Newsletter: Feature

from Anne Gibson, Chesterfield Derbyshire, UK (pumkinlover on Rav)

When I first bought my sock machine I had lots of really nice Indie dyed sock yarns as a hand knitter but no regular 4-ply (fingering weight) so I looked on eBay for some “practise” yarn.  Someone was selling a couple of packs of “odds and sods” left over yarn which I bought thinking that they were the correct gauge, only to find that quite a lot was DK. This would not knit on my Imperia 72 cylinder.

So that got put down to experience  and stuffed out of the way, only to resurface for an idea of knitting bunting. Then my daft idea occurred -what about knitting a skirt. By now I had a 60 cylinder made for the Imperia by a David Lord so I set off.

Knitting flat bed with all except a couple of needles is made easier on an Imperia because with care you can raise the needles without having to use a clamp or cylinder spring  to hold the raised needles in place.

The yarn was mainly acrylic with some wool content but although not the choices I would have made in a yarn shop I plodded on with no particular idea  if it would work or not, or even how to proceed.

Eventually all the yarn was knitted into one long piece and it looked long enough to be cut into six segments which I estimated to be enough to make a skirt. I overlocked and then cut into six pieces then sewed up the side seams to make a person sized tube.

By pinning and shaping the waist then again overlocking I managed to shape the waist and finished by adding some elastic around the waist and turning up the hem.

In the end I was quite pleased with the result and hope one day to wear it to a Crank in and at the Ruddington Framework knitters museum where I am a volunteer.