Is Machine Knitting Cheating?
What Hand Knitters Should Know
If you've spent much time around knitters, you've probably heard it:
“Machine knitting is cheating.”
Usually this comes from someone who has never actually used a knitting machine.
There is a common misconception that you put yarn on a knitting machine, push the carriage back and forth a few times, and a sweater somehow falls out the bottom.
I wish.
A knitting machine can knit extraordinarily fast, but machine knitting is a skill of its own. It requires planning, swatching, shaping, troubleshooting and a good understanding of how knitted fabric behaves.
For an experienced hand knitter, that can come as quite a surprise.
A Knitting Machine Is Not an Automatic Knitter
The machine forms the stitches, but the knitter is still making the decisions.
You choose the yarn. You determine the gauge. You calculate the size. You cast on. You shape the garment. You transfer stitches. You change colors. You correct mistakes. You bind off. You assemble and finish the garment.
Depending on the knitting machine, you may also manually manipulate needles to create stitch patterns.
The machine replaces the repetitive physical action of forming every stitch individually with two knitting needles. It does not replace the knitter.
Think about a sewing machine. Few people would suggest that a handmade garment stops being handmade because a sewing machine formed the seams.
A knitting machine is another tool.
And like any specialized tool, you have to learn how to use it.
Machine Knitting Can Be Harder to Learn Than Hand Knitting
This is the part that surprises many hand knitters.
When you learn to hand knit, you begin with two needles and some yarn. You learn to cast on, knit, perhaps purl, and eventually bind off.
With machine knitting, several things have to work together before you can successfully knit.
The yarn has to be appropriate for the gauge of the knitting machine. The machine needs to be threaded correctly. The yarn tension needs to be appropriate. The carriage has to be set correctly. The fabric needs the proper amount of weight.
And then there are all those needles.
When everything is right, the carriage can glide across the bed and produce an entire row of knitting in seconds.
When something is wrong, the machine can let you know rather dramatically.
The carriage jams.
A stitch drops.
The yarn gets caught.
The carriage suddenly becomes so difficult to push that you wonder if hooking it to a tow truck would help.
This is where the real education begins.
Hand Knitters Have an Advantage, and Sometimes a Disadvantage
Experienced hand knitters already understand yarn, gauge, garment construction and knitted fabric. That knowledge is extremely valuable.
But it can also create expectations about how a knitting machine should work.
A knitting machine doesn't behave like two knitting needles.
With hand knitting, you turn your work at the end of each row. A flat-bed knitting machine doesn't. That one difference alone changes which stitches are easy to produce.
Stockinette, for example, is wonderfully fast on a knitting machine.
Garter stitch, one of the easiest stitches in hand knitting, takes considerably more work on a flat-bed machine.
Seed stitch is another simple hand knitting texture that requires additional manipulation by machine.
Meanwhile, techniques such as tuck stitch, slip stitch, Fair Isle and other patterned fabrics can be extremely fast on a machine designed for automatic patterning.
The trick is learning to stop judging the knitting machine by how well it imitates hand knitting.
Learn What the Machine Can Do First
This is probably the most important advice I can give a hand knitter learning to machine knit:
For a little while, forget what you know about hand knitting.
Not permanently.
Just put it on the shelf while you learn the machine.
Instead of sitting down with your favorite hand knitting pattern and immediately asking, “How do I make the machine do this?”, work through the machine's manual.
Use an appropriate yarn. Learn how to cast on. Learn what the weights do. Learn how the tension mast affects the yarn. Learn how to increase and decrease. Learn to transfer stitches. Learn how to recognize when something isn't right.
Most importantly, play with it.
Your first goal shouldn't be producing a complicated sweater.
Your first goal should be understanding what happens when that carriage moves across the bed.
Don't Skip the Swatch
Hand knitters know about gauge swatches.
Machine knitters have even more reason to make them.
You cannot accurately judge the finished gauge while the fabric is hanging on the machine. It is stretched across the needles and being pulled down by weights.
The fabric needs to come off the machine, relax and then be measured.
That means you need to know your stitch gauge and your row gauge before knitting the garment.
A hand knitting pattern may tell you to knit until the piece measures 10 inches.
On the knitting machine, you need to know how many rows will produce those 10 inches before you get there.
Machine knitting is fast partly because much of the thinking happens before the actual knitting begins.
Yes, Machine Knitting Is Fast
Once the machine is set up properly and you know your gauge, the speed can be remarkable.
A plain stockinette garment piece can sometimes be knitted in a fraction of the time it would take by hand.
But that's only the knitting.
You still have shaping, finishing and assembly. You may need to transfer stitches or perform other hand manipulation during the knitting. And if your gauge is wrong, you may get to enjoy knitting that remarkably fast piece all over again.
I've done exactly that.
The good news is that when a piece took 30 minutes instead of several evenings, reknitting it isn't quite as painful.
And once you know how a particular yarn behaves on your machine, write it down. Those notes become invaluable for future projects.
Give Yourself Time to Learn
Machine knitting has a learning curve.
Give yourself weeks, and realistically a few months, before deciding how you feel about it.
Your hands need to learn the movements. Your eyes need to learn what correctly formed stitches look like on the machine. Eventually you'll recognize the sound and feel of a carriage moving properly.
You'll also become much better at diagnosing problems.
In the beginning, a jammed carriage can feel completely mysterious. Later, you'll have a mental checklist of likely causes and know where to look first.
That experience can't be rushed.
Start With Something Simple
Your first project doesn't need cables, lace, Fair Isle, five colors and a complicated neckline.
In fact, please don't do that to yourself.
Start with something small and plain.
I have often recommended simple baby garments because they are small enough not to become overwhelming but still teach many of the basic skills needed for larger garments.
No babies in your life? Knit for charity.
The purpose of those early projects isn't to produce your masterpiece. It's to learn casting on, shaping, removing stitches, binding off and finishing without investing days of work in each experiment.
A Good Dealer Can Shorten the Learning Curve
Machine knitters have always been very good at helping one another. Clubs, seminars, classes and online machine-knitting communities can be tremendously useful.
But there is also enormous value in having someone experienced actually watch you use your machine.
Sometimes a beginner can struggle for hours with something an experienced machine knitter recognizes in seconds.
If you have access to a knitting-machine dealer who teaches, take advantage of it.
A good lesson early on can prevent a lot of frustration later.
Go to www.silverreed.com/ and find your closest dealer.
You Don't Have to Choose Between Hand and Machine Knitting
Learning machine knitting doesn't mean giving up hand knitting.
Most successful machine knitters who also hand knit continue doing both.
Why wouldn't they?
There are projects and techniques that are wonderful to knit by hand. There are others where the knitting machine is wonderfully efficient. And there are projects where combining the two produces the best result.
I've made pieces containing machine knitting, hand knitting and crochet in the same project.
There are no knitting police coming to inspect your sweater.
Use the tool that gives you the fabric, construction and creative result you want.
So, Is Machine Knitting Cheating?
No.
But it isn't hand knitting, either.
Machine knitting is its own craft.
The machine gives you speed and capabilities that hand knitting doesn't. In exchange, it asks you to learn an entirely different way of working with yarn and knitted fabric.
Learn the machine for what it can do rather than what you think it should do.
Then, once you're comfortable with it, bring all that hand knitting knowledge back.
That's when things get really interesting.
Written by Angelika Burles. Copyright Knitcraft Inc. All rights reserved. This chart and guide may be printed for personal use. Please do not reproduce it on another website or in commercial or noncommercial printed materials without permission.