French Knitting

So with the world falling apart around us with coronavirus, we are all stuck at home and getting pretty bored. My older son built a french-knitter out of a toilet roll and some paddle pop sticks (just like I remember doing as a kid also) and started making endless lengths of woollen cord. It looked like fun, and I wanted to join in: but I didn't really want to make cord: I thought it would be cool to make something that would be more useful, and I was interested to understand how the principle of simple french knitting extended to larger spools. So, we went ahead and built this one:

It's about 20 cm in diameter and is made up of 22 pegs and knits a tube about 10cm in diameter. My son quickly took it over and started creating tubes that you tie off at one end so they are kind of like a baby's beanie. It was pretty cool: he ended up making sleeping bags for toys and giving some away to the neighbours and other people we know.

I don't think I was quite satisfied yet, so as a next logical progression, we built this one:

This weighed in at a slightly more impressive 40 cm and 51 pegs: put together with some old Ikea cardboard packaging. This was a bit more useful for me as it knitted a tube approximately 20 cm in diameter which makes a good sized winter scarf. Only problem is it does take along time to knit: I guess I'm not a seasoned knitter, so it seemed like a long time to me: at fifty-ish pegs per round and an approximately 2 meter scarf needing 210 rounds across 7 colours, there were about 10,500 stitches involved, which took me about 3 weeks of work, working about 45-60 minutes a night ... it's the sort of thing I'd probably do once just to satisfy my curiosity, but probably won't try again :). I got about half way through my second colour (orange as pictured above) before my fingers started to blister and I couldn't go on :) ... I ended up breaking a kebab stick in half and using it as a make-shift knitting needle, which worked a treat: craft for me is strictly using hackish, inappropriate tools to get the job done :).

Actually, working on this project has re-affirmed for me how much I don't really like repetitive manual work, even if knitting is sort of relaxing, I guess. I'm pretty chuffed with my cool scarf, though. I'm thinking about putting a bit of research into building my own automatic tube-knitting machine, so I guess there might be a part two to this post if I end up building something.