It's not all machine knitting around here!

Last week I took a screen printing class at NYC Resistor, a lovely hackerspace in Brooklyn.

It was their first time teaching this class, and fittingly they taught a screen printing technique that was new to me!

We were asked to bring in a vector art file. I really let myself get in my head about art for previous screen printing classes, so this time I vowed to do the first dumb idea that made me laugh. I was inspired by a recent delightful discovery in my Monday night gaming group and spent a half hour goofing on it in Inkscape.

Enough talk. Here are some process photos! (with more talk as captions)

Many thanks to NYC Resistor and our instructors Woody and Mean Gene.

Thanks also to the other folks in the class, who were fun and chill. Their designs game out great, but that's their business.

I look forward to doing some more screen printing at a future NYC Resistor craft night!

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As mentioned in my first-hat and forbidden socks posts my Brother KH-930e knitting machine was unable to knit two-color Fair Isle patterning due to two cam buttons being stuck together.

I didn't really know where to start with figuring this out. I remember doing some semi-fruitless web searching, before finally deciding to learn how to disassemble the carriage enough to look at it and see if I could find something obvious.

I started by hunting down the service manual PDF for my machine and following the instructions there. Those instructions and diagrams helped me get the handle and the cover off, as well as most of the way to removing the cartridge-like structure that mounts the cam control buttons. I was scared off by the "remove these springs" steps, as I did not see a way to remove the small springs without bending them.

At the end of this process I was able to determine that the buttons themselves were not stuck together. It was the plates that each of these buttons controls. If I wanted to get inside to see what was going on, I would definitely have needed to get those springs out, and plan for some messier and more fiddly work.

Disappointed and anxious, I reassembled the carriage. Thankfully, it still worked, though still without Fair Isle support. Between the mess of old oil and grease, and my anxiety about getting the carriage apart and together again, I didn't even take photos of this part of the process.

That's when I found the videos that would have saved me all the trouble!

This Cleaning Brother Carriages from theanswerladyknits on YouTube has so much information about Brother (and other) knitting machines, in-depth disassembly and cleaning videos, lists of what to buy, and even explanations about common issues like the exact button-sticking problem I was facing. I cannot stress enough how relieving and exciting it was to find these videos.

I went a little overboard and bought their whole deep-clean-and-restore shopping list, which ended up being a little over $100 worth of oils and solvents and lubes and oil-soaking rags. I only planned to use 2 or 3 of these, in order to unstick the button cams, but wanted the other stuff on hand in case I needed to go further.

Once I had all the fluids, I picked up an aluminum turkey pan as a portable work tray. This served to keep all the oil and gunk away from the surfaces in our small apartment, let me spray next to a window for better ventilation, and store it out of the way as I let things soak.

Our carriage was pretty clean, overall, but with old yellow-orange grease pretty visible. According to the videos on theanswerladyknits channel, this is old lithium grease, likely from when the carriage was first assembled. That suggests our machine had not seen much use since its early days.

I removed the plastic parts for the buttons and knobs for hand-cleaning and wiped away the visible globs of grease that I could see, then sprayed "aero kroil" into the cam button assembly, especially focusing on the bottom area where the "tuck" "multicolor" cam plates need to slide past one another. Within minutes, the kroil had done its work and I was able to slide the two plates independently, hooray!

I let the kroil work overnight. As theanswerlady's husband "Ask Jack" tells it, kroil a "creeping oil" that works its way over and between metal parts, freeing them up, then also works its way out. However, he also says that we don't want to leave any hydrocarbon oils inside the machine.

So the next day, it was time to chase out all the kroil, and as much of the old lithium grease and any other "crud" it had freed up. I used a can of LPS-1 to spray into and through all the nooks and crannies of the carriage that I could get to, using a stiff brush and blue towels to try and "mop out" all the gunk I could reach.

After the scrubbing I propped up the carriage for an hour or so to let the LPS 1 drip out before flipping it over to let it drip some more. I bagged and tossed the soaked shop towels and used some fresh ones to lightly blot away obvious pools and drips as I re-assembled the carriage.

Before testing things out, I sprayed the underside of the carriage, as well as the machine's needle bed, with "ask Jack"'s recommended "LPS FG" food-grade dry silicone lube, and gave everything a good wipe down.

After a couple of false starts I got things going and everything moved much more smoothly than before. I set up some waste cotton yarn across all 200 needles and knit a long swatch at varying tensions, working the mechanisms and soaking up any excess lube and junk that might come out.

Finally, I pulled out the hat pattern I had worked out for Producer Amy a couple of weeks before, knit the hem, and engaged two-color Fair Isle pattern knitting...

I think we're in business!!

Returning to my original "curriculum":

• ✅ Do some swatching
• ✅ Make a single-color hat
• ✅ Make a two-color hat with a Fair Isle pattern
• 🔜 AYAB time

Looks like I have "no excuses" left not to disassemble the on-board electronics to replace them with AYAB. 😳

In truth, I would like a bit more practice with Fair Isle using the "vanilla" machine. Specifically, the hat above is done with an overall repeating pattern, but there are different techniques if you want to do a "motif" that is constrained to just one part of the knitting. I want to make some swatches with isolated patterns and end-needle selection, practice managing floats, get used to the way pattern knitting row counts feel "off by one", see how Fair Isle affects the finished gauge of the fabric, etc.

Meanwhile, I've started a basic sweater with hilarious results. Stay tuned, like and subscribe, etc. etc. etc. 😎

Today is a good day, I think, to make little guys.

Pattern from Machine Knitting Monthly Oct 2025, which calls for spider legs, but I think the “little guy”-ness is correct without them.

Before I reveal the story foreshadowed in my post about machine knitting some first hats, a digression.

One of my main goals with machine knitting is to be comfortable enough with the machine and techniques required to make custom two-color patterns with AYAB. To that end, I had given myself a very short syllabus:

• ✅ Do some swatching
• ✅ Make a single-color hat
• ❌ Make a two-color hat with a Fair Isle pattern
• 🔜 AYAB time

My attempt at a two-color Fair Isle patterned hat came out as a cool-but-wrong tuck stitch patterned hat. The "MC" button that activates multicolor Fair Isle knitting sits right over the "T" (tuck stitch) button, and they were well and truly frozen together. I will save that story for another time.

Meanwhile, the machine could definitely still knit, so I had no excuse not to keep learning and practicing.

Which brings me to socks.

As knitting project go, socks would appear to be small, fast, and easy. Depending on whose pattern you are following, there are a few techniques to learn. Plus you have to make two of them, so you are tested on your consistency.

Unfortunately, a lot of sock-knitting content is for circular knitting machines, or double-bed knitting machines with ribbing attachments, or for hand knitters.

Which is why I became obsessed with Diana Sullivan's No-Sew Socks

These socks are designed to be made on a single bed standard gauge knitting machine - like mine! They are knit top-to-bottom, back-to-front starting at the rear ankle hem, going down to a rounded heel, across the foot bottom, and around the toe. At that point, you switch techniques, picking up the stitches from previous rows to work your way back up and over the top of the foot, ankle, and hem. When it comes off the machine, it's a whole sock. You just need to hide the end threads, wash it, and block it.

While my machine matched the pattern requirements, Diana's pattern calls for thicker wool-blend sock yarn than what I have on-hand. In my "practice phase", I'm using thinner two-ply cotton, which means I have to adjust the row and column counts from Diana's pattern by a conversion factor - a multiplier based on the ratio of Diana's sock yarn gauge measurements with my own.

While some of this is easy multiplication, some of the techniques require adding or removing stitches at some "rate". In this case, creating the curved heel and tow areas involves "short rows", where more and more end needles are held at their current row while more rows are added to the middle. When the number of rows and stitches changes, you've also got to change instructions like "add one stitch into hold at the end of each row". Thankfully, my gauge's stitches-per-inch measured "close enough" to Diana's pattern, so I only needed to deal with the difference in rows - my thinner yarn came out to about 1.5x rows-per-inch compared with Diana's.

