With limited access to University facilities, I make use of my own.
Prior to lockdown, my intention for my final major project was to make use of the University's extensive knitting machine facilities to create fabrics for my final collection. As it became clearer that this might no longer be an option, I decided to look at ways around this, and what I could use among the equipment that I already owned in order to create a similar outcome.
For me, this could have advantages in that I could use my own equipment at any time of day, and there could be no problems with continuity in the pieces I create before and after my MA.
I am fortunate in that I own a Passap E6000, a basic domestic knitting machine. I had heard of software that you could get that would enable you to design on your computer and have the machine translate these files into knit. Unfortunately my machine, at over 30 years old, was not designed to ever receive downloads.
However, the company that I contacted about the DesignaKnit software gave me the name of a woman that they thought might be able to help me. Anne Croucher, a semi-retired knitting machine guru, has been working with knitting machines since the 1970s and has around 50 to 60 machines of her own. She has her own facebook group where she shares her knowledge alongside other knitters. After emailing her I received a response from her husband, a retired electronic design engineer, who said that he could fix a microchip to my knitting machine console that would enable it to receive downloaded files.
I boxed up the old console, pictured:
And a few days later got it back, along with a new cable to connect it to my laptop. This in turn needed a cable adaptor to make it fit USB, which in turn needed a driver to help my laptop recognise it.
The cable couldn't recognise DesignAKnit (though I had been told this beforehand) so I turned to freeware instead. There are, perhaps surprisingly, a few to choose from. I first tried Win_Crea, which seemed like the most popular. Interestingly, this freeware was made by another husband and wife team, Chris and Jill Dixon from Sydney, Australia. In this case, Jill is the knitter and Chris is the programmer. I love that the blending of different disciplines (knitting/electrical engineering, knitting/computer programming) can have such creative outcomes.
I initially had some success in getting the laptop and knitting machine to talk to each other. You can see in the image below that the machine needles are corresponding the 5th line of the pattern:
Unfortunately, when it came to more complex designs such as pixelated images of photographs, the knitting machine displayed an error message.
Unwilling to give up, I tried the freeware JournalSix. The great thing about developers making this software and sharing it with the community is that it enables people like me to be experimental with their knitting machines. The downside is that there is no technical support. With Win_Crea, I reached a point where I couldn't go any further and had to stop. I had more success with JournalSix. For a test pattern, I programmed in an image of Leigh Bowery. I chose an image with high contrast, and set the software to translate that into 2 colours, which it did really well:
The sample is by no means perfect - it's a long time since I have knitted jacquard and I forgot a lot of the tricks, but I am delighted that I managed to knit an image of this complexity on a domestic knitting machine.
It couldn't possibly compete with the Shima Seiki machines in terms of speed and finish, so I do still see myself using those in the future, but I'm very motivated to use more of my own fabrics that I have designed and knitted by hand.
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