This machine is fully manual (no electronics, no punchcards, just needles manipulation by hand). It’s also chunky gauge machine, what means it has bigger needles with bigger gaps in between them, and therefore can knit with chunkier yarn.

What made it perfect to start with machine knitting, in my opinion. I have a bunch of yarn for hand knitting that tend to be on the chunkier side. Manual manipulations helped me understand the functions and behaviour of the machine.

First tests:

After successfully testing the basic knitting, I tried intarsia.

Intarsia allows to „paint with yarn”. It’s best suited for bigger patches of colour. It allows you to have as many colors in one row as you like – it’s „just” a mater of managing the dangling bobbins with yarn in a graceful way. 😅

Intarsia didn’t work. The carriage wasn’t selecting the needles. It’s ~40 years old machine, so it wasn’t super big surprise.

This is when I learned how to take the carriage apart, clean and oil it.💪🏼

Finally I knitted a long, merino scarf by just playing around and testing all kinds of stitch patterns I could think of: tuck stitches, intarsia, plain stockinette.

The last thing that is left is weaving in the loose ends. (I’m really bad at this! 🫣 It’s boring and somehow not rewarding… even though it’s the only way to actually make the garment fully wearable 🫣)

The thin pink lines are „lifelines” – they’re like snapshots, like ‚git commit’. 🫶🏼 Extremely useful thing in all kinds of knitting, including machine one, as it turned out. 😒😛

You may ask, what happens when the yarn sneaks out from yarn feeder unnoticed, and you still run the carriage across the bed?