Knitting

What a novel idea, talk about knitting on a knitting blog. Wow, some would think lately that this was not to happen. Well, it is right now.

So what am I doing. Well, I just had a piece come off a bulky knitting machine. It is a plain stockinette piece that I wanted to do the pie crust edging on. The bulky machine is that machine that has the sinker hooks and every time I try to do this edging it is so messy that I frog it.

Since I cannot get this edging to go right on the bulky machine I am going to take it to the standard and do it on that machine. At least it has gate pegs and not those sinker plates to deal with. There is also that doing the edging on the standard machine will make the edging a bit finer. The yarn I used is a thin yarn so it will work ok on the standard machine.

Then I have a couple other pieces, again just plain stockinette stitch, that I might just edge with some crochet. I haven't made up my mind about that yet.

So the hubby walks in the room last night and says, now what are you doing. I have one of my knitting pals set up on a machine knitting stand (by the way this is perfect for setting up the pal). I have determined that I need one more stand just for this, but that is for another day.

Like I just said, the knitting pal is set up and I am working a really neat piece on it. Don't know what a knitting pal is? Well, in a set there are five interlocking plastic pieces with something like pegs at the top. There are clamps to clamp it to a flat surface. Along with the five sections there comes four needles. You can use one needle or four or more at once to knit with. You can make some very interesting pieces with this tool.

So back to what I am doing. I started with one needle and made a base of two rows of the stitch number 3 from the main booklet. This booklet comes with a pal (or should come with a pal). I am using red heart baby soft yarn and started with green. I put together six sections. I know I said it comes with five, but I have three knitting pal sets. After the first two passes (you actually start with an e-wrap, yep just like you can use on knitting machines and knitting looms).

Ok back to the working. I started with one needle worked the cast on then two rows of pattern number 3. What is pattern number 3? You start from left to right working your first stitch on the first peg from left to right on the peg. Here you have to understand that the stitches on the pal are worked on both sides of the pegs, so you have a left to right on the peg and a right to left on the peg.

Now back to the first row and how it works. You work that first peg left to right, work the second peg left to right. That is the first pass of these two pegs. The next pass is work peg 2 right to left and peg 1 right to left, work peg 1 left to right and peg 2 left to right. This is done several times and when you are done you have a count of 10.

pegs 1 and 2 knit left to right (this is a recommended stockinette beginning)
Stitch 1 peg 3 →
Stitch 2 peg 4 →
Stitch 3 peg 3 ←
Stitch 4 peg 4 ←
Stitch 5 peg 3 →
Stitch 6 peg 4 →
Stitch 7 peg 3 ←
Stitch 8 peg 4 ←
Stitch 9 peg 3 →
Stitch 10 peg 4 →

So your first two pegs are done.

Now repeat that same thing over pegs 5 and 6, then 7 and 8 etc, across to the last two pegs and knit the last two pegs left to right.

For your row coming back you reverse the stitch pattern and start from right to left.

After two pattern rows you should be back to the left side of the pal. I then added a needle with red heart baby soft in a light blue color. Did I say the first color was a light green color, yep I did.

Now I have a second needle started. How does this work? Well, you follow the count with the first needle and the second kind of follows behind. It is interesting in how it works.

I am working slow as I tend to pull stitches off the pegs, this is really easy to do when you start to use multiple needles. So hopefully tonight I will have one more skein of yarn, one more blue is all I need, so that I can add an additional two needles to the process.

I am going to have to work slower then I did last night as I do not want to mess up on this piece. I have messed up so many times with multiple needles that it becomes down to displaying total disgust with myself.

I am almost ready to take a baby ghan off a panel knitting loom. Every time I think it is ready to take off I decide that I want it a bit longer. I hate making baby afghans that are too small too quickly. So I tend to make them larger. Besides mom and baby can cuddle better under a larger afghan.

Well, that is is for now. I still have some booties to finish up, just sewing of bottoms, and a couple of hats to do in a terri cloth yarn. I need more time.