Crafting in Abundance

Valerie from Woodley Machine Knitting Club, gave an interesting talk on many items she has crafted since becoming involved with knitting. Here are a selection of items from the varied and inspiring assortment she had brought along. All of the knitted items had been machine knitted but with other crafts sometimes added to complete the design.

Here are the show and tell items this month

November 5th - no fireworks for us!

If you don't like fireworks, but love knitting come along to our meeting - on Tuesday 5th November.

Val from the Woodley club is coming to show us some of the more unusual items she knits but a few that are not quite so different.  I've already seen some of them, so I know you'll be interested.  It might even give you some ideas for things to knit for our next challenge - buttons, beads and sequins.

We'll also have time for the usual things like notices and tea or coffee.  The meeting will start at 8 pm as usual.

Design Evening

At the last October meeting everyone had a go at measuring tension swatches and working out the stitches and rows for their chosen pattern shapes. Liz explained how to use the green ruler and covered the other rulers for different gauge machines and knitting. The rule has stitch gauge on one side and row gauge on the other.

Kit for Calculating Stitches and Rows from a Tension Swatch

 

Tension Swatch Board

The board surface is rough like an emery board or sandpaper and keeps the swatch flat and still whilst being measured. They used to be on sale in the days when machine knitting was very popular. One can be hand made by attaching sandpaper to a firm card or thin board.

The show and tell pictures

October 2013 meeting

The next meeting of the Fleet Knitting Club (1st October) will be about designing and knitting your own pattern. I sent an e-mail to everyone on our "list" explaining what we proposed to do, and asking them to knit a tension swatch that can be measured during the evening.

There were also a few other things to bring:

ruler

tape measure

note pad & pen or pencil

calculator

a garment to copy the shape from, or a garment schematic

The idea is that we can teach ourselves enough to be able to work out our own knitting patterns or alter a purchased one to our size.

If you haven't been to one of our meetings before, please do come, with or without the things above.  

There will be the usual show and tell, plus time to chat and drink tea or coffee.

The date: Tuesday 1st October 2013

The time: 8 pm - 10 pm

 

 

New Term

The new term brought a very mixed bag of knitting projects. The club embraces all knitting styles and the associated crafts which is great. There is usually at least one expert on hand to learn new techniques, plenty willing to share new ideas and provide some crafting help.

Following the AGM business and the schedule for the club meetings, members brought out their summer projects. Yarn was on sale and craft magazines were being recycled amongst the group. One member brought in her machine and solved a tuck lace problem.

A simply beautiful arrangement of colours from a new member

Hand crafted laceweight shawl, so complex to many but a breeze for some of the talented club members

The challenge with this yarn is getting it to knit the colour changes fairly evenly across the different pieces so it still looks pleasing with a bit of random creativity

This garment has an interesting textured edging turning a plain knit into something special

Beautiful textures using up yarn ends into a throw or wrap for the autumn

Different kinds of knitted squares, is this continuing the blanket theme

This was adapted from a Zandra Rhodes pattern

Liz had brought aloing some of the hats and accessorie sets for the Guild stand at the autumn exhibitions. Amazing what can be done with machine knitting and millinery crafts

September 2013 and the start of another year.

Our Club meets again on Tuesday 3rd September at 8 pm. As usual this will be our AGM, so it is the ideal opportunity to give us your ideas and thoughts about the club and what you aim to knit during the next year.

Along with the AGM (which as you know doesn’t take us very long!) we will be solving a few problems. There will be at least one knitting machine there as we have been requested to see why a machine won’t knit tuck lace. If you have a problem that you’d like us to try and solve, do bring it along with anything that might be necessary, such as pattern, needles and yarn. I have also been contacted by Laura, who has yarn to sell which is left from when she had her own knitting business. She will be bringing it along to the AGM meeting so don’t forget to bring your purse.

Once again it has been difficult to find speakers and we have had to rely on members volunteering to show techniques and stitches to fill the programme. We will try to find speakers to fill the gaps which will then give us a reasonably balanced programme.

With your agreement, we will continue to support the Friends of the Royal Marsden Hospital, Sutton Branch with donations of knitted and other new, but unwanted, items. We will collect them together at our December meeting, and they will be taken to the hospital a few days later. The Friends of the Royal Marsden will also be the recipient of the money raised at our club meetings through the sale of donated yarn and other items of knitting paraphernalia.

