One hobby helping another….

One of my hubby’s hobbies is Amateur Radio…He got his license back in 1997 after a lot of hard work (with my help of course :DD )…He has spoken to people all of over the world and keeps him out of mischief..

I never thought for one minute that one of my hobbies would come in useful for one of his..ie my knitting and his amateur radio…

A few years he decided that he wanted me to knit him a dustcover for his Icom radio…I didn’t fancy handknitting it as he wanted the word “Icom” on it and I don’t really like knitting intarsia (too many balls of yarn to juggle at one time) so I agreed to machine knit one..

We decided on using cotton yarn as we didn’t want it to be fluffy incase the fluff went into the air vents on the radio…

Off I went online to search for some 4ply cotton…I found some on the Texere Yarns website and he chose a wine colour yarn and some gold colour yarn for the writing…

Now came the difficult part…I had never entered an intarsia pattern into my knitting machine (I had a Brother 900) so off I went with my manual and figured it all out..

I never for one minute thought it would be soooo complicated..I entered the pattern into the machine and off I went knitting it…I whizzed through the cover and proudly cast it off and had a look at it…I was aghast to see that I had knitted the pattern backwards!!!

I had forgotten that what I saw on the machine was on the back of the material, I had entered the pattern as “ICOM”… I had not thought to reverse the pattern…Off I went and re-entered the pattern as “MOCI” and prayed that this time it would come out correctly..

You will be pleased to here that it did and here is the finished piece…

Since knitting this cover, my hubby had bought me a Brother 970 and I had lots of fun playing with it and knitting lots of lovely garments…but never did intarsia on it until a couple of weeks ago…

My hubby received a new amateur radio for his birthday….this time it was a Yaesu radio and of course he decided he wanted a matching cover for it..I put it off and put it off until I wore me down and I agreed to knit one for him..

As per usual I couldn’t find the remainder of the cone of cotton in wine so went back to Texere Yarns and luckily they still sold the yarn I had originally used and even in the same colour, so I ordered a cone..

When it arrived I put it to one side for a few days building up the courage to do the maths and chart to knit this new cover…

I knit a tension gauge and left it for a couple of days and hubby decided which tension he liked the cover to be…On a Sunday afternoon he was outside wood staining the shed so I decided to surprise him by knitting the cover…

Of course I had totally forgotten everything I did originally so dug out the manual and proceeded to enter the pattern…Once entered I cast on and began knitting…

I decided to just knit the bottom part with the word “Yaesu” on it to begin with to make sure that I had entered everything correctly…It was just as well I did as you guessed it, I had entered it wrong…the word came out backwards (again)…

Funnily enough once I saw what I had done I remembered that I had to reverse the name so off I went (again) and re-entered the word “useaY”….

I re-cast on and proceeded to knit it…everything appeared okay so I cast off and took it off the machine..

Holding my breath I turned the cover around and was so pleased to see that it had worked out…

My hubby was really pleased to see him completed cover and the only thing he pointed out was the curling up at the ends…I had knitted it in stocking stitch which is renowned for rolling so I steamed it to make it a bit better…It still curls so I have agreed to crochet around it in the gold to see if it stops the curling..

Now he is showing the covers to all of his Amateur Radio friends and am hoping to get orders for some…They are going to be £10 each (the cotton is quite expensive) and I can put anything on it that is required…

If you are interested in one please email me and let me know what you would like…

:wave::wave::wave: