Ultimate Sweater Machine Knitting Machine, Try#1

This is how obsessions begin...

This is the Ultimate Sweater Machine (USM) knitting machine. It produces a sheet of stockinette fabric in customizable widths. It works by sliding a carriage left and right across the track to "knit" the row. The first row is the most difficult, but once you get a feeling for the clicking patterns, it goes a lot faster.

Success! I made it beyond row one!

Growing...

The black plastic strip along the bottom of the sheet has steel rods in it to add tension to the sheet of fabric. This allows the carriage to slide back and forth smoothly. Without the tension on the fabric, the stitches gum up on the needles.

The weight hit the floor!

Once the weight hits the floor, you need to clip the bottom of the piece towards the top of the piece to maintain tension on the fabric.

Finally long enough to have to clip up.

What they don't tell you in the manual is that:

1. You need to add tension across the ENTIRE width of the fabric, not just the sides. See how the stitches in the above photo are curving and bunching up in the middle? This is because there's no tension on the stitches. This photo was taken right before I dropped like half the middle stitches because I didn't know.
2. That you don't want to hook the tension hooks on the fabric too closely to the top of the fabric sheet. It pulls on the fabric funny, and you drop the side stitches more easily. They actually tell you to put the hooks 2-4 rows below the top of the sheet. Once I figured this out, I put the hooks more like 2 inches below the top of the sheet.

Two 218 yd skeins into the sheet. 

So if you notice in the above photo, I have used a locking stitch marker to add as my tension "hook/clip." I used the locking stitch marker because the USM only came with the two hooks I used on the left and right sides. Based on what they suggest in the manual, they should have given me at minimum, 4 hooks, but they did not. They suggest using two hooks on each side with a rubber band between them to prevent the fabric being "stiff" and to avoid dropping stitches off the sides. I have yet to try this as they only provided me with one rubber band and two hooks.

So that's it! That's my progress with the Ultimate Sweater Machine so far! The plan is to use this blank/undyed sheet of yarn to dye gradient yarn.