I did my best! Here's the pattern I came up with to try and make socks for Producer Amy.

My pattern mostly follows Diana's until we get to the short rowing. Here, she calls for putting one needle into hold on each side as you knit each row, down to a certain number of needles, then short row back out at the same rate. The one-to-one ratio really simplifies the technique. Comparatively, I would need to knit 1.5x the number of rows with my thinner yarn. So I came up with a three-step waltz that moves two needles out of (or into) work every 3 rows.

• With carriage on the right, put the left-most needle in hold position and knit right-to-left.
• With carriage on the left, put the right-most needle in hold position and knit left-to-right.
• Leaving needles alone, knit back right-to-left.
• With carriage on the left, put the right-most needle in hold position and knit left-to-right.
• With carriage on the right, put the left-most needle in hold position and knit right-to-left.
• Leaving needles alone, knit back left-to-right.
• Repeat! (And when short-rowing out, put needles back into work rather than into hold.)

The resulting socks have some holes of various sizes in the short row areas. Being new to this technique I can't be sure whether each hole is from a mistake I made in the technique or because my two-stitches-per-three-rows adjustment needed an extra needle wrapped here or there.

Anyway. Sock photos.

Despite some issues, they look like socks! But do they sock??

Something is... not right with the final seam inside the front hem of the socks. I think perhaps I am finishing them off the machine too tightly. Or perhaps a different yarn would have more give. Whatever the reason, these were really difficult for Producer Amy to get on her feet, stretching only up to a point and no further. These photos were taken before washing and blocking, which I knew would shrink the final socks further.

After washing, these look a little better! The fibers have pulled together. The too-loose front hem on one sock is more visible.

Neither of these are wearable now, unfortunately. But I learned a lot and got experience with some important techniques. I look forward to trying again with some actually-meant-for-socks yarn that more closely match the pattern. And some more practice!

Last weekend, I joined forces with my buddy Hunter to make a game for PlayJam 8, a game jam for the adorable yellow Playdate game console.

Introducing: Stellar Scrapm'n! Descend into debt as you ascend to the stars in a clunky little hauling ship. Crank to steer through rocky caverns in search of valuable junk you can sell to pay off a little bit of that financial liability at a time. Also: robots will shoot at you, pew pew, watch out!

If you're so inclined, we'd be grateful if you checked it out! You can check out our jam entry to download, rate, and review.

If you have a Playdate, you can sideload the game. If you don't have a Playdate, you can still check it out by grabbing the Playdate dev kit and using the Playdate Simulator!

The review period is open until September 22nd. Check out the other submissions, too! There's slightly more than a dozen little games to check out.

Thanks for reading. You may also enjoy Hunter's post about the game / jam. Feel free to eject at this point because what comes next is-

Something like a dev log

A skippable cutscene for context

Hunter and I are both computer science boys with web business jobs. We don't write much code that looks like game code day to day, but we do enjoy dabbling in "the game dev". Hunter has done some pretty impressive projects in Unity in the past, I enjoy working through Godot tutorial content to keep up with that community, and we are both drawn to the rinky-dink little Playdate console with its retro-aesthetics, thoughtful constraints, and inviting dev tools and documentation.

Before we knew about Playjam, Hunter had been building up a Metroidvania game, inspired by working through SquidGod's YouTube tutorials for working with the Playdate. I recognized a lot of the fundamentals from working through a similar Godot course from Heart Gamedev. Neither of us had done a lot with Lua, but the Playdate API and docs offer a lot of structure for folks coming in with experience working with other languages.

When PlayJam 8 came across our radar, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to work on something together, sharpen our skills, and have fun making a thing. So, we cleared our calendars and set our expectations for success. How hard could it be? (This is foreshadowing.)

