Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Christmas cleaning?

well, I don’t really want to give you the wrong impression and if you’re kinda squeamish about grunge, click off right now. Okay, don’t say I didn’t warn you...the other day, I was swatching for a lace garment for the next issue and I was using my favourite machine, my standard gauge Silver Reed - I knit most of my stuff on this machine and if you’re actually counting, that’s at least 20 plus garments just in the past year. Now, lace can be a bit temperamental, I’ll admit, but once you get everything right, it’s a walk in the park.
So, with the lace carriage, if the same stitch/needle is dropping or hanging up over the gate peg, first thing to do is change the needle. Well, I had two stitches, same ones, that kept messing up on the swatch, so after taking the swatch off, I went to change the needles, even though they looked fine. So, pull out the sponge bar, pull the needle forward, close the latch, push down on the hook end of the needle to push the other end up through the needle slot and yank it out... there’s gunk (gunch? how the heck do you spell that word?) on the end of the needle, like fluff, but worse! yuk! oh, oh! (grimace)
I belong to the school that believes if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! if it still runs, run it, faster, even! You know, change the odd needle, add a drop of oil here and there; once in a blue moon, you might need a new sponge bar - but save the old one, just in case. So, I do know it’s been quite some time since my baby’s had what you call a deep cleaning where all the needles come out and it gets serious.
Now, coincidentally, I have one of those Dyson vacs that has the clear, see-through canister that you can see all the crud that you’re vacuuming - it’s quite fascinating in a disgusting sort of way at first - and I had (seriously, this is no joke) cleaned IT out, washed the canister and the filter last weekend after doing my weekly household chores - not that I do that on a regular basis, don’t get me wrong - I was probably trying to avoid doing something else requiring a little more brain concentration - and did it just because. The only reason I mention this is I brought the super-clean Dyson up to my knitter, thinking I could just give it a quick suck job and things would be cool - oh my, stuff started coming up, but I could see that it was stuck around the needles - no help for it but to pull them all, because no matter how powerful the suction, the crud is wedged under the needles. I even had to use the latch tool to dig in and hook stuff out... well, after all 200 needles were out and not a single scrap of lint left in the needle slots, I looked at the vacuum and couldn’t believe what came out of my poor machine...
is this what they call over-sharing?
Anyway, the purple lace cardi is done - it's beautiful, and me and my baby are happy!!

2 comments:

Lynne said...

I'm glad you shared. I never would have guessed this much lint would be in the machine!

Cindy said...

My theory on cleaning is when you do finally clean, you can really tell that you did. None of that cleaning so often it's hard to tell if you did or not. I think this cleaning job qualifies. And with my output on the machine, I think I've got another year to go before a deep clean, which is nice to know!