We also have an on-going project to knitting for a charity. As you enjoyed knitting the squares, we’re wondering if you would like to do the same this year. If so, we will be asking for a volunteer to make them into the blankets to give to Shelter. If you think this is something you could do please either volunteer at the AGM, or contact me at any time. Shelter will also be happy to receive hats and scarves of all sizes if you prefer knitting them.

We have continued to update our blogspot. Hardly a day goes by without someone looking at it. The programme will be posted there so as soon as I fill a date in the programme I will put it on the blogspot. If you haven’t looked lately, we’ve updated the layout and it has a whole new look now.

Subs will remain £15.00 for this year so please help by having your cheque ready (made payable to “Fleet Machine Knitting Club”) or the correct money to hand and maybe in an envelope with your name on it. You can still opt to pay £3 per night that you attend if you prefer. If necessary we may need to levy an additional variable amount towards any evening when we have a speaker.

Looking forward to another successful year of knitting.

No August Meeting

Just to remind you that we don't meet in August.

However the Committee will get together and start planning for the next year (September to July) so if you have any suggestions for a speaker or topic you'd like us to cover please do get in touch with me.

See you all in September!

The Blanket Project is completed!

We have now completed our blankets for charity.  Four blankets were given to Shelter.  Three of them were large enough to fit single beds and the fourth was a little smaller and would fit a cot.

This blanket was made up from 6 inch (15 cm) squares

This blanket was machine kntited in three strips and then joined on a Hague Linker.  It has an extra section that is folded back so that the blanket can be folded and become a pillow - is it a planket or a blanillow?

This blanket is made up of 8 inch (20 cm) squares. Some of the squares knitted for the 6 inch blanket were oversized, so we added sections on, patchwork style, to increase their size.  It made for a rather interesting blanket.

This is the last blanket we made and when we had finished we had just one square left over.

Whe we took them into the Shelter shop in Fleet they were amazed at all our hard work and recieved them with grateful thanks.

And for those of you that knit squres, we asked and yes they do take knitted squares and assemble them into blankets. So if you don't have enough to make your own blanket then take them into the shop in Fleet Road and they will do the rest.

Well done everyone.

July meeting to end our Year.

The July meeting was the last of the club year (which runs from September to July) and the end of the 2013 Challenge.  The challenge this year was to knit an outfit for a doll and we had a number of people who were able to complete the challenge.  Here's the photos of the things that were knitted.

 

We also were able to sort out a problem for one fellow knitter.  She had an old garment that she was fond of and wanted to create a copy.  However she didn't recognise the stitch and asked if anyone knew what it was.  Never one to turn down a challenge, Christine took a closer look, picked up a pair of needles and some yarn and set to work.

 By the end of the evening she thinks she had cracked it and wrote down what she'd worked out so our other knitter could go away and work the garment out.  We are looking forward to seeing the finished garment.

There was lots of chatter going on in the mean time and aslo some show and tell.  We  also collected the last of the knitted squares and saw the blankets completed so far.  But more of the blankets in the next post.

July meeting

It's our July meeting tonight and the end of our challenge.  I hope there is a good turn out and that many members have had a go at the challenge - to knit an outfit for a doll. We'll see!

I'm also going to take along the blankets we've been knitting squares for.  The one made up of 6" squares is complete and the one made up of 8" squares needs about 4 more squares to finish it.  I'm hoping that someone will bring them along tonight and that we can get them sewn on.  If anyone brings more squares we can decide then what to do with them.  It will depend on how many there are.  This will be the last evening for bringing squares as we have now spent about 3 months on the project.  Hopefully we will be able to spread the completed ones out and take photographs to post.

We don't have a meeting in August, but will be back again in September when it will be our AGM.  We're already working on the programme for the next year (Sept - July) so hopefully we can get most of the dates filled before we come back.

Looking forward to the meeting tonight, and hopefully a few new faces.

Fleet Knit in Public

It's taken me ages to find time to update the blog - sorry, time has just not been available to me.  But better late than never!

So, we had a great day, talked to loads of people and hopefully some of them will come and see us on a club evening.  Some people had seen the posters around town and came along with their knitting and joined us.  We taught a few children how to knit, and they had a go on the knitting machine.  Some grown-ups had a go as well. 

We took photos, but only when there weren't so many people around.  And some of them aren't that good as the sun shone down through the glass roof which caused shadows!  We were grateful at times for the shade and kept moving the chairs round to take advantage of it as it was very hot in the full glare of the sun.

We even got some knitting done!  

The photographer from the local paper came along, but it was before the official start time and there were only a few of us early birds there.  Still we eventually got into print - about 3 weeks after the event.

The general consensus was that we should do it again next year!