I have recently started feeling the urge to knit and have (so far) made 2 scarves for my daughter and daughter-in-law on my Pocket Knitter (by Bond) and have another scarf for Lucy about half done on the Pocket Knitter. That is a great tool for small projects worked in stockinette stitch, but it’s a bear to try and do purl stitches on. I’ve found some Knifty Knitter round and rectangular looms on Craigslist for a good price and I’ll be using those to make hats and scarves with all the fun yarns that were on sale after Christmas.
Also, after cleaning out about 8 years worth of computer carcasses, I set up all but one of my knitting machines only to discover that all of them but one needed new sponge bars to be usable. 4 sponge bars later all the machines are up, clean, and working great. Did I stop there? No. I was out looking for something on Craigslist when I keyed in “knitting machine” and up popped a Passap E6000 for the asking price of $200. I called immediately and offered to buy it sight unseen. You can’t buy them new and Refurbs are over $2000. I figured if nothing worked but the needles were intact, I could make back that money by selling the needles.
Come to find out, all was present and working except the color changer eyelets and the tension masts, a broken needle and a broken edge spring. Getting new parts was easy and by the end of the week and a good cleaning, I had a fully functioning E6000 for a very good price. Another good thing with the deal was the 2 teaching videos, a stack of patterns, and a tub of yarn. The never-used linker that was with the machine stayed with the owner (once some so-and-so told the owner it wasn’t part of the machine)Â to be listed on Craigslist (and is still there if anyone wants it).
So every day since I got it up and running, I’ve been sitting at the machine with my 9″ TV/VCR cued to the lesson of the day and working on practice pieces. Currently my biggest frustration is the color 2 edge loops on the right side of all the knitting, which I’ve been trying to adjust out, and the fact that things have got to be knitted down about a foot before you can actually see the knitting. For the time being, I plan to stick to hats, scarves, baby and girl sweaters for Sydney and Lucy while I learn this new machine. Small easy stuff is all I can handle at this level and time commitment.
While the E6000 is very similar to my DM80, which is currently in the process of being deep cleaned, there are some differences due to the computer, which does take some of the guesswork about what thing to do next. I do want to get the DM80 fully functional so I can have several projects going at the same time.
I think my next purchase will be a bi-directional DAK cable that will allow me to download patterns from DAK to the E6000 and knit from screen.
And to my friend Sally, maching knitting and using a hand loom is not cheating – it’s just a different process.