Knitting Machines galore since one is never enough, photo tutorials, and knits gone wild

Several months back I put myself on the Ravelry wait list.

Given there were over 12,000 knitters ahead of me, I figured it’d be after Christmas before my name would be added.

Well, their coders must be coding mighty fast because my welcome email arrived this morning. Continue reading…

Happy Birthday to me.

It’s my first blogiversary. To celebrate, I’ve prepared a photo tutorial on how to take apart, tear down, and deep clean a Passap Duomatic knitting machine.

Although I used an older Pinkie as my demonstration machine, it is almost 100% identical to tearing down a Duomatic 80. Its retainer bar is held on a bit differently. A photo tutorial for just the Duo 80 pusher bar can be found here. You will still need the pinkie pdf for everything else on the Duomatic 80.

In my usual fashion, there are a ton of pictures for your maintenance enjoyment – 18 pages worth.

Download PDF

After having fun with reversible cables in 4 x 4 rib columns, I decided to play around with using Full Fisherman’s Rib as the base fabric for double sided crosses. The results were nice.

Side 1

Here is one side. Note you can see three rows of crosses.
Since Full Fisherman’s Rib is made by tucking one bed while knitting the other, then reversing the process on the return trip, you need to pick an odd number of row repeats between the crosses.

This way you always cross the stitches on the bed which has just knit off stitches, not just received tucked stitches.
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I’ve been playing around with reversible cables on my knitting machine, a technique made popular by Lily Chin in a three part series for Machine Knit America in the early 1990’s.

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Since buses, motion sickness, and knitting wasn’t my cup of tea, I only got to click needles while visiting with a dear friend near Washington, DC. She is a new knitter, doing great, and wanted a challenge. I got her going with a simple XO cabled scarf for her daughter. I liked the hugs and kisses theme so much, that once I was back at home, I expanded my pattern to make a small baby/doll blanket.

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Here is how you assemble the Passap Duomatic or Duomatic 80 stand. It is very straight forward.

1. Layout all the pieces
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With so much information presented at the seminar, deciding where to begin once I got home was a challenge. I settled on adjusting my Duo 80 color changer since it’s always been cranky. Turns out the face cam on my back lock has been hitting the control lever white nubs way too hard. It’s a miracle I never sheared one off.

The control lever nubs are the four white pieces of plastic on top of the color changer. The red arrow is pointing to one.
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I’m back home from Pacifically Passap and my head is still spinning from all the info I tried to cram inside.

Thank goodness The Notebook can refresh my memory.
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