It starts with a theme

PlayJam8 kicked off on Friday with the announcement of the theme: ascending. Hunter and I (along with my producer, Amy) brainstormed a lot of potential concepts. Being nerds, we thought a lot about space and our nostalgia for retro games about space.

This is when Hunter introduced me to Space Shuttle Project for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

We did not make a "shot for shot remake" of Space Shuttle Project. You are free to imagine what it would be like!

We were more interested in making a game where you are in space, rather than getting to space. Unfortunately once one is in space, the concept of "ascending" becomes murky as references like "up" and "down" become negotiable. Another thing that is negotiable is money and getting to space is expensive. Hunter was reminded of Hardspace: Shipbreaker where, good news, you've got a cool space job but, oh no bad news, you're in crippling debt and the exchange rate for your hard labor will not fix that. Maybe you can ascend to financial freedom??

This sounded like a fun kernel of an idea, but of course we needed something simpler to implement. I was reminded of one of my favorite childhood games, Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warpship. This old ad for the game, in my opinion, does not explain the gameplay very well, but the vibes are incredible:

A vaguely game-shaped collection of mechanics

Based on our inspirations, we planned more-or-less these features:

• A little ship that can navigate by rotating 360 degrees and using a thruster. "Space-like" in that there is no drag - objects in motion stay in motion.
• Navigating cavernous rocky spaces which can damage you if you bump into them.
• Goodies to pick up and carry.
• A base where you can drop off goodies for points / money / upgrades.
• Obstacles and enemies to interfere with your fetching.
• Weapons to destroy obstacles and enemies.
• Multiple levels to progress through as you strip each environment of resources.
• Interstitials for story.

Friggin' tools

Here are some things that we used:

• NobleEngine library / engine for Playdate
• LDtk 2D level editor and the PlaydateLDtkImporter
• AnimatedSprite library
• Aseprite / Libresprite for new sprites / art
• Some assets that Hunter had collected over the years for the rocky terrain and SFX.

Struggles

We had a lot of quick wins early on, but stubbed our toes many times. I'm tired, so this won't be hour-by-hour or day-by-day. Feel free to skip this unless you are future me (or Hunter)!

A recurring theme for me personally: I often knew the concepts for what I wanted to accomplish but had little or no practice directly with the tools, like LDtk and Aseprite. Climbing multiple learning curves during a crunch is stressful!

It's a little tricky to get curvy "cavernous" shapes with 2D tilemaps, but it's not too bad. What is bad is the feeling you get when the Playdate's native "axis-aligned rectangles only" physics system goes haywire every time your ship touches terrain. We reined in a lot of the chaos, but there are still plenty of places where a wall tile's bounding box doesn't line up with the actual pixels, making it look like your ship has suddenly stopped for no reason, or like you're embedded in the rock.

I went down a lot of rabbit holes for the physics issues, including evaluating alternate physics engines (which usually require building C extensions and wholly separate level-creation tooling) and adding a layer to take over to see if there was "really" a collision when the Playdate says there was. We simply ran out of time on this.

The other major toe-stubber was our choice to bring in, but not commit to, the Noble Engine.

The built-in concepts of Scenes that you can move between, with Noble taking care of transitions and lifecycle management, sounded like a great way to separate out concerns. Our focus started on the GameScene, which holds the level and player and enemies and collectibles and- you know, gameplay.

Unfortunately, we did not test our understanding of how Noble manages multiple scenes until very late. It turned out we were making sprites that Noble could not clean up on transition, loading things before Noble was ready, expecting things to be cached that Noble was throwing away, and more. A mess!

