PROGRESS, PROBLEMS & SOLUTIONS

The ribbing on the back is finished, and it does the trick: no more curling bottom on the back of the sweater.

Next step: hang and knit the second sleeve.  

  I had a lot of trouble with this, and it was pretty disconcerting because this was the first machine knitting I've done in a few years.  The trouble was that the yarn kept breaking.  That's a pretty big problem.  It had also curled up around the stitches, making very fat sections.  Not nice enough!  I took the sleeve off the machine.  That's when I discovered that the machine was not breaking the yarn--the yarn was already broken.  That whole ball of yarn had multiple breaks in it.  WOW! I thought--do I have a moth problem?  Even though it's been in a zipped plastic bag all this time?

I got out another ball of yarn, set it up in the machine, and there was no problem.  It was simply a bad ball of yarn.  The rest of the sleeve zipped up in no time.

Then I knit the ribbing of one of the side fronts by hand--that took one hour--and hung it on the machine to knit the rest of the side front.  My machine is very simple and doesn't do ribbing.  Here's how that looks, ready to go:

This is a view of the whole machine set up:

It took just 15 minutes to knit the rest of the side front by machine.  Jim said, Isn't that cheating?  No more than sewing a quilt together with a sewing machine, rather than taking  a month to hand sew all the seams!  I knit the other side ribbing and hung that on the machine.

But this time there were problems with the machine.  The carriage kept becoming hung up on the machine needles.  So I took the sweater off the machine and investigated.  First I read the manual to see if there was any information explaining this.  Nope!  I looked underneath the carriage and saw that the magnets that pull the needles up into position were pulling them so high that the carriage caught on them.  Why would it do that?  The manual gave no explanation.  So I went to the internet.

Thank goodness for Google!  I was able to find the explanation and a wonderfully instructive set of directions for how to fix this problem:

Turn the needle bed over and find, between the needles and the needle bed, a strip called "the sponge bar."  Aha, there it is.  It's the white 3/8" strip being pulled out from under the needles.  The manual never mentioned a "sponge bar."  You are supposed to check this sponge bar occasionally, and replace it when it gets old and compressed.  Well, this "sponge bar" is not just old, it's been deceased for a long time:

Again, thanks to Google, the solution is simple.  Go to the local hardware store and buy some 3/8" weather stripping.  Remove all the needles from the machine (that's all the needles in those two jars on the desk, sorted by colour) put the new weather stripping in the slot for the sponge bar.  Reinsert all the needles, that's not too hard, turn the needle bed back over, and you're good to go.  WONDERBAR!!!  It's fixed, and it's good as new!

Because the knitting must be weighted it stretches out very long and looks pretty weird.

But when you remove it from the machine, weights off, give it a good stretch, it turns into what you need.

The next step is to pick up and knit 145 stitches along the front for the front band.  It took me quite a while to figure out a neat way of picking up stitches for the band.  By about the third or fourth try I had it: insert a crochet hook in the space between the first and second stitches of the vertical knitting, draw up a stitch and put it on the needle.  It was actually pretty easy because there are 140 rows of knitting, so picking up 145 worked out quite easily.  I was near the end of row 3 on the front band (145 stitches in each row) when I realized that I was knitting the front band along the side seam and the armhole!

When you do a lot of handwork and want to do it well, you become very committed to taking out whatever isn't right.  So I more or less cheerfully took out all that work and started over, this time on the proper edge.

It took a long time to knit the front band because it's a lace pattern and is just over 4" wide.  But this morning I finished that right side front band:

It's pretty bumpy now.  It needs to be "blocked" -- made wet and dried while laid flat on a towel.  I'll finish the other side front band first, then block all five pieces of knitting, sew them together and be finished.  Then I really, really hope the sweater will fit me!