Stitches West!

I belong to the Machine Knitters Guild of San Francisco Bay Area, along with a bunch of really talented knitters. Above is our Booth (#946) at Stitches West. I was responsible for all things Stitches for our guild this year. While it was a lot of work, my best knitting buddy and I had a ball designing the booth and setting it up. The garments above were all knit on knitting machines and designed by the knitters from our guild.

This is a two piece garment made by one of our members, this outfit is well designed, knit and is just plain old stunning!

Really some beautiful garments and they really made the booth look good. This is a membership drive for our guild. You have no idea how many knitters have knitting machines under the bed at home and have no idea how to use them. I know this because I was one of those knitters. I bought knitting machines, I had 2 before I even knew how to use one. So this is a demo booth to let other knitters know that we have a local guild and it is for the express purpose of teaching machine knitting.


This is my best knitting buddy, she is demonstrating a knitting machine that is on loan to the guild from Newtons Yarn Country. We had so many garments volunteered for the booth, we tried to pick one from each of the knitters to highlight.

Above is a wedding dress that one of our newest members knit. The amazing thing is that she knit it on the Ultimate Knitting Machine and hand manipulated all the lace in the dress. Her knitting machine has no ablity to auto pattern and if you want a pattern in your knit, you have to hand manipulate every stitch. It was a daunting undertaking, she finished her dress and wore it when she got married, I will bet she was a beautiful bride.


Our knitting guild is an amazing cross section of knitters and designers. I feel blessed to have found this group of amazing people. The talent is one thing, but the sharing of knowledge and experience is priceless. The green sweater above was also knit by the same member who knit the wedding dress. This green sweater has leather details that she designed and incorporated into the sweater.

I have a couple of Finished Objects to share

Take a look. I have been working on the patterns most of the summer. I will post some photos here and if you are interested in doing a beta knit of my patterns, let me know via a comment and I will send you a copy to knit. You must let me know how the knitting went and any comments for the writing of the pattern.

Here is the baby hat with a mock baby cable.

This hat is hand knit in worsted weight acrylic yarn with a crochet flower as adornment. I taught myself how to crochet recently. The hat is hand knit on double points. Sweet right?

Below is the 3 button baby kimono I have designed. It has an asymetric opening and is knit using a Brother 260 knitting machine. In case you wonder, I knit using both machine and hand knitting.

My first love of knitting is hand knitting, but I wanted to get into knitting design and the knitting machine is the tool that will enable you to go a little faster with some basic designs. I choose to do what I refer to as "Fusion Knitting" where you use both machine and hand skills to complete your garment. In the above garment you will see that I did a little hand knitting for the bottom edge.

Above is a close up of both the flower and the increases at the under arm that make the short cap sleeve. I tested this pattern for hand knitting myself so the next views are what I knit from this pattern by hand.

Here is a funny fact about the differences between hand and machine knitting. When you hand knit you knit it on the "right" side and when you machine knit, you knit from the "wrong" side or the purl side. So you will see that the difference between the two sweaters are the opening are on different sides and on a asymetrical front you will notice this, where as on a normal front you would not notice it at all.

This is a close up of the neck detail with the decreases that make the neck. You can see that I used the green yarn as a contrast, I crochet the edge using a picot stitch. I loved how this came out. This is my beta of hand knitting it from the machine pattern. So this cream colored version was knit by hand. You will notice that I did a contrast picot edge to keep the look really simple. I love how they came out, what do you think?

Please leave comments and let me know what you think. I