I’ve recently tried water etching ceramics. It was fun to see the raised pattern to emerge. 🤩
For more complex designs I’d love to use some digital tools. The goal is to make a stencil from an one-side adhesive water-resistant material (vinyl for example).
Does anyone have any experience with home cutting machines? I’m contemplating on getting https://cricut.com. I’m looking for advice! 🙌🏼
I’ll tell you what happens: your work is on the floor with loops unraveling in front of your eyes, while you’re desperately trying to safe it. With every touch it unravels more. 🫣
Lifeline stops the unravelling! Lifelines to the rescue! 🛟
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?
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 🫣)
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.💪🏼
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:
My posting about knitting machines hasn’t been updated since a long time. Worse it didn’t even start in chronological order. 😅
While awaiting parts to fix my Electroknit KH-930 machine I got a little impatient 🤫 and snatched a very good deal for KH-230.
I have a list of upgrades and modifications I want to make in my steel pony 🚲 to make it even more enjoyable for the upcoming season.
Will have to get a degree at YouTube and Reddit universities pretty soon. 🤭🤓
🙋🏻♀️ Any channels around bike-building or bike-touring (gear, long-distance bike paths and trips, etc.) worth checking out? 🙌🏼
First bike ride in the forest of the year! It felt amazing. Sun on the face, wind in the hairs, pine trees spreading their captivating evening scent… 🥹
Unpopular opinion: it feels so precious *because* of the harsh winter we had (at least partially).
Note to myself: I’m still the same. 😆
I can’t get my 🦆 🦆 🦆 in a row and get out of the house first. Then when I’m cycling, I can’t think of getting back home, I just want to go on and on, until it’s cold and dark. 🤭
