Brushing off the dust

I may or may not have mentioned at some point that I have a knitting machine stashed away. Apart from a very brief daliance when I first acquired it, it's mostly been gathering dust in the corner of the spare room. Til now that is. I had one of those very bright ideas (the sort I often regret an hour later) that the mighty midget and I could have a play with it and perhaps make him a jumper. Knowing how he loves anything mechanical, I also thought he'd get a bit of a kick out of it too.

Finding the machine was no problem. There it was all tucked away in it's case in the corner, the manual of course, was another thing entirely. I fished around in my cupboard and pulled out a box of what I knew contained bits for the machine. Old issues of Knitting Machine magazines, pattern books, stitch libraries, piles of pre punched pattern cards and even a few blanks to make more. To my horror (and having just promised the MM a new "toy" to play with), the instructions were nowhere to be found! Two hours of pulling things out of my jam packed cupboard and once I'd finished sneezing from all the dust I had a sudden epiphany and looked in the boxes that I'd bought to store my yarn stash in. Sure enough, tucked away neatly were the instructions, a complete set of tools and another ball winder and even better, a swift.

Breathing a sigh of relief all round, we got on with the business in hand and now have a somewhat cleaner and definately far less dusty machine. I've oiled it and now it's running like a dream. Now I just have to work out what I'm doing with it. The MM has of course already had a go and after I'd cast him on the back for his jumper, he cracked off most of the back in no time.

The only down side of letting your five year old at the knitting machine is that he has this insatiable need to twiddle all the knobs and dials. So I am going to be counting all the rows up to the sleeves to try and match the fronts. For some reason I'm guessing that the 931 rows on the row counter may be just a little way out!Thanks for the comments on the Toucan socks. With the star toe, the decreases (or increases if you're working from the bottom up) are spread evenly all around the toe rather than being at the sides. You also go down to a far smaller number of stitches and that combined with the way that the decrease rows are spread apart is what gives you a much rounder toe. If anyone's interested, I'll post my pattern notes .