Knitting

You know, I knit.

Yes, it's not the most manly of hobbies, but I just can't seem to get into scratching my balls, drinking beer, or spending hours of my life watching other men either grab each other or kick ball around on a field of grass. Call it simply yet another of my character flaws and leave it at that.

One of the most interesting words in Candian English is tuque, which is their special word for a simple stocking cap. It's considered to be the national hat of Canada, something they're a bit smug about because it indicates, somehow, that they're tough and able to deal with their winters.

The reason I'm mentioning this is that there are a huge number of ways to make a tuque, and pretty much any one of them is "right." But a poorly made or worn tuque in Canada is an object of ridicule. Which, it seems, is pretty much every one I've ever made. I'm sort of on a quest for the perfect tuque recipe.

Anyway, knitting is one of those things that you can just *do*; it doesn't require a lot of planning, it doesn't require a lot of thinking while in the midst of it, it doesn't require a huge investment. At least, not when you're doing a new set of dish clothes or a quick stocking cap.

On a completely different level of things is machine knitting. Knitting machines dates back to the 1600s, and they were invented as a way to make hose - the equivalent of blue jeans in the style of the day for men - more quickly, cheaply, and in wilder fashions than were otherwise possible. The machines can only do one 'type' of stitch. In hand-knitting there are three types of stitch - a knit, a purl, and increases. In machines there are only knits, although complex machine may have needles which can knit from two different directions, and a backward knit stitch looks exactly like a purl stitch. But there are two things you can do to vary the stitches without hand manipulation - slips and tucks. (In hand knitting there are far more options, including slips and tucks, twists, drops, increases, decreases, cabling, etc. Many of these can be done with hand manipulation on the machine as well, but they take more time and effort than doing the same by hand so why would you do that on a machine?)

Which begins to explain how knitting machines are so very different from hand knitting. Everything needs to be carefully plotted out before ever you start a machine knit project. The exact tension or gauge (which is how many stitches or rows per inch) must be known, so you can determine how many needles you'll need to get each garment piece the correct size. Machine knit garments are usually knit flat; that is, you knit properly shaped pieces of flat fabric, which are then sewn or bound together to make the final product. (This is very different from some of my hand-knitting techniques in which I make garment-shaped piece of fabric, with no sewing whatsoever.)

Unfortunately, most things are more involved than just figuring out the basic dimensions. So a garment becomes a sort of programming algorithm. For a sock, say, you need to know what tension should be in the ribbing at the top, so it's stretchy but not stiff. And you need to have a regular density for the leg and the top of the sock, but a tighter and heavier part for the bottom, and maybe denser yet for the heel and toe which are where the sock is most likely to wear through. And each of these will likely have a different tension. The shape of the sock cannot be a straight tube, either, although that might work for a very stretch athletic sock which isn't intended to fit particularly well. If it's an over-the-calf sock it needs to come in sharply above the calf, but not be tight from the widest point to the ankle or it will tend to pull the sock down. The largest measurement is actually from heel around the top of the foot, just forward of the ankle, which is why the heel is "turned" with extra stitches. Then there is the shaping of the foot and toe area - how much, when, and how should the toe be joined to make the least amount of lumpiness. By the time you've calculated everything, adjusting for yarn thickness, stiffness, and characteristics after being washed, you realize that a lot of preparation and investment has been done and you haven't even started knitting!

And the machines are often complex to get ready to start knitting. Stringing up the machine can take 15-20 minutes, more for machines working with multiple colors.

Because knitting machines are very limited in their techniques, but are very good at doing things evenly and quickly, knitting machine people tend to focus on different ways to be complex. Like doing multiple colors. With a two-bed machine it's very easy to make, quite literally, photo-print knitting. Using four colors in a way similar to the way TV screens work, and a fairly modest computer, I can build a pattern to knit a picture into a sweater. And it would knit quickly and fairly simply. It probably wouldn't be the lightest or finest sweater, but it be awfully cool to have a sweater with pictures of my grandbabies, or a sunset photo from one of my cruises up in the fjords of the BC coast.

Anyway, the point of all this was to begin talking about my knitting projects, because even a simple one should be documented in some way. In part because it helps me keep track of what I've done. Now I need to get a digital camera so I can take pics of various projects and progress, and start documenting!