Shoulder Seams on the Machine

I came across this youtube video for putting in a shoulder seam in two parts. Worth looking at but that's not how I do things.

Finished side straight off the machine: not yet washed, blocked, press or anything.

No. So this is what I did:

Knit my back and took it off with a long circ needle.

knit the front and put the shoulder onto decker combs, (a garter bar would be OK too)

Back goes onto the needles, wrong side faces the machine, public side faces me, BEHIND the latches.

Front goes on to the open latches

Flip the decker to vertical while holding the work so the stitch all roll onto the needle

Add a little weight on both pieces. Pull ALL the needles back so the back stitches are now on the front

just like this

I did bind off around the gate pegs

As with everything, how different people do the same thing always interests me. Depending on how firm the shoulder seam has to be, how stretchy the fabric, will determine as to how to finish off the live stitches, back stitch, make the last row MT+1 or 2 and latching off, lots of scope for what the design dictates. And it was easy with the decker comb and if the back was taken off with a garter bar and flipped, then it would be really quick.

The photo of it finished was very blurry, so I'll take another one and come back and put it in tomorrow. Which I've just done. Here they are straight off the machine, not yet washed, pressed or anything but I think it is a nice tidy and quick seam.

Finished underside

Fixing my Lace mistakes, dropped stitches and weight fixes

I'm doing a run of lace projects on my SK280 + LC2 and I've been experimenting with fixing dropped stitches. I had done.. maybe 16 rows and I noticed a dropped stitch 4 rows back and decided to see how difficult it would be to rip out 4 rows of 100 sts.

So.. If that happens - rip it back to the start and begin again. Time to undo and fix - V - time to go back to the beginning and reknit has to be considered, but checking every 2nd row worked really well, especially essential to check where there are 4 + transfers in a row.

By the time I was working on the last piece, with no more dropped stitches, I made sure I had evenly distributed weight along the entire width and moved them up every 20 rows. No dropped stitches at all in the pieces knitted.

However if it's at the end of a piece, I think it would be less effort to rip them out. I did try to drop down and reknit - it would be OK in certain circumstances, but I noticed that the dropped stitches were mostly on the multiples of 4 transfers close together, not very helpful place to drop stitches, so ripping back was better.

I decided to take photos of exactly what happens when rows are being knitted, to make it easier to rehang correctly.

Row 1:  travelling right to left- stitches are transferred first, the yarn trails and knits AFTER. The stitches are only transferred to the left and the empty needle has the single thread on it.

Row 1

 Row 2: travelling left to right -stitches are transferred first, the yarn trails and knits AFTER. The stitches are only transferred to the right and the empty needle has the single thread on it.

Row 2

the card in the reader is all ready to knit the next row and needs to be memorised.

For reference Rows 3 and 4.

Row 3

Row 4

I dropped a great deal of stitches on the back, so I workshopped the sleeve to see how to work more weight.
I noticed that the action of knitting was dislodging the bar weights, so I tried putting them on from the back, tried out the triangle weight with the small weight and the caston bar from Bev.

The triangle weights added on the back worked so much better, no dropped stitches at all on the sleeve, so I redid the whole lace section of the back - well worth it, as there were way, way too many to fix. However, one stitch that isn't out of position and hasn't got any dropped stitches, it's just as easy to catch it up from the back. I've done just a few on my Zora, that popped up after wearing.

I tried out using the little orange men in a row so it didn't knit the stitches on the left that I wanted to take off for the initial armhole shaping.

Motif Placement Notes

I liked this lace design, but I thought it would be too much all over. It has columns of single stitch running through it and I thought it would be a good candidate to work out how to do motifs and how to put it where I want it in a project. I decided to do this bit of it.

Working out where to put the selected part of the card into the position on the garment.

 Position of the card in relation to the needles on the bed. Marks on the card reader

Correspond to marks on the needle bed

Then all I had to do was work out which parts of the card, it could be anything from .. say 6 to 24sts or more so it repeats .. say in the centre, all depending on the required design and where it is placed in the project. On this project, I used L1 to R12 and positioned the piece 6 needles off centre - L86, R74 instead of L80, R80, so the motif and gutter stitches were where I wanted them - this time on the right. Maybe next time a centre piece, or on the left, or without a gutter, it certainly works well.

Settings:

Carriage - on the LC exactly as usual plus the magic cams screwed on the sides, levers back

Card reader - set and memorise row 1

Back bed - put the magic orange/white markers on - L on the left, the white side is included in the knitting pattern the orange side is exactly what the little orange markers usually do, R on the right, here are all the settings and add ons when in work.

Bed -Orange markers on the front of the bed are unnecessary to the function, but I left them there so I could easily identify the needles I was dropping and latching back the 2 sts relatched gutter.

Refresher:
To memorise the pattern: side levers forward, card on row 1, white lever next to the card reader - forward.
To commence the pattern: side levers back, white lever next to the card reader - back.
Put the panel on the left next time.