John Allen, 1934-Reseñas

Lenore Shepard

This is an excellent collection of stitches. Mr. Allen also adds different variations to give the reader ideas of how changing a yarn , a stitch size, or even a combination of things can change the look and feel of the fabric being created.

The book itself is well organized with color pictures of all stitches as well as most variations with punch card diagrams where necessary. With a little bit of thought and patience most of these stitches could be translated to hand work. Stitch types include: Fair Isle (Knit In), Tuck, Slip, and Lace.

Overall this is a good book to have in your reference library. This is not a pattern or instructional book, just a robust collection of stitches. Its up to you to run with it and make it yours.

The title says it all. This book has a collection of machine knit stitches and nothing more. There are no instructions for use, but instead there are graphs and written stitch patterns to spark creative juices. I purchased this book when I first bought my knitting machine. I realized that I had much to learn before this book was of value. It is interesting to see how he used the same stitch with different yarn to create different looks.

John Allen is British and wrote several books. One of them is “The Machine Knitting Book - How to design and create beautiful garments on your knitting machine” dating back to 1985. It is just what the title says: A kind of training for designing garments using different techniques on the knitting machine, complimented by 24 instructions for garments matching each chapter. Starting with general information about yarns, styling and colours, the following chapters build upon each other and deal with stripes, jacquard, tuck stitch, weaving, intarsia, lace and hand-tooled patterning. Of course the garmens shown are long since out of date, but they are very good examples how to creatively use the possible knitting techniques, and they encourage the reader to have a go on designing.
The book has 128 pages and was published by Dorling Kindersley, London. Its original price was £ 9.95.

This book does not contain any instructions, it is a compilation of patterns for the knitting machine, similar to pattern collections for hand knitting. The author confines himself to single bed patterns for punchcard machines (24-stitch-repeat). The techniques shown are tuck stitch, lace, partial knitting (short rows), jacquard (fair isle), cables, cut floats, weaving and as a bonus an impressive collection of braids and edgings.
I find it very interesting that Allen used the technique of partial felting already 20 years ago (the book was published in 1989). Felting yarn is used together with non-felting (e.g. rayon) to achieve varying structures.
John Allen does not intend to provide ready-made instructions for immediate use, but he tries to motivate his readers to experiment on their own. For him, machine knitting is a creative craft on its own. Some of his pattern suggestions are quite time-consuming and require a lot of hand tooling at the machine. But you will get very unusual results, which are impossible to achieve with hand knitting.

While the garments are quite British in fashion, and now dated, John Allen is the definitive source in how to use color in knitting.