Machine knitting

Machine knitting is one of the three crafts under the umbrella of the Knitting & Crochet Guild (the other two being hand-knitting and crochet). Machine knitters have always been welcome in the Knitting & Crochet Guild, and our numbers swelled considerably when the Guild of Machine Knitters merged with us in May 2019.

Although domestic machine knitting hasn’t been around as long as either of the other two crafts, it’s not exactly a recent invention either. Early machine knitters were home workers, knitting on frames and producing knitted garments much more quickly than they could by hand. We’ve gathered together some useful links if you’re interested in the history of machine knitting, including the history of the Guild of Machine Knitters.

What does the Knitting & Crochet Guild have for machine knitters?

As well as the publicly available pages you can access from the main menu, we have a number of resources for members who are machine knitters.

Publicly available pages:

• About knitting machines gives you an overview of the different machines available, an outline of the way they work, and a guide to what you can do with one.
• Buying a knitting machine builds on the information in the previous page, and highlights some of the things you need to consider before making a purchase.
• Using your knitting machine contains a few useful hints and tips, plus a link to a list of people willing to provide some support when you are first getting to grips with your machine, and to a few patterns to get you started.
• Unwanted knitting machines deals with the difficult problem of what to do with machines that are no longer in use.

A lot more is available to members (you will be prompted to log in for everything except the taster edition of Across the Needlebed):

• Slipknot – our member publication – regularly includes articles of interest to machine knitters
• Across the Needlebed is a quarterly online publication, available from our website, specifically for machine knitters – although others may also find it interesting – and a taster edition of Across the Needlebed (a small extract from the first issue) is available to all
• Our Collection comprises a library of books, periodicals and patterns, and samples of items made by machine knitters – these can be viewed by arrangement (see Our Collection). To give you a taste of what’s available, we have a short video (on YouTube) highlighting some of the machine knitted items in the Collection (and you can see more about some of the items in the video on the 100 Objects page).
• The Guild of Machine Knitters’ Newsletter used to be published quarterly. Many issues contain hints, tips and patterns. The full archive of the Guild of Machine Knitters publications (including available issues of Beyond the Gatepegs) is held as part of our Collection.