There are many knitting machines, but this one is mine. My knitting machine is not my best friend but I will master it… one day.
Now that that’s out of the way. I recently went down a rabbit hole of researching knitting machines and have come to a few conclusions. They are not created equally. The expense of a knitting machine sometimes is reflected in how much pain and suffering you will avoid learning to use the machine, and using a knitting machine is a completely different skill set than traditional knitting. From what I have found there are two main types of knitting machines for home use, a flat bed, and a circular knitting machine.
And within these two types of knitting machines, you have different modifiers to the machines themselves. For example, most but not all circular knitting machines can knit flat panels, and flat bed knitting machines can use punch cards to make designs or can be manually manipulated. Both types of knitting machines can also have row counters built in, but as you can see from the picture I simply taped one of the digital row finger counters to the shuttle of the flat bead knitting machine and it works just as well.
The biggest problem I found when looking at actually buying a knitting machine, besides the initial price shock, was that with a knitting machine for the most part you are stuck at a specific gauge. Basically, if you wanted to knit a pair of socks you would typically use sock weight yarn, with small needles in order to get the desired fabric. The gauge being the combination in weight of the yarn and how loose or tight the stiches are making up the fabric. However a knitting machine uses fixed latch hooks for the needles and these can not be interchanged for different sizes like normal knitting needles. This means when you purchase a sock weight knitting machine you are stuck using sock weight yarn, you could scale down to lace weight possibly, but the fabric would be very loose, however you couldn’t scale up to a chunkier yarn like worsted as the machine may get easily jammed and the fabric would be very tight and stiff.
Enter the Ultimate Sweater machine. (As seen on TV!)
Its incredible…ly frustrating, but we will get to that. This knitting machine comes with five different key lates that dictate how far the needles are pushed in the sequence, allowing for different gauges. Though the needles themselves are always the same size for the most part it will handle both lace weight yarn and worsted weight yarn, and most yarn in between. You can also use different gauges on the same weight of yarn depending on what type of fabric you are wanting to make. Below is an example picture of this.
The sample on the left was made using a light worsted weight yarn with key plate 2, and the right sample is the same yarn with key plate 3. As you can see since the yarn is a very light worsted, almost sport yarn the smaller keyplate or gauge creates a tighter knit fabric that is more suitable to its weight.
While the ultimate knitting machine is more versatile in use than most other knitting machines there is a steep learning curve with exactly how to move the shuttle, not dropping stiches, and working with the latch hooks/needles. Also the ultimate knitting machine is not ‘programed’ via punch cards, this means to set in a pattern you must manipulate the stiches on the latch hooks manually to create anything other than a standard knit stitch.
For small projects, or projects using simple knit stitches this machine is wonderful. I’ve even attempted some simple lace patterns which, while tedious work up much more quickly than knitting by hand. Unfortunately, I have very little patience for learning this machine, as the latch hooks seem to be made to drop all of the stitches just when I’m hitting my stride. However overall, I would say this was a good purchase, and I am looking forward to when I can easily use this machine to work up projects in record time.
I think this is a normal tool relationship for me honestly. When I first got my spinning wheel we were not on good terms for a very long time, and now I’m making whole sweater amounts of yarn with relative ease. Next time we will look and talk about the franken spinner and her story.
