🤖 🧶 Machine Knitting - v1 Sweater Manufacturing

Hello to spring in NYC (and goodbye to sweater weather??)

Last month I wrote about hand-knitting a sweater out of ‘waste’ and scrap yarn, but most of you don’t know that I did the majority of the knitting in late Dec / early Jan. I had always planned to write a newsletter about the process, but it was easier to start knitting than to start writing!

This month, you’re all following along in real time - I only started knitting this new v1 sweater on Tuesday afternoon. And! It’s only the second sweater I’ve ever knitted on a machine. Needless to say, the process has been slower and more frustrating than I anticipated. But I’ve learned a lot! And after making a few on the fly design tweaks, I’m confident that I’ll be obsessed with the final sweater - I really like how it's coming together (I wasn’t so sure of that on Tuesday night, already 6 hours deep into knitting having only completed the back panel and part of the front...)

Some progress pics before I share my notes
A few weeks back I introduced knitting machines - here's mine (thanks eBay), all set up at home:

A panel of fabric knitted on the machine - this is the 'wrong' side (aka what you'll see if you look at the inside of your sweaters): 

Here I'm about to join the the front and the back panels together at the top of the right shoulder: 

Front and back are now joined, and I'm getting ready to attach the left sleeve:

I’m not quite done yet, I’ve got to knit and attach the ribbed hem, cuffs, and collar, and seam the sleeves and sides.

Some notes/things I've learned

• Always make a proper gauge swatch!!!! I kind of skipped it, and I regret that choice... My tension was a little too tight, making the machine knitting more difficult, and slower; it was a physical struggle to pull the carriage across the needle bed (and that’s not great for the machine either). The resulting sweater will have a slightly denser, stiffer feel than I was going for. 

  • For non-knitters: a gauge swatch is a square you knit before starting a project, using your yarn needles of choice, to check the ‘tension’ of the fabric. 

    • Thick knitting needles with thin yarn result in loops that are very far apart, and drapey and loose/mesh-like fabric.

    • Thin needles with thick yarn create bulky, stiff fabric.

  • Gauge swatches are also important for sizing your garment, allowing you to calculate the number of stitches required to knit a desired width & length.

• Machine knitting with scrap yarn bits - I had experimented with this a little bit in my class but had yet to try it out on this scale. Some techniques (swapping in different color stripes & holding different threads of yarn together) worked better than others (manually knitting short strands of scrap into the middle of a row).

• Hours spent knitting: ~11 hours (so far, I've got at least a few hours left to go). The total time I've spent (including unraveling) is just over 15 hours. Overall this is a little slower than I hoped (I thought I might be able to complete the whole project in ~12 hours) but the above points are definitely areas that can be improved upon next time around.

Looking forward to sharing the final piece (and a little reflection on the process) with you next week! Though if the weather stays this good I might have to pivot from sweaters to vests…

Best,
Anne