I bought another knitting machine – a Brother 930 this time. This one is an electronic machine and I am pretty excited about it! I had already bought some knitting machine yarn from the same lady, and she gave me a pretty good deal on this machine. I mean honestly, wait until you see all the goodies it came with!
So let’s get into what this Brother 930 came with!
A Brother KG95 Garter Carriage
If you’ve never used a knitting machine, it’s important to know they only form stitches in one direction. A knitting machine on it’s own can only knit stockinette. Sure, there can be patterning in those stitches but you can’t knit garter stitch unless you’re willing to do some pretty extensive hand manipulation. Knitting ribbing requires either some hand manipulation of the stitches or a ribber to attach to your machine (this machine did come with the KR 850 Ribber as well).
What the garter carriage does is allow all of that to be done on the machine without any intervention. You set it up and that little guy will chug away back and forth across your machine, knitting and purling as the program tells it to. Is it fast? Apparently not, but does it matter if you can be doing something else while the garter carriage does its thing? Of course not.
A Brother KG93 Garter Carriage
Yes that’s right. A second garter carriage. This one was not in regular use so the cover didn’t quite cover it. So yeah, it’s a little dusty but that’s okay. We can clean it.
A PPD or Pattern Programing Device
So way back in the day’s of compact floppy disks, you could create a stitch pattern on your computer and save it to a diskette. Then you could pop the diskette into this gadget and your machine would knit the pattern! You could also purchase patterns that other designers created on diskette and use those too. There are some diskettes that came with it, but it will be a while before I have time to really look at them.
But wait – there’s more!
A bunch of accessories, including spare needles for the Garter Carriage which is a good thing since they are hard to find and cost around $30 each.
An absolute pile of punch cards!
Now I don’t think this machine uses them, but my Singer SK700 can! Plus I’m just tickled to have a bin that is exactly the right size to store them.
When you can, buy your machine from a knitter.
The difference between buying a knitting machine from someone who used it, and buying a machine from someone who did not is remarkable. First, she kept her machine covered. So yes some things got dusty but most are remarkably clean.
The second garter carriage is dusty, you could see it in the picture above.
So is the main or K carriage. The Ribber Carriage looks the same.
And the Lace Carriage. But they can be cleaned no problem.
The sponge bar will need to be replaced (probably on the ribber too). It is quite flat and crumbly as old sponge gets. It should be around 3 times as thick.
So for the next week or so, I will be spending my evening cleaning up this Brother 930 and all of it’s beautiful accessories. I can’t wait to start using it.
Do you knit or crochet? Or do you have a knitting machine yourself and if you do – do you use it? Let me know in the comments.
