Thursday, November 01, 2007

Bond Antepenultimate Knitting Machine

I've been knitting a top-down cardigan in fine and annoying yarn, and somewhere in the middle of the long, tedious circular-knit, stockingette-stitch, needle-size 0 sleeves, I began to think about my knitting machine. I have a Bond "Sweater Machine" bought cheap on eBay in 2000. At that time, there were many knitters posting "Bond Incredible Sweater Machine" how-to's, hints, and tips on newsgroups and mailing lists. I learned how to use the machine and made several sweaters, then put it away, mostly because I had plenty of knitwear.

I had a chance to buy a professional knitting machine a couple of years ago, but decided that was a large, expensive object I could do without. Nowadays, it seems the better consumer-market machines, such as Passap and Brother, have disappeared. The industrial machines are still available, and at the other end of the scale, the toy-like "Ultimate Sweater Machine." (That must make my model the "Bond Antepenultimate Sweater Machine.") Evidently, interest in home knitting machines is down. There are far fewer Internet resources available now than when I was learning, and disgruntled Bond owners are unloading their machines on eBay for low prices.

I really enjoy my little plastic machine. Although it is limited, it taught me how machine knitting works, and it will crank out the stockingette stitch fabric at a good clip. (Unfortunately, I'm committed to finishing the troublesome top-down cardigan by hand.) This week, I've figured out how to knit intarsia, Fair Isle, cable and ribbing, too. It's always fun to try new things.

I've put together an annotated list of "Machine Knitting Links," because so many of the sites coming up on Google Searches are moribund, with dead links and "404 Errors."

Advice, particularly on Bond Knitting Machines Commercial Web Sites With Good Information Lists of Links Machine Knitting Reviews and Overviews Interesting Ideas and Inspirations

2 comments:

Susan said...

Have you visited http://www.needlesofsteel.org.uk/
They have collected all the free machine knitting patterns they could find on the web and put them here. It is a very useful site.

Rebecca Clayton said...

Wow, Susan, this is a great site, new and quite current. Thanks so much for the reference!