one of my favorite television shows is Discovery Channels “How it’s made”. An incredibly simple idea, but highly entertaining to discover how a whole range of objects are made. Ranging from electric fuses to Canadian porcelain, guitars or hammers, I’ve seen them all.

What makes it so fascinating to me, is the fact that it gives me a new insight into everyday objects. I see them with new eyes because I can see how much work goes into making them or how ingeniously some things are made.

But I haven’t seen a how it’s made about knitwear yet. Which is a bit of a shame, because it would make a good episode. So we’ve decided to make our own “how it’s made…knitwear” episode featuring a glimpse of our new collection, enjoy!

step 1: It all starts with yarns. In this case a really nice Merino wool, dyed red. The yarn is slowly unrolled by the machine and fed into its belly.

Step 2: The yarn is then fed through a series of rollers and clamps which makes sure the yarn is tensioned correctly before being knitted.

Step 3: Once it achieves the right tension the yarn then goes inside the machine where it then moves inside the yarn feeder.

Step 4: This is the knitting bed.

Step 5: The knitting bed consists of hundreds of knitting needles (the silver cylinders you see at the bottom), which move up and down depending on the pattern being knitted. The yarn feeder guides the yarn past all the needles which knits it together. Each needle knits one vertical column of loops.

Step 6: the knitted end result then slowly appears at the bottom of the machine.

Step 7: And there you have it: a nicely knitted piece of fabric ready to be ironed, cut and sewn into a full garment.

And now you know how it’s made!

Tags: behind the scenes, How it's made, knitting, Knitwear

This entry was posted on Friday, June 4th, 2010 at 7:18 pm and is filed under The making of. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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