Sunday, January 13, 2013

Swaving and knitting pouches

My progress on learning to swave has been good. Overall,  I am not yet as fast as with ordinary knitting, but stress on my hands is less, allow more knitting to be done in a knitting session. Individual stitches are faster, but the process is not smooth and continuous.   Decreases and repair of mistakes are much slower and suck up any time gained by making stitches faster.

The quality/consistency and tightness of the fabric is the is as good or better than I can achieve with long gansey needles.  Since socks are hard to do on long needles, this is the very best sock fabric that I have ever produced.

Can swaving be done with Shetland style leather knitting pouches?  The pouch can be used to hold the prick as it is rotated to produce single stitches. However, the pouch has too much friction to allow the spring of the fabric to drive a continuous process as with a knitting sheath.  And, the angles are wrong.  It is not ergonomic.

Knitting pouches are the tool of choice for knitting fine, soft fabrics including fine lace and soft Fair Isle.

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