A couple of weeks ago I ordered a pair of garter bars for the Bond made by Kriskrafter:

They arrived just after I packed the Bond away to clear the dining table for some visitors, so I figured trying them out would have to wait until the next time I had a project to make.

While on the train on the way home from picking up the freebie machine I read the old manuals and realised that the way you do fair isle is really quite easy. I hadn’t got that far in the book for the machine I’d bought, because at the beginning there was already so much to learn.

Having taken over the dining table again so I could look over the freebie Bond and combine it with the one I’d bought, I figured I may as well try a small fair isle project – and give the garter bar a go too. Though not for making garter stitch but to do spaced decreases across the bed.

So I picked some yarn and a simple beanie pattern from the Bond manual, and got knitting.

I tried a simple zig zag as I could do that without worrying about a chart. The fair isle was pretty straight forward, though I had to learn by trial and error that whichever yarn has the greater number of stitches in a row has to be the one you knit with the carriage. When hand knitting fair isle I tend to make the floats a little tight. On the machine I’ve made them too loose, but now that I know I can adjust for that.

The garter bar worked well. Getting it to line up with all the needles takes a bit of fiddling, but it makes decreasing (and increasing) across a row so much faster and easier than doing it by hand.

Now that I’ve done a hat, I really want to make something larger. I have enough of the blue and brown yarns left to make a vest. Hmm…

(But that did have to wait. I had sewing to do. Lots of sewing.)

(If you’re a bit bored with Bond posts, don’t worry. As so often happens, I have posts about one craft lined up to publish while I’ve actually moved on to another – this time sewing up costumes. I don’t want to blog about one of the costumes until after the event, but the other should be good blog material… pun not intended. In the meantime…)

The new (design-wise) Bond came in this box:

The old came in a long, slim box, since it didn’t split in two like the newer style machines. (You can see the box in a photo below.) Obviously I wasn’t going to get the old bed into the new bed’s box. I could get the two connected pieces of the new style one into the old box – just – but there was no room for the carriages and all the bits and pieces.

I needed a carry case of some sort, so I went to eBay and searched through the categories. I found a camera bag that might have worked if it had been longer, and a tool bag with the same problem. I found bags for cricket bats, but they were too flimsy. Finally I looked in the musical instrument section and found keyboard carriers.

$50 (including postage) later I had this:

It’s exactly the width of the old Bond’s box:

It’s padded but not rigid, so I’m using the old Bond box to protect the beds. I had put all the tools and such in separate zip lock bags then into another cardboard box, but the bags are fiddly to get into while you’re working. So I measured up the remaining space in the keyboard bag and shopped around until I found this toolbox:

And Paul discovered that the carriages fit perfectly into those plastic shoe storage boxes with room for the keyplates as well:

Now that I’ve finished incorporating the new old Bond with the old new Bond, and got everything to fit nicely into one convenient carry bag… someone has offered to give me another Bond. And that has given me another crazy Bond modification idea…

Could I rig up a second bed in front, and do circular knitting?

Part two of incorporating the old Bond involved me fixing things on the old bed, and a revelation regarding wax.

First up was the sticker strip marking out the needles. Using Illustrator, I recreated the strip and printed it on sticky-backed paper. But this wouldn’t stick. A previous owner had waxed just about everything on the machine. So I removed all the needles and put the bed in the bath to give it a good scrub with soap and hot water. It helped, but the strip still didn’t stick very well. It still lifted off in places. I needed another solution.

But then I began to wonder if I should bother with a strip at all. The boxes of the sticker strip align with the gaps between the needles, not the needles themselves, and I find at times I can’t remember if a box is supposed to represent the left or right needle. A mark that was in line with the needles would be better. Looking closer, I saw that the carriage and needles don’t rub the back edge, behind the needles. And, of course, either side of the channel at the wider, front part.

So I bought some fleuro yellow nailpolish and, at every fifth needle, marked both places. I don’t know how well this will wear, but it’ll be easy to replace.

Next I dealt with the sponge bar problem mentioned in my last post. The solutions I’d come up with was to buy some foam draft strip and cut the foam away where the strip would cross the bridge between bed sections.

