That's the name of my knitted top, get it?I finished it!
It took as long to finish the arm and neck openings as it did to knit the pieces. This is how it goes with machine knitting, I'm learning.
In the case of this top, a lot of the time spent on that phase was thinking about how exactly to do it - by machine. It's a technical/mechanical issue.
Knitting by machine is so different from knitting by hand where you can flip stitches around, combine them and add new ones wherever you want.
On a knitting machine, you are stuck with each stitch on its own fixed needle. If you want to add or subtract one in the middle of a piece - as I had to to make the vertical darts for shaping this top - you need to move all the stitches to one side of where you are increasing or decreasing to make room (or take one stitch away) in the middle.
Needles on one bed only knit, and on the other bed they only purl. Making garter stitch, the easiest thing in the world for a hand knitter (knit every row) is about the slowest stitch you can do on a machine because you literally have to switch the stitches from one bed to the other, or reform them on a single bed machine, every single row.
So the problem with my bands was that the pattern called for them to be knitted on (stitches picked up around the edges) in reverse stockinette stitch so they would curl and look nice and round. Easy by hand, tough by machine because of the configuration of the needles and how they would knit. No matter how I figured it, I'd end up either with the stockinette side showing (curling the wrong way, therefore) or with the "seam" where the stitches of the band were joined to the body on the outside instead of the inside.
There are probably ways of doing it but it was going to be really, really awkward.
So I did it by hand with skinny 2.5mm circular needles. Picked up the stitches, knit four rows, cast off. I am very pleased with how it turned out.And here's the back. Yes, that is a band of garter stitch on either side of the (totally redundant) keyhole opening. See above for degree of difficulty.
The Sewing/Knitting Lawyer is happy with how this one turned out. It should be a nice basic item for summer.
from The Sewing Lawyer http://ift.tt/1UktW2Y
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