The project is an afghan called Stornoway (yes, I know that's in Scotland not Ireland), designed by Anita Grahn, which you can see here on Ravelry. Below is one of the pictures included with the pattern, from the Ravelry site.
So first off, let's just take a moment to admire how gorgeous this is and, ahem, how
Before I do that though I'll briefly share a bit about the construction of the afghan. The centre rectangle, or body of the afghan, is knitted first - you can see from the pictures above and below that it is a type of textured checkerboard pattern. The cables are part of a wide border that is knit all the way around the perimeter once the rectangle is complete. The corners of that cable border, which are exquisitely designed, are achieved with short rows (while at the same time maintaining the cable pattern). NO ONE is allowed to talk to me when I'm turning those corners unless they or the house is on fire. Thankfully there are only four corners, and I've now completed three. Here is my progress as of this morning.
At the very top of the picture above is the beginning of the border (the white yarn is a temporary chain cast on), and obviously at the bottom of the picture where the stitches are still on the needle is where I am currently working - so just a few more repeats of the pattern, one more corner, and then I graft the end to the beginning. The knitting needle that appears in the photo up the side of the body of the afghan is holding live stitches - one of which is knit together with a border stitch every other row. That should give you a general idea of the construction of the afghan.
I have had plenty of time as I have worked my way through this project by hand to review my decision about whether or not it would have been possible and/or worthwhile to knit this afghan by machine, so let me share some of those thoughts with you to hopefully inspire a conversation.
Yarn was the first consideration - I knit this with the exact yarn called for in the pattern, and in the exact colour the model was knit, which was Knit Picks Wool of the Andes, in Noble Heather. This yarn is 100% Peruvian Highland Wool and according to the ball band knits up at 4.5-5 sts = 1" on #6 to 9 needles (4.0 to 5.5 mm). So for my mid gauge machine this is an ideal weight.
The second consideration was just practical - do I even have enough needles available on the needle bed to accommodate the body of the afghan? No problem there - the cast on is fewer than 150 stitches.
The third consideration was the checkerboard textured pattern, which is basically alternating squares of stocking stitch and garter stitch. The garter stitch squares would have required me to reform about half the stitches on every other row. Not really a big deal with a multi-pronged tool. Or you could just knit a plain rectangle and forget the checkerboard pattern, but I like it and didn't want to do that.
The fourth consideration was that the pattern instructions for the body of the afghan required that you knit the body to a certain length without actually telling you how many rows or pattern repeats that would require. That's not uncommon with hand knit patterns, but is my only criticism of this pattern. It is essential to get that number right on this pattern because after you complete the rectangle you then have to pick up a specified number of stitches all along the perimeter, as these live stitches are what you use to connect the border with the body of the afghan. And that specific number of perimeter stitches is because there is a specific number of cable pattern repeats around each long and short side of the rectangle. So I consulted the comments on Ravelry, and did some math, and was able to determine the correct number of rows/repeats for the length of the afghan body in order to have enough rows to pick up the number of stitches I needed.
So I think I actually could have knit at least the body of this afghan on the machine without any trouble, and if I were to ever knit it again (and I would not rule that out as a possibility), I definitely would.
The cabled border, however, is quite another issue. Cables are certainly possible on the knitting machine, but with this pattern, as you can see from the photo, there is a LOT of cable crossing. And then there is the matter of the live stitches on the perimeter to which the cabled border is attached. I think you could dispense with those live stitches and just hang a selvedge stitch from the side every other row, or you could just knit the cabled border on its own and seam it to the body. And the short-rowed 90 degree turns - again certainly possible on the machine but I'm not sure it would be any faster than hand knitting? My conclusion - definitely yes to machine knitting the rectangle body of the afghan, and maybe try a swatch of the cabled border on the machine to see how tedious it might be to actually execute. But my intuition says stick to hand knitting for that part of the project.
What do you think? If you're a hand knitter as well as a machine knitter, have you ever spent your entire project time on a hand knit thinking about how you could have machine knit it instead?
Nancy