However, the plastic bars that hold the needles and sponge bar down crushed and broke the draft strip backing at the bridge, so I still had the problem of the first needle in each section being too loose. The rest of the needles now moved with about the same freedom as the ones on the new style bed, so at least that was an improvement.

The only solution I could think of for these loose end needles was to cut a very thin sliver of the draft strip and stick it along the needle channel, under the needle. This holds the needle up a little, but the carriage still works and I was able to knit without any problems.

Having already drilled into the old bed, I must admit I’m tempted to get a grinder and remove the bridges between each section so a sponge bar can be laid across the whole thing. But it seems a bit too risky. One mistake and the whole bed could be ruined.

These last weeks of Bond knitting I’ve been looking at the Ravelry “Bonders” forum more often, and someone mentioned Cheryl Brunette’s tutorials over on YouTube and that she talks about where you’re supposed to apply the wax. Turns out I was right: it’s impossible to wax the keyplates properly with the chunky ring of wax that comes with the machine.

She suggests a few alternatives, one which I had on hand: some old partly used birthday cake candles. Once I’d waxed the right surfaces of the keyplates they ran smoother and quieter.

So now MEGABOND has wax where it’s supposed to go, and less where it’s not. The needles aren’t too lose or tight and every fifth one is marked. All I needed now was a way to store and carry it…

Two weeks ago, in one of those neat co-incidences of timing, a Raveller in Melbourne posted that she was giving away an old Bond. She’d taken most of the needles out of to fix another machine, but there was a complete extender kit and I’m always keen to add length to mine. So I put my hand up for it. After a trip into town to pick it up, I was the happy owner of this:

It was intresting to see the subtle changes that had occurred over the years. The cast on hems were sturdier. These had breaks in them, but could be cut down to make smaller ones if I ever needed to. There was an old as well as new carriage – having two carriages would make working stripes in two colours much faster as I could work from each side and not have to change the yarn all the time. The books were very clear, and actually instructed you to pull the elastic out, not snip it. (Which might explain why the hems had breaks in them. I suspect they were never well suited to this treatment).

The needle beds were made from little sections bolted together just as with the newer model, but on this one the whole length was held together with one rod. This made it sturdier than my machine, which divides in two so it can fit into an easily carried box, and each extender kit is attached with a single bolt so that the whole middle section is a bit wobbly – which is why I eventually screwed the whole lot down onto a length of particle board.

Discovering this, I was tempted to clean up the old bed and move all the needles from my Bond into it, but the other big reason I’d attached my Bond to a board was that the clamps that came with it didn’t work. When I tightened them they pulled the machine down and forward, so something was at a wrong angle somewhere.

So I tried the old clamps and hey presto! They worked just fine. I compared them later, and the old one has a smaller angle than 90 degrees. That must make all the difference.

Eliminating the wobbliness and having clamps that worked was a significant improvement. I wouldn’t have a heavy board attached to my machine so I’d regain some of the portability. I could use this old section as the middle section, then attach the two halves of the newer Bond pieces to the sides, adding all the needles from my extender kits and the one I’d adopted the old Bond for. Which makes 186 needles in total!

Lots of cleaning and moving of needles later I hit my first challenge: the rod of the old Bond protruded out one side, making it impossible to attach extension pieces. Yet this machine had come with an extender kit, which must have attached somehow. A close inspection revealed that the rod had been cut off at one end and pushed to one side to free up the hole, which aligns with the bolt hole of the extender piece. I’d have to do the same with the other side.

But to keep the join as sturdy as possible, I got Paul to cut the rod just short enough that it still fits within the hole. Then I drilled new holes for the bolts that attached the new Bond halves.

But when it came to locking the needles into the old bed, I found a flaw in the old design. The cavity for the sponge bar in the old bed doesn’t run the entire length of each piece as in the new bed. Little dividers at the edges mean the sponge bar has to be cut into sections. This means that the ends of each sponge bar move when needles slide against it – and the result is the end needles slide more freely than the middle ones. I’m considering how I might fix this. I figure the sponge bar (or whatever I use in it’s place) needs to be attached to something thin and rigid. A strip of card or plastic, perhaps.

Other than that, the operation was a success. And so I can now introduce you to… THE MEGABOND!

As always, working with the Bond leads to me making ‘improvements’. This time it was new cast on hems:

A year ago, when I last set up the Bond, I found a YouTube tutorial on making cast on hems that could be removed quickly and easily. The plastic hem that comes with the machine is inflexible and fragile, and has to be attached with a strip of elastic, which must be cut off later. Snipping the elastic is time consuming and there’s the danger you’ll snip the yarn by mistake. One way around this is to add a few rows of waste yarn then a row of smooth, thin cotton ‘ravel cord’ that can be pulled out sideways. But why double up on the work, when you can have a hem that you can attach with ravel cord straight away? And make them any size you want.

I made a few of these knitted hems and blogged about it. Here’s the plastic hem and the home-made one:

But these hems had a few problems of their own – mainly that the rod weights kept working their way through the stitches at the ends and falling out. It seemed to me that a fabric pouch would work better. They’d still need some loops to hang the hem onto the machine with, but I figured I could just stitch them on.

So I gathered together some leftover curtain backing, thread and acrylic yarn:

I cut the fabric to the length of a rod weight with a seam allowance and enough depth to fold in half lengthways and hold two rods:

I folded it and placed it on the machine to mark where the loops would go:

Then I created loops with the acrylic yarn, using a rod as a guide to keep the stitches the same size. I used backstitch and sewed through the previous stitch in the hope this would stop the stitches pulling if they caught on something:

Then I turned it inside out and sewed the seams, leaving a gap at the top of one side end to insert the rod weights:

Turned it right side out. Inserted rods…

… and tried it out. Hanging it on the machine was a simple matter of lining up the loops. Very easy:

All I had to do then was knit a row of ravel cord then begin my project. Easy peasy. And removing it was just a matter of pulling the ravel cord out.

I was so pleased with it I immediately made a longer one. They are more time-consuming to make than the knitted ones, but the time saving is more than made up for when using them for a project.

Now I’m eyeing at my substitutes for claw weights…

… and wondering if I can improve them by using this fabric pocket idea.

One of my favourite gifts I received on my 40th was a collection of hand spun and commercial yarn in warm greys and naturals. I made these slippers out of some of the commercial yarn after I discovered it felted beautifully:

But I hadn’t found the right project for rest and the handspun until now. After knitting up the pieces for the Cowly Vest I decided to make a long ribbed scarf out of the gift yarn. The Bond being a single bed machine, you have to do the ribbing by hand with a latch hook. Since the handspun was quite clingy, I decided to skip the stitches that would be latched rather than unravel them at the end. You can see the lines where the skips are here:

I was determined to keep knitting until I couldn’t make stripes any more. The scarf just kept growing and growing. It wound up almost 3 metres long:

By then I’d worked out that latching up those ribs was going to make a very tight fabric. Firstly because the tension was clearly a bit tight already – I should have used a bigger keyplate. Secondly, just skipping a stitch means there’s less yarn to make a new loop with, so you get a very tiny, tight stitch.

That left me with two options: drop a second column of stitches for each rib… down all 3 meters of scarf, or leave the strip of fabric as stocking stitch and make something else out of it.

I admit, I was already favouring the latter because the strips were whispering ‘awesome sleeves!’ to me.

(Though no matter what I did, I had a LOT of ends to sew in.)

In the meantime, I’d been collecting together patterns and ideas for garments made of rectangles, including a few I’d already made. The Jo Sharp Origami Bolero is a cross between a shrug and the Circular Shrug (rav link):

After a bit of measuring and math I worked out that if I halved the strip and sewed it together it was almost exactly the right length for the sleeve, and only slightly wider.

That left a body and collar to knit. There was a little of the grey commercial yarn left, but not enough for either piece. I had some balls of natural yarn leftover from other projects that would probably do the collar. I just needed yarn for the body, so I called that reliable local, Bendigo Woollen Mills and ordered some Luxury in Bark, a colour close to the mid grey of the commercial gift yarns.

So once again, using yarn meant buying more yarn. Funny how that happens.