another story, and it will still make things easier in winter if we have a working dryer.
After that, it's off to work! And it's Hallowe'en today, so I'll bring my green velvet witchy hat to wear-- it might cover up the fact that my roots are starting to show... ;-)
Working three days a week has changed the way time gets managed around here. There's less time to do the things I have to do and consequently less time to do the things I like to do, like writing in my journal.
Recently, journaling has been eclipsed by work, folk clubs, practice, and taking care of things around the house. I'm still baking all our bread or as much of it as I can, and we've had a couple of really nice meals at home lately (J found sirloin steaks on sale at Sainsbury's, so I have had a little red meat, hooray!).
Our normal (if you can call anything around here normal) weekly schedule goes like this:
Monday: I'm home. Bread baking, practice, housework, a little writing if I can fit it in. J has scheduled many Mondays off, so he often works on a DIY project.
Tuesday: I'm at work from 9:30-6ish, with major flexibility at the beginning of the day because of transport things. We eat cheap takeaway at the office and G has a frozen pizza at home for dinner, because Tuesday night is Sharps and that starts at 8 at the House and runs 'til 11. We get home late and are too exhausted to do anything except hug G and fall into bed.
Wednesday: I'm at work from 9:30-6ish. We rush home and have a quick dinner together; then J and I run off to Eltham for Folkmob, which runs from 8:30ish to 11ish (sometimes later), then come home eithe by train or bus, depending on hos late it is. We are too exhausted to do anything except hug G and fall into bed.
Thursday: I'm at work from 9:30-6ish. There's no folk club on Thursday nights, so we come home at the regular time and that's the night everybody expects me to cook something fabulous for dinner, so I spend a lot of time in the kitchen.
Friday: I don't work on Fridays, so if the weather's good, Friday has become laundry day by default, though we get lots done on the weekend, too. Friday night, we really like to have takeaway and play a game or something at home, but that isn't always possible, so sometimes we have leftovers.
Saturday: It's a toss-up what we'll be doing on Saturdays.
Sunday: See Saturday.
This week differs from most weeks in that I had to work on Friday and will have to work today as well (I'm switching days off because the Talis Fairy's C is with us for a few days and while leaving one thirteen-year-old boy at home alone is OK, leaving two of them together could be a recipe for disaster. So J has today off and I have tomorrow this week, which means we won't go to Sharps and we'll probably get C to the train station on Wednesday, though Tuesday afternoon/evening is a possibility depending on what else we're doing.
Whew.
Now, special stuff that has happened:
First off, I have a gig in Eltham in December. I know you probably already knew that.
Secondly, we had a Swiggle on Saturday, which was mostly lovely.
hrrunka already pointed out the one bit of trouble I and most people who kinda wanted to play some music had with it, and even that wasn't all that big a deal, really. I think it was mostly due to people who wanted to talk staying in once it got dark outside because it was chilly outside, but I also reiterate that I think there'd be less intrusive chatting if these things were held more often, say, once a month. That way people wouldn't be as busy catching up with one another, because they'd see one another more often. Third, I am going to be doing a harp weekend for some Far Isles people in November, so I'm preparing some workshops for that, even though I know it will be mostly the usual 'beginning the harp for people who have had their harps for awhile now' workshop. Hopefully there will be enough slightly-more-advanced students that we can get into some meatier topics over the course of the weekend, so I'm preparing a couple of those too, and looking forward to a weekend of harp immersion.
Fourth, I have a new-to-me toy that pretty much took up my whole Sunday, which will be why I haven't exactly been the prolific journaler this weekend.
rinioth messaged me on IRC a week ago or so and said, "Hey, you still interested in a knitting machine?" and I was like, "Shyeeah!" His wife apparently bought one something like 15 years ago, used, and then never used it much herself, if at all. I'm going to natter about this for awhile, so feel free to skim.This is a Knitmaster 260K knitting machine, which is a very basic machine that doesn't have a ribbing attachment or anything like that, although I believe you can approximate mock rib with it. I'm not sure if you can get a ribbing attachment for this machine. Yesterday, J,
pola_bear and I (mostly pola_bear and I) worked really hard to make this thing work, went through all the introductory material in the three manuals that came with it, searched through the boxes of magazines and patterns and really old acrylic wool that probably were part of the legacy of the machine when rinioth's wife bought it, threaded it up, fixed the needles to knit a starting swatch, and could not, for the love of little chocolate truffles, make it work properly. It would cast on beautifully, then not transition to the knitting row settings well at all. It would drop tons of stitches and leave loops at the back and then the carriage would get more and more tangled as we went along. I was really beginning to think, by the time pola_bear went home to her mum and I came upstairs for a frustration cuddle with J, that there was a really good reason rinioth's wife hadn't gotten much out of the machine: It was absolute junk. After a long cuddle, I decided to go back and try it again, and I asked J, another pair of eyes, to come and just make sure I was properly troubleshooting. Well, we found a couple of things. First, there was a whole bunch of thin, white yarn (not a colour I'd used) wound around one of the rollers that takes care of pushing the needles out ofthe bed and through the yarn. OK, that was problem one. It took several minutes to get all the yarn out of there without damaging the mechanism. Then, we cast on another swatch and had the exact same problem, all over again. J suggested that I try to pick up every single dropped stitch and see if that would help, rather than just hoping it'd work itself out as I continued knitting.
