In Which I Confess my Mess

OK. So I've been blathering on about these knitting machines and them totally taking over my house and attention. Well, just to give you some idea of the chaos that my house has become...


First up is the LK150, the machine I've had for about 10 years. My parents gave it to me as a Christmas gift, and I never did much with it. I wasn't good with it, I went to the classes I was offered, but it was so difficult to get through my head and get knitting off it, that I never really used it.

Until now.

It's so amazing what a new sponge bar and a good cleaning will do for a knitting machine! Why, oh why is that not in the manual??
What you see is two separate projects on the LK150, one is green and destined to become a summer cotton short-sleeve sweater for me. The other is pink, grey, and white, and will become a gift.

Also in the picture is my pile of ironing on the ironing board behind the machine (not very likely to get ironed like that, is it?) and my humongous warping mill. I love my diagonal check basement floor!

Here's a peek at the sweater I started and abandoned, but am going to pick up again really really soon... It's Jo Sharp dk cotton, and I love the feel of it! This machine is awesome for its simplicity (as far as machines go) and ability to handle standard hand-knitting yarns.
Next to be infected, I mean infested, was my dining room.

Not content to have one machine in the basement, I brought home another. This one belongs to a coworker, and it has sat collectirng dust in his basement for over 12 years. It's a Brother Electroknit KH910. It's electric. Ooooohhh. It does patterning... ooooOOOOOOoooo.

And it was filthy. Eeeeewwwww. Twelve years is plenty of time for oil to get hard and gooey with yarn fibers and make a kind of black gunk in and on every moving part in the machine.

You can see the bottle of rubbing alcohol and paper towels on the floor underneath it, and the box containing its ribber over on the left. It's not done yet, and I only received its new sponge bar yesterday. The pink invoice on the needle bed is for the sponge bar and the spare needles I ordered. This machine prefers laceweight to fingering yarn, and would probably take sport, but might fight it.

It's getting there, but it's not done yet. I promised to clean it up, and if I didn't want it, I would help him sell it. There are lots of awesome extras, but...

There's another.

It's in my living room. And it's the one I've recently fallen in love with. It makes such perfectly logical sense to me, more so than either of the others, and I'm working my way through the tutorials in the book.

Meet Pinky.
This one is a Passap Duomatic, and is a double-bed machine, which means it has two needle beds, at 90-degrees to each other, and can knit tubing, ribbing, or flat. The pretty book on the chair is my manual, which I copied in full to be free to make notes and highlight, and tape samples into. You can see I plopped it right in front of the fireplace, and have been going at it with several cones of yarn, trying everything. This one prefers finer yarns, too, but takes sport better than the Brother (in my experience, limited though it is!)

This machine is too much fun.

Though I did break two needles figuring it out. And spares aren't that easy to come by, either. Rats.

So in the true spirit of confession, I'll close with a picture of the box from the Pinkie, sitting in my dining room. Still. I need to haul it out to the attic of the garage and hope a mouse doesn't move into it. The scrapbooking bag is for scale, and is about 15" square.
I need to find my house. This is getting crazy!