English Rib, also known as Half Fisherman’s Rib or Shaker Knit, is a ribbing variation you can machine knit on any machine with a ribber. Above you can see swatches of English Rib, Swung English Rib and Fisherman’s Rib.
English Rib on a Singer Knitting Machine
To knit English Rib on a Singer machine, we start by casting on as we would for a 1 x 1 rib.
We can see in the above image the Operation Table from the manual for my Singer machine. The first portion deals with the cast on if you use that method, but we see in the second portion our settings for the stitch pattern.
Starting with the carriage on the left.
- We aren’t using the punch card so we set the patterning lever to the circle.
- On our main bed carriage, we set the left side lever to the circle and the right side lever to the triangle.
- We set the cam lever to tuck.
- On the ribber carriage we leave both set levers on ‘1’
- Pitch is ‘P’ and swing set to 5.
- We set the tension or stitch size appropriate to our yarn and the same on both carriages
Then we knit
On the first carriage pass knitting from left to right, both beds knit as usual. I expect as I learn more about using knitting machines this will be proven wrong, but to me it seems as if setting that side lever on the main carriage to triangle allows the carriage to ignore that the cam lever is set to ‘tuck’.
Knitting from right to left, the ribber knits as usual but on the main bed the machine just lays the yarn in the hooks without knitting it. It knits on the next carriage pass when we go from left to right.
We can reverse this and have the machine knit right to left and tuck left to right. We just need to set the left side lever to triangle and the right side lever to the circle.
More on English Rib
You can see a full demonstration of knitting English Rib on the Singer knitting machine on my channel. While you’re there don’t forget to hit the subscribe button!
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