Join the Q: Rise of the (Loom Knitting) Machine
Created | Updated Feb 5, 2017
Join the Q: Rise of the (Loom Knitting) Machine
As a knitter myself, I enjoyed reading Dmitri's accounts of his loom knitting exploits – I hadn't used a loom as I knit using needles, but I found it fascinating to read about the different techniques for creating the shapes I was familiar with when making hats or scarves.
When I saw a loom knitting machine for a bargain price in a charity shop, I was very happy to buy it1, and hoped to be able to make my own hats and scarves in super quick time by following Dmitri's explanations and using the machine mechanism to speed the process up.
It was harder than it looked...
Getting Started
Step 1: build the machine – the main body of it was already constructed, but I had to add the top handle, legs and "Tension Arm" to make it look like a cauldron for brewing knitted items.
Step 2: read the instructions that came with the machine... and then read them again.
Step 3: have a go at loading the machine with wool2 and try turning the side handle.
Step 4: reload the machine with wool after the stitches all tangled up and fell off.
After experimentation and close studying of the mechanisms, I deduced how the machine worked – unlike the standard loom, which has fixed pegs and a separate hook to move the wool over the pegs, the machine has prongs containing hooks that grab the strand of wool from the Tension Arm and pull it down to make a new stitch as the handle is turned. This new knowledge enabled me to load the wool into the machine properly, so the nth attempt resulted in a reasonably good circle of knitting.
I created a cylinder quite quickly, and then attempted to remove the piece from the machine. Compared with my previous efforts in which the stitches fell off the prongs as soon as I looked at them, I found it really difficult to extricate the wool from the hooks on the prongs. I managed it eventually and admired the useless tube I had created.
My next experiment was to try to knit a Flat Thing, by sliding a knob on the side of the machine. As Dmitri found before me, it is much easier to knit Round Things – I eventually worked out what the machine was attempting to do when it was in Flat Thing mode, but it was a bit too clunky to actually do that so the edges of the piece were not neat3. In studying the Flat Thing mechanism, I also discovered that it was actually really easy to take the stitches off the prongs – turning the handle with no wool in the Tension Arm caused the stitches to be pulled under nothingness and hence they all fell off.
Experiments Complete
Once I was happy that I had conducted enough experiments, I decided to check the instructions that came with the machine again and see what patterns they suggested for me to try. Disappointingly, the machine only has 20 prongs, so making a hat in the round for anyone other than a tiny baby doll is impossible. The instructions suggested a hat could be created by stitching three Flat Things together and then gathering the top of the resulting tube to make a dome. However, given my lack of success with Flat Things, I decided against that. Instead I found a better pattern – a long Round Thing flattened out would make a good thin scarf with a neat finish on both sides.
Armed with my new skills that had been honed by trial and error, I loaded up the machine with a sufficiently large ball of wool, knitted the first two rows slowly to make sure all the prongs were engaging correctly, and then began turning the handle full speed ahead.
Making something larger brought with it a fresh set of challenges.
Firstly I discovered that the Tension Arm was too feeble to cope with a ball of wool without jamming – instead I had to unwind an amount of wool from the ball to enable the strand to be gently fed into the machine. Secondly, it was pleasingly mesmerising that the machine worked by spinning the prongs round inside the cauldron of the main body, but when the scarf became longer than the depth of the machine it started twisting up on the carpet as the stitches moved. Result: another jam. It was physically demanding work to keep pulling strands of wool and keep untwisting the growing scarf, as well as supporting the machine on my lap rather than on the floor to help the scarf to emerge, but I got there eventually.
It is quite fun, as I can knit a child's scarf for charity in a couple of hours, but compared to the flexibility of Dmitri's Loom Knitting Kit with different sized looms and options to load the wool in a variety of ways, the machine is very basic. No problem, though – once I have finished making as many scarves as I can cope with, I will put the machine back in the charity shop so it can go to another new home.
