My New Toys!

On Friday evening, I took Meg and we went to Future Shop, and bought my first laptop! A Gateway NV53, with 15.6" monitor, 4GB memory, 500GB HDD.....my brother assured me that it was a great computer at a great price. It's been interesting getting used to it, and Windows 7. I did my last post here using it too. I have trouble highlighting text and moving it, and sometimes I press something and the whole page just disappears, LOL. But, after I write this, I am excited to be able to take it downstairs and use an online version of the instruction manual for my other new toy: A Singer 155 chunky knitting machine! This is my 4th machine (although I had bought one other machine for my parents). So, for those of you keeping track, I have a Singer 327 (standard gauge, 4.5mm), Singer LK150 (mid-gauge, 6.5mm), KnitSmart (8mm), and Singer 155 (Bulky gauge, 9mm). The "mm" is the spacing between the needles. Only the 327 has a ribber, but the 155 does have a ribber available, I'll just have to be patient! The things that made me want this machine, is that it's a "real" bulky knitting machine...it has a 12st punchcard, and can do tuck, slip, punch lace, and fair isle. It also has a knit contour! It's a separate piece that you place onto the left end of the bed, behind the needles. I'm wondering if I can set it next to the LK150 and have it work with it too.

The Singer 155 will have quit a bit of overlap of suitable yarns with the LK150, but it can go much thicker, and just has many more features. Yes, I can easily use worsted weight with the LK, but the knit contour means I can take a schematic from a magazine (and I just picked up a pile of Interweave Knits from Value Village!), and make it so much quicker, and then have the pattern to use again, with another yarn.

When I went in to see the machine, I was surprised at how ....bulky, LOL, it was. The carriage looks huge, and I kept thinking the needles looked too far apart, or were missing every other needle. I haven't had the KnitSmart set up in awhile, so I've been focused on the 6.5mm and 4.5mm gauges. Yes, the 9mm is double the 4.5mm and a lot of tools/patterns can be easily adjusted. I thought a comparison of the every other needle selector tool would be interesting:

Thank god for auto-save! Some how, this window just switched to my stats page (that I had been viewing prior to writing this), and I couldn't find this post page anywhere! That's happened a few times, I wonder what I'm doing!

By the way....I never expected the Superbowl would affect Canadian banks! I had to go to FOUR bank machines on Sunday afternoon to get money! I wish the machine had said it was out of money before I wasted time, or maybe I should have tried a lesser amount, LOL.