air knitting...

The other day I mentioned knitted dishcloths and sort of admitted to making two under the guise of helping my friend with her Silver/DAK (DesignaKnit) issues. Still on that bent, and, trying to get ready for my next lace, button-front, long hoodie, I wasted the last two days on DAK. No worries, more on that another time, but today, in order to salvage the day and feel like I accomplished something, I thought, what the hay, might as well knit a dishcloth! Christine wanted to know why I was using fairisle to do a tuck stitch? Well, it was Janet’s emailed file that I was using, and I just brought it into my DAK - she has DAK9 and windows10. I have DAK8 and windows7. All of which, if you don’t have DAK, tune me out for a minute or so. 

Anyway, I saw the file, it’s 81 sts X 180 rows (the checkerboard diamond one) but she didn’t say how, why or what? So, I just left it as fairisle, no big deal. He/DAK doesn’t know that you set your carriage for tuck (heh, heh!) - all you really care about is that he is selecting the needles that are to be tucked - I did some air knitting before the actual ‘with yarn’ deal - that’s where the front arm is removed,

air EON

the stitch pattern downloaded, the needles you want are in work position, set the carriage to tuck and pass over the needles. Because the arm is off, you can see what needles are coming to the tuck position and what needles are coming out to the stockinette position as you are passing the carriage across. This way you can know that everything is set right, without having to go through all the deal of waste yarn and the fixed cast-on and then finding out you’ve got things the wrong way, especially on electronic machines, even if you don’t have DAK!

P.S. Make sure to check a row that is more or less than every other needle tuck! ‘Cuz it could be either one!

air tuck 

The knitted stitches are the needles that come out (tuck ones don’t come out so far),so you’re looking for more of those side-by-side like the second photo.