Stay at Home Mom turns Hobby into Fun and Creative Income

with her Home Based Business and Cottage Industry

The Knit Tree is a small family owned company on the outskirts of Redding, California—right at the tip of the Sacramento Valley—surrounded on three sides by beautiful mountain ranges. It is operated by David and Sharon Nani.

Machine Knitting Programs are Developed for Economic Development High School ROP Programs, Fashion Industry and Cottage Industry

In more recent years, The Knit Tree specialized in training custom knitters in economically depressed areas for their own cottage industry business or fashion industry producing original, hand loomed, distinctive knit products using the special professional knitting techniques on their hand knitting machines. These knitting looms allow for faster production while still maintaining handcrafted qualities. Along with this endeavor came another challenge. Each knitter is at a different level of development in their knitting skills, but the importance of earning an income from their home based business or factory knitwear business, from the beginning is crucial to their success.

Today’s machine knitting community has availability of lots of used knitting machines on the market or individuals are inheriting a knitting machine..  Unfortunately, these knitting machines usually do not come with instruction.  The new owner often goes to the internet community to find information on how to use their new equipment so they can have a new knitting adventure.  To meet this need, Sharon has been adding the technical machine knitting articles that she has written for several knitting magazines over the past 30 years, to the article page of her web site. The articles must be converted from published magazine format to web page format. the older articles are being updated with digital photograph. So this is an ongoing project. Many students learn best by visual methods of instruction rather than written, so Sharon Nani's next goal is to fulfill this need for further visual instructional availability. Some of the basic knitting machine techniques will be offered as a short video on the article page along with the written article.

Sharon also feels the time has come to document her training program and machine knitting articles in a manner that would be beneficial for future generations.  Sharon is now documenting her machine knitting programs and lessons on DVD’s.  The DVD Instructional Videos also come with a cd / or folder of the handouts, patterns and instructions that Sharon provided to her students as help aids and projects.  These handouts can be printed out to coincide with the visual DVD.       These Knitting Machine DVD’s will be offered for sale at www.theknittree.com as they become available.  The Lessons within Sharon’s training program will be divided into a series of DVD’s in the same order of the private lessons that she taught to each individual.  The ultimate goal is that a person who has 'no knitting machine experience' will be able to study at their own pace with these DVD lessons. Each DVD will list what techniques are taught and if there is any prerequisite knowledge. The first one scheduled for release will be Passap DM80 DVD. Alot of the basic knitting machine techniques are the same for the Passap E6000. A separate DVD series specific to the E6000 will also be presented. If you are interested in getting on the mailing list for the release of the DVDs, please contact us..