So, that's what I did. Painstakingly, with the little needle tool that comes with the machine, I picked up each and every dropped stitch, using both the machine needles and this little tool. Not only was this time-consuming and frustrating, but I also learned some valuable lessons about the way that knitting machines knit. I can now explain to you exactly what is happening when the needles on a knitting machine make a stitch. Aside from a couple of things getting caught on the posts, which I understand is going to happen at the beginning of a machine knitted swatch, I picked up stitches on four or five rows. With each row, the machine dropped fewer stitches. When I finally had a clean row, I weighted the swatch down and tried to work a little faster -- and what do you know, inside of five minutes, I had knitted over 100 rows of perfect, snag-free, dropped-stitch-free swatch! J wonders if the machine wasn't just gummed up from the snag and years of non-use and needed to re-lubricate itself (we still don't have any machine oil for the machine: that's on my list of things to get today).
Now, I have to tell you, most people would probably have given up, after having followed the directions exactly to the letter and still coming up with snaggy, knotted, non-knitting when they were done. I feel pretty good about myself for persevering, but particularly if that jam was in the carriage when
rinioth's wife bought this machine, I can understand why she never really got into using it: it makes it nearly impossible to move the carriage back and forth, whih is part of why stitches were dropping. It only seems to really catch after the cast-on row, which is why casting on seemed to be simple. I think this is because the needles have to move more during regular knitting. Once that jam was cleared and the machine had knitted a few rows, it really went to town.Now, I didn't finish that experimental swatch until almost 8pm, and then it was time to make a really late dinner for everyone, after which we played a game of Hell Rail (and I nearly fell asleep on the table), so I have not cast on another piece of knitting. I do not know whether or not it will need to be babied through those first few rows of anything I knit. If I find out that it does need that kind of close attention, I'm not 100% sure I'm going to like this machine-knitting thing. Or I suppose the more accurate thing to say would be I'm not sure I'm going to like this knitting machine. If it continues to drop stitches like that at the beginning, it's going to be more trouble than it's worth.
Speaking of that, whqat is it worth, anyway? That was one of the questions I promised I'd answer for
rinioth, so I checked around on Ebay and on various machine knitting sites, and the nearest model I found to this one (a Knitmaster 260) was apparently a fancier model, with a ribbing attachment already included, on a nine-day-out auction, with a starting bid of £50. I haven't seen anything selling at over that. I'll start looking for comparable machines and see which ones are like the Knitmaster. My feeling is it's not worth terribly more than that £50, if even that, particularly if it is going to be so touchy at the beginning of each project. However, I am learning a lot about machine knitting in this experiment.I suppose it would be silly to wonder if anyone on my friends list has a knitting machine or uses one regularly? The LJ machine knitting community seems to have been deleted, so I can't look there, and I'm not really keen on joining a mailing list (I'm already on more than I have time to read), although I will if it looks like that's the only source of good information. The UK Machine Knitters' Guild web page doesn't have a whole lot of information on it that I can find, but I'll continue looking around, and any pointers, or pointers to people who might have pointers, that I could get would be really helpful.
So now I'm possibly going to go and try that second knitting machine experiment, to see if I can cast on a swatch and move smoothly from cast-on to knitting without a ton of stitch droppage, now that the machine has "warmed up," so to speak.
Edit: With less fiddling than last time but more than I really want to do, the machine handled a wider swatch (70 stitches) handily and I did about 100 rows in five minutes or less once all the glitchies were worked out. I'm getting to where I can "feel" when the carriage has snagged; the yarn feeds through differently when there's a problem. Next experiment: wool thicker than fingering weight!
We're expecting the Hoover repairman pretty soon, sometime between 8 and 10, I think, so hopefully by this afternoon I'll have a working dryer-- or a semi-working dryer: I have found that this dryer is good only for certain things or very, very small loads, which makes it neither time or energy efficient, but that's another story, and it will still make things easier in winter if we have a working dryer.
After that, it's off to work! And it's Hallowe'en today, so I'll bring my green velvet witchy hat to wear-- it might cover up the fact that my roots are starting to show... ;-)
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Date: 2005-10-31 11:24 pm (UTC)As for people hushing when I play, I'm less bothered than you might think from the discussion here. Honestly, my frustration comes from not always being able to hear other people play, not from people not being able to hear me. I'm used to playing in crowded places: if I want people to hear me, people are going to hear me. But it was losing the first several lines of "Jesus' Brother Bob," the first song I'd ever heard Corwin sing in public really, and hearing Mike play an introduction several times, looking as if he really wondered whether anybody was listening at all, and J commenting to me later that he missed the whole first verse of "Cream Cake Girl" because he didn't realise it was happening-- and the TF even introduced the song pretty obviously before she began playing.
A visual flag might be an intersting idea.....does this mean we need to come up with some sort of emblem? No, nevermind. Let's not go there. Really. ;)