Thursday, May 4, 2017

Basketweave Stitch on the Machine



I wanted to see if it was feasible to do this stitch on the machine, so I fired up the SK155 and gave it a burl. It's basically a single stitch cable. Youtube has handknitting instructions. My first pitiful attempt was on the 10ply dark brown Bendi wool, which was a difficult colour to see were it all went horribly wrong while I was doing it, and I used T9 for that samples, good for stitch size wise, but otherwise no - not really a workable swatch...

Machine: SK155 Chulky 9mm
Yarn: 12ply Cleckheaton orange wool that Bev gave me - yarn needs to have a bit of give.
T10: really do need a large stitch size to be able to cope with the transfers.
Cast on: I did a crochet cast on over 20 needles. The handknit instructions say an even number of stitches.

Row 1: after crochet cast on,knit one row

Row 2 Prep: Transfer EON to the right, skipping over needles still in work
Needles 1 and 2 cross, 2 goes over 1.
Row 2: all stitches transferred (watch out for the gatepegs)
Needles 2 and 3 cross, 2 goes over 3

Row 2 knitted - It looks like the sts are in "pairs"
which get split up to the adjacent pair each row

Row 3 Prep: On LH side move last sts to adjacent needle
then EON transfer over remaining needles, to the right.
The last stitch each end isn't cabled,
just moves one needle in or outwards.

Row 3 transfers complete

And that's it. Each end's needles go in and out of work depending on the transfers.
Row 1, transfer EON to the left, knit one row - a one stitch cable.
Row 2, transfer first stitch to adjacent needle, then transfer EON to the right. One stitch on each end is not transferred.

Repeat these two rows. cabling first to the left, then next row to the right, alternating the end needles in and out of work as required. Carriage is going to the left - transfer to the left, Carriage is going to the right, transfers go right. The only thing I'd do on a piece of knitting is on the very last row, knit the MT, in this case it was done MT+4, so that final row should have been T6, it would look better.

I'm not sure about this, but if I wanted to sew it up, I'd might try an extra stitch each side to make it easier to do that. That's not what I did on this sample and it will be a much bigger stitch. Now I've had another look, I think it would be easy enough to seam it on thicker wool. Maybe if I decided to do this on the standard 4.5 machine? it would be more difficult to see? Maybe I'll do that another day.

Anyways, here's the sample, I was fiddling around with dropping down to relatch, sometimes it's quicker to do that than drag out the ribber for a little bit of ribbing on not many rows.


Added the tape measure for reference.

What it looks like on the other side


2 comments:

ItMakesYouSmile said...

Hooray! You are a woman after my own heart, Lorna. I'm trying to wrap my head completely around this. This seems to me to NOT be the same thing as crossing pairs of stitches, do you think that's correct? I'm curious how this method would do as an insert within a field of stockinet, as one might do a panel, say down the front of a sweater?

Anyway, I love it and will try it myself. Thanks so much for all the great photos.

ozlorna said...

OK Ive tried to simplify it a bit better, it's really easy, I over thought it to start with.

Row 1: 1&2, 3&4 etc cross, 2 goes over 1, 4 over 3 and so on.
Row 2: 2&3, 4&5 et cross, 2 goes over 3 etc. HOWEVER the first thing to do is move the stitch closest to the carriage ONE needle over (back to it's original position in Row 1), so all those crosses can happen, and the very last stitches goes over one needle to it's original position in for 1. That's it.

Crossing these two rows are all that needs to be done.