Chains

These chain designs were my first explorations with 1-2-Punch. Knitting on a punch card operated flat-bed knitting machine imposes some strict constraints, but I enjoy the challenge of creating within technological limitations and design restrictions.

The machine uses punch cards to automate the colour selection process, unpunched holes will knit colour 1 and punched holes knit colour 2. Punch cards do not have a row length requirement but are 24 stitches wide, so any pattern produced will be a 24 stitch repeating pattern horizontally. I have found it useful to repeat the pattern vertically as well, to reduce the length of the punch card needed to fill a larger area.

The method I have used to create colourwork is a stranded technique similar to a fairisle knit. This looks great on the front side of the fabric, the selected colour is in plain knit on the front. However the other colour is left on the back side of the fabric as a strand of yarn (or a float). Long runs of the same colour leave long floats on the back of the fabric which can cause tension issues and catch during wear.

All that in mind, a pattern needs to avoid long runs of any one colour, be 24 stitches repeating horizontally and be as short as possible vertically.

Chains are an ideal candidate for this sort of pattern as they can be aligned creating sort of chain stripes and they have a short vertical repeat. The main issue I had was large runs of a single colour, the process was mostly about finding creative ways to avoid this.

It’s easy to make a simple knit chain, but this leaves large floats everywhere on the pattern

Click image to show floats

Adding a second chain, so we now have a 12 stitch repeating pattern. There are no longer any long floats

Here’s a swatch of the fabric produced

Another way of reducing the spacing between the chains is by creating a chain along the diagonal. A nice feature of this chain is that it is in a sense one continuous chain. To edit each link in the chain just follow along the chain and after 9 links you will be back at the first edited link

Click to change to square links

I wanted to take advantage of the finer detail I could make if I used a larger scale. One chain across the whole 24 stitches means finer resolution, smoother curvature in the chain and smaller gaps between links.

Unfortunately there are still large areas of the pattern which result in long floats

Click to show floats

My solution has been to introduce a 1x1 checkerboard as a background which removes all long floats from the pattern. Visually this checkerboard acts as a median colour between colour 1 and 2. Essentially providing a 3rd colour to play with

This pattern became my chain jumper, a snug raglan sweater entirely covered in chains

I have played around with the idea of a 1x1 checkerboard acting as a third colour. If colour 1 is white and colour 2 is black, then areas of checkerboard look grey from a distance.

I took a photo of a chain and edited it to be heavily pixelated and greyscale. Then values were assigned either colour 1, checkerboard, or colour 2. The pixels are translated across to a knit pattern which (from a fair distance) looks like a photo of a chain

The chain photo was used to create at shirt with a graphic stripe