Designaknit 8 - part 2
Designaknit 8 Pro
I have now drafted another design into Designaknit for Palazzo Pants so that I hopefully utilize the very light linen and cotton fabric I did a test square for. For the Palazzo pants I used a pattern from one of the Brother orientated magazines – to be precise it was Machine Knitting Fashion – Issue 13 = Design 8. I entered in the tensions for the Brother as per my tension swatch and began.
Brother 940 with Motor
The download to my Brother 940 was easy ie after connecting my no 2 cable – a serial cable that I used with the USB adapter ie the blue one, bought years ago – fairly straightforward. You have to go to the actual knitting Pattern window to do the download, this is different from DK7 but not insurmountable. I eventually downloaded (after uploading any patterns from 901 forward back into DK – under a new Brother folder.) This cable with this machine is a interactive one ie it knits and if you have DK8 speech option on – it tells you when to increase etc etc.
Motors and Designaknit
However, I have a motor on my Brother and initially it works with the motors but the speed of the motor seems to cancel out the interactive screen – it’s ok for a minute or 2 then it just disconnects – not to worry though – you can still follow it by manually updating, and this I did by jumping forward to the next instruction and by reading how many rows had to go – its quicker for me this way than by doing it all by muscle power.
Very straight forward indeed and I had my 4 pieces knitted in no time, I did not do the pockets as the fabric was too thin. Now for the fun part – and this is in no way anything to do with DesignaKnit – the pieces were all too long –that was entirely my fault - I simply entered in the pattern as it was, and did not check the size etc ie length of each piece nor did I press my fabric well enough – and lets face it – fine floaty fabrics are tricky anyway, and I had to use the fine knit bar with this job.
Cut and Sew Job looms
Enter my overlocker which I used to cut the bits to length after pressing and measuring them, By that time I used the Hague Linker to stitch the pants together, love my Hague, and with thin yarn it behaves itself.
End Result
End result is that I have a floaty pair of Palazzo Pants that will be comfortable to wear as they are made of linen and cotton.
So far the moral of this story is ensure your measurements are correct and definitely press your tension square (especially with fine linen yarns) to how you want it to be. I did not use the fabric I produced for the original design as that type of pants/slacks would have required more structure.
I wonder!
I wonder if there is anyway to get that measurement silhouette that DK gives you when you enter your sizes to see if you input designs fit or not…now that would be good! Oh wait a minute, there are no trousers, pants designs in the original set – in this day and age, I wonder why – they are so easy to knit.
