New to me Web Site and iPhone Apps

Here's a comment I got from my latest bed runner note.

"Hi,
I saw on another site where your first Knitting program was 'Mom' by a someone on the west coast.
Well, that was me, and I have a new 'Mom' for the iPhone. I'm not trying to sell you something...just reminiscing when I used to sell in Alles Around the world knitting, and sold 'Mom's Knitting Computer Program' for the Apple II and Radio Shack and IBM.

I'm retired now, and have written a hand knitting program modeled after my original 'Mom' You might see it on www.iTunes.com and search for 'Touch and Go Knitting" or my web site at http://www.TouchAndGoKnitting.com Nice to run into someone from those times. You are one of the only old customers I could find ,Richard Foy 801 547 9328 Layton, ut"

I wanted to past this note on here because I really was a Mom user but quite by accident. I bought my first knitting machine in 1987 as a present to myself for working all those long years...and immediately decided that a computer should work for me charting those patterns. Almost immediately after I bought the machine I moved to South Carolina where I met a woman who was an expert knitter and had money to burn. She bought the Mom program because her husband was one of those old guys who worked with computers back in the early days. She thought he knew all there was to know about computers but actually he was futzing around with the home PC and didn't know beans about it (I suspect he was working with them pre-DOS days and maybe was doing data entry or something. Anyway--he didn't know beans about the software and neither did she. She gave me a copy of Mom and asked me to figure out how to use it and show her. Well, I took to Mom like a duck to water. I loved the program. It made sense to me and surprisingly enough, when DesignaKnit came out I was thrilled to see that the Original Draw part of DAK was very similar to Mom's design entry. You went from point to point. How easy was that. My friend never could figure it out even when I tried to show her so I inherited the program from her and was very happy with it.

I just now went to the App store with my iPhone and sure enough, there it is, "Touch and Go Knitting" Of course I'll get it and play with it, I love iPhone Apps and keeping in touch with what's going on. Good Luck Richard, I'm glad you found me.

Bed Runner

Here's a photo of a bed runner at a hotel I stayed at last week. The cool thing about bed runners is that you can quickly quilt or knit or weave one and change it with the seasons because they don't take a lot of fabric and really make the bed look great.


Now here's the one I just knitted on my Brother 970 standard gauge machine.

I wove it using the 1x1 pattern just because I wanted to weave but I think tuck stitch or a fairisle would look just as great. In fact I almost wished after I started that I had done it in squares like a quilt so I could embroider in the white squares. Oh well, as I said....you can make them to match your mood if you want, they're small so the next one may be knit squares with a fabric backing on it.

I used Tamm 3 ply for the knitting yarn and Red Heart's TLC Baby, 2 skeins of color New Mint Sparkle, for the weaving yarn. I planned on 70 inches so that it would lay across the bottom of the bed and overlap just a little but had just a little yarn left over after my 700 rows and decided to go ahead and keep on going so ended up with 730 rows using all 200 needles for the width. I bought a ball of Patons Astra for the worm trim and knitted 5 stitches 8 rows all the way around to give some body to the edges. I thought I would put a fringe on it if I needed more length but it turned out just fine.

Some bed runners I've seen are narrower, this could easily be folded in half and placed farther up toward the middle of the bed as shown here: http://www.alibaba.com/showroom/bed-scarf.html

This could be made on the Bond or the mid guage machine just as easily as on the standard gauge machine.