Knitting on a Bulky Machine with Punch Cards

At the May meeting of the Machine Knitting Guild of Minnesota, Karen put on a wonderful demonstration of how to knit on a bulky punch card machine. Many of the punch cards that come with a punch card machine will knit the same pattern in different techniques, which in turn gives a different look to the finished object. Be sure to check your manual to see which cards will knit which technique before starting. Some patterns don’t work well, if at all, with some of the techniques, such as tuck stitch, in which two stitches cannot tuck side by side. There must be a plain stitch between them.

The techniques that Karen demonstrated were fair-isle, slip stitch, tuck stitch and thread lace.

Note: Please forgive the video quality. Your author is an administrative assistant by profession, and neither a videographer nor a film editor.

To view the video larger, start the play, then hover your mouse over it, and click on the YouTube in the lower right corner to view it directly on YouTube.

Here are close-up photos of the finished sample:

The Fair-isle Sample

The Slip Stitch Sample

Tuck Stitch Sample

Thread Lace Sample