Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Fiber Festival Meeting - The Most Evil Thing in the World

Another great couple of days was had knitting. As stated earlier I have been busy spending a great deal of time typing . In addition I have had several meetings.

Moving along the best part of the last couple days is that a lot has been accomplished. Before Hive knitting we had a meeting for the Fiber Festival. Most of the classes were set and so we will be able to get out the schedule for the website and put out literature to all of the local shops. It is not that progress has not been made in putting this thing together. It is just really nice to see a bunch of the people together in the same room working on it.

Good times……..

I continue to make chemo caps. I will have to make a vest or something in a week or two just to make something different.

We are looking around for a place to knit on The Marley when we have the icord all made. Since there are only six stitches on The Marley we should be able to make him in twenty or so hours. This should be the coolest knitting project since the last long scarf. The Judy.

Speaking of The Marley someone has asked me how we alter the Bond Knitting Gizmo to make it able to do worsted weight yarn. Firstly it does not do it incredibly well. It is better than doing it by hand. This goes without saying. Firstly I take the machine apart and take all of the oil from the manufacturer out of the machine. Then with 200 grit sand paper I sand off the upper edge of the inside track. The sanding has to be just a little bit and must be perfectly smooth when done. All of the dust from the sanding must be completely removed.

Then the needles must be altered a bit as well. The metal needles on the machine need to be expanded just the tiniest little bit. They cannot be stretched too much or they will useless. There is also very little play in these needles. If you mess with them too much they can break. Also if they are too large then the yarn will not flow over them in the proper way.

The machine then needs to be oiled in the gears and the tracks. Use need to use gun oil to oil the machine with. This is important. It is much finer than the oil that comes on the machine and is the key to making the whole thing work.

When you load up the machine you cannot do it the way that the instructions say. You must wrap the yarn manually around each needle. After than you must go slowly when you doe the first twenty or so rows.

After you get the machine going to can do about two skeins of yarn on an oiling. The machine can heat up and the guide on the needles can get hot enough to weaken the lower section of the plastic track they are on. When this happens they break through. I have used plumbing goop to fix several machine that had had this problem.
These machines are not designed to do this. They are made of plastic and simply cannot take the strain. Also this thing will have a tenancy to skip stitches. The only way to fix this is to take the icord off the machine and unravel it past the point where this happened. This is also a thing that you have to experiment with before you get any good at it. It took me six skeins before I was able to get the hang of it. Also do not practice with you want to use. While you experiment it will destroy the yarn until you get good at it.

You also need to make apart the machine and brush out the fiber and replace the oil after four skeins. Depending on the weight of yarn you cannot do more than three skeins at once. This is a good time to take apart the machine. You can stitch the bits of icord together seamlessly when you have the all made.

I hope this is helpful to the person who asked me about it in the comment section a couple days ago.

I have a chunk of the second chapter of the fiction book done. For the first time one of these books is moving along at a decent rate. Well we will see how that goes.

Thursday through Sunday I will be away from the computer in lovely Hershey PA. For the Army people out there I am going to our Territorial Congress. For the non Army people out there I am going to a long conference.

The only thing more sacrilegious on a knitting blog than saying you hate yarn is stating that you hate chocolate. I hate chocolate unless it is smothered into something else. I suppose the who chocolate thing has to do with knitting turning into a mostly female activity a couple hundred year ago.

When I have a million dollars I will be starting a yarn shop that will mostly be staffed by biker knitters. There are two women that will be allowed to work in my biker knitting shop and they know who they are. On my job application will be a question about how much they like chocolate. If they say they like it too much they will not be allowed to work in the shop.

The women will be exempt from this question for obvious genetic reasons. Apparently there is some sort of female genetic thing dealing with chocolate. I will not get into this. I am not a geneticist or qualified to answer this question. I will say that this is scary on multiple levels.

There will be no chocolate in the public area of the shop. There will be rock candy a popcorn machine. The chocolate will be in a locked room for the two aforementioned women. They will be the ones with keys to room. I am not a sadist nor am I suicidal. I am sorry, I feel that the chocolate thing must be controlled in order for the male knitting revolution to firmly retake knitting. I will dedicate more on the subject of the insidious chocolate conspiracy at a latter time.

Be safe out there and keep you stick on the ice.

2 comments:

Charissa said...

I've never liked chocolate much. Sometimes I don't mind small bits of it, but I don't get what the whole ruckus is about. Even as a kid I didn't like chocolate ice cream, chocolate milk, etc. You do get funny looks when you tell people you don't like chocolate.

metal and knit said...

Funny i dont do chocolate cake really just good blocks of choc and in my hiding places please.

Hope congress is great and blessed and you dont get what i always get congress throat which is a raspy voice from all the time you spend singing and generally talk to people catching up.

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