Fun with birdseye and double bed jacquard

Hello again! I've been absent here for a while. I do hope you've been joining me on Crafting Fashion if you're interested in cutting and sewing your knit fabrics. Today I'm back to posting about the making of the fabric. And this time it's double bed jacquard knit with birdseye backing.

Designing and knitting fabrics is truly my first love. Though I usually prefer making textured knits with multiple tucks, slipped stitches, and judicious racking, I've found myself machine knitting a bunch of double knit jacquards lately with relatively flat surfaces. I love double knit fabrics, because if floats are not going to be part of the design, I just don't want to see them.

And if the design isn't going to be in the texture, it has to happen with the color. Though I usually feel that my texture skills are stronger than my color, I've forged ahead, using lots of grey. Ha!

Here's a simple broken plaid. It's got a menswear vibe, but I'd really love it as a jacket.

You can easily see it has birdseye backing, even from the front. (With birdseye every other needle knits on the backing bed. With the next row the opposite needles knit.) The horizontal rows of stitches can appear wavy, depending on where color changes occur.

And so I got heavily into birdseye for a while and designed more with my heathered grey yarn.

Many years ago before I had a knitting machine that did birdseye easily, that is before I had a machine with "lili buttons" and before my current Passap with pushers, I thought that a birdseye fabric would be less dense that a double bed jacquard with a striper (all backing needles knitting every row) background. This is not true. With birdseye backing, while one needle knits, the next needle misses (or slips or skips). All those slipped stitches reduce sideways stretch in the fabric and can make the fabric quite dense. In fact birdseye is a good backing choice for thin yarns. The wool yarns used in the swatches in this post were all 2/18 or 2/20 (worsted count).

Designing the fabric above got me thinking about how when we choose to depict curves in jacquard knits, we're forced to work with stitches that are pretty much in a grid formation. The grid is especially obvious when stitches are relatively big as with our standard or bulky gauge machines. There are no real curves when you're close, just jagged lines, a pixelated(!) image, but hey, it's part of the craft.