One of the great things about belonging to a machine knitting club is the opportunity to knit with your fellow club members. Yesterday, was such a day. Our instructor for the Lace Workshop was our own Jackie Willard. Jackie is an extremely talented and knowledgeable hand and machine knitter. Experienced on both the Passap E-6000 and Brother machines, she really shines when it comes to knitting lace on the Brother.

When our club first started Jackie took a lace hand knit pattern from a well known magazine, Knit N' Style and wrote the pattern in Design-A-Knit for the club members to knit. That is Design-A-Knit 6, the program without the lace tool. With her help we were able to knit a garment that incorporated the lace carriage, K-carriage and garter carriage. After that everyone knew we had a very talented knitter in our club.

For the Lace Workshop we worked on one lace patterns from Stitch World to create a short-rowed lace shawl in wool ray. As you can see from the video everyone had lots of questions, and Jackie's experience with lace permitted her to respond with ease.

The attached video is just a sneak peak at the fun we had at the workshop. It is the intent of the Sophisticated Stitches club to hold future machine knitting workshops on different topics.

For more information about our club you can contact me at, donmarie@fast.net or Tammy Noble at knitandsew44@yahoo.com.

Regards,

Donna

Websites for Machine Knitters

Dear fellow machine knitters, Like many knitters I belong to various Internet groups for crafting. Recently, I came across a post that mentioned a "blog" that featured videos for beginning machine knitters. The blog is http://diananatters.blogspot.com/, so I hope those who read this blog will check it out.

Furthermore, I also came across a post that offered "free" embroidery software. http://www.lorileedesigns.com/SEU.html#anchor_117

That's right, FREE embroidery software. Of course the buzz on the list was how could anyone offer free machine embroidery software. There had to be a "catch". In deed there is a "catch". You can only use the software while on the Internet. That's not a bad "catch" when you consider how much machine embroidery software costs. I know MasterWorks II Professional costs over $1,000 and the only way I could afford it was to upgrade from my old software, PE Design.

Machine embroidery is a great way to embellish a machine knitted item. Check out my pink on pink machine embroidered and machine knitted lace trimmed summer top.

Regards from the Sophisticated Stitches Club,

Donna