After finding this out so late, my instinct was to cut our losses and drop features like a title screen and different levels, which would have let us focus on building the game as if Noble's scene management stuff wasn't there. Unfortunately, I ignored that instinct and spent a lot of time moving code around, chasing down references, touching many parts of the project, breaking-and-fixing, finally getting things barely-working. The result is that we got our title screen, but we didn't have time to add any actual interstitials or extra levels. So... the menu basically serves no purpose, haha! Bonus: I accidentally left in a debug option in the player controls so you can bounce yourself to the title screen and back again and resume with everything exactly where you left it. And by "exactly where you left it" I mean it reveals some object cleanup bugs that we missed, as all enemies, collectibles, and even fired bullets suddenly return from the void! 😂

This was a triumph

I tend to focus on the negative, but this whole thing was pretty fun and we learned a lot! To ask "what would I do differently?" would be foolish - time only moves in one direction - I am grateful for the experiences and will carry this learning into the future.

Hunter and I both want to keep filling in the holes in the project, and (eventually) release something that feels like a complete game experience. I think that rules!

I look forward to becoming more fluent with the tools that were new to me! Theory is not the same as practice, and I could use more practice. Particularly the meta-practice of doing things that I am not already "good" at. Practice at being bad at something and struggling to get better.

Hell yeah!

In my apartment we are lucky enough to have a big countertop, open on three sides, creating a nice flat project surface for even sprawling projects.

However, we also have a lot of projects that compete for this space! Producer Amy is often working on increasingly complex sewing projects that require the entire surface. Likewise, the knitting machine occupies an entire edge of the space. Both of these are time consuming, with potentially complex setup and teardown procedures. How can we accommodate both fiber arts hobbies?

You may not be surprised to find that I found inspiration from Carson (@KnitFactoryImpl) on YouTube. In her videos I noticed a low-profile metal stand that basically amounts to a single horizontal bar and four splayed legs, clamped together by a couple of big screws. She mentioned briefly that they aren't manufactured anymore, but you can find them on eBay "from time to time".

With the fear of scarcity in my heart, I jumped when I found a similar one on eBay a few days later.

As you can see in the photo, the stand can break down quite small! Pictured here are 5 of the 6 parts required for it to work. The long body bar has circular recesses where the knitting machine can be securely clamped, as well as slots for the legs. Each leg splays out at an angle to withstand the force of moving the machine back and forth. The body bar and legs are held together with a pair of screws and wingnuts, and the screws are at the end of long bent metal bars which do double-duty to provide some stability for the mounted knitting machine, as well as providing a place to rest the top of the knitting machine.

You may note that I said "5 of the 6" in the previous paragraph. One of the screw/bar pieces was missing. Thankfully the seller had simply misplaced it and, after contacting them, they found it and mailed it to me.

Meanwhile... If you have a keen eye you may have noticed another missing part. Because each leg splays out at an angle, each also has a rubber foot with a special shape to let it rest flat and provide traction. One of the legs was missing this foot.

In this house we 3D print, so I dusted off my calipers, OpenSCAD, and trigonometry skills to make a replacement. I'll attach the OpenSCAD and final STL files to this post for posterity, but I definitely hit a point where the math looked right but the piece looked wrong, so I did some eyeball-based adjustments when tweaking the foot's resting face angle and a fudge factor to help the foot slip onto the machine leg.

Now I can machine knit without taking up the countertop space. This reduces my anxiety about having the machine "out" for long periods of time as I practice skills or work on more time-consuming project.

Of course, there is floor space to talk about, but that is slightly easier to negotiate at this point.

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“Happy” March 2020, 2020. Year 5½ of “two weeks to flatten the curve”. 🫠

I was able to get the updated COVID-19 booster, today. Nice to see some systems are working.

One of my main goals with learning machine knitting is to replace the electronics on my Brother KH-930e with AYAB (All Yarns Are Beautiful) to create multi-color patterned knits of whatever sicko stuff comes to mind. But home knitting machines aren't a fire-and-forget type of machine. They require a lot of manual effort - from fine stitch work to good core strength - a lot of which requires practice for technique and feel.

So, after taking a machine knitting workshop at Brooklyn's Textile Arts Center, I started absorbing a ton of how-tos, mostly in the form of videos (and those mostly from Carson at her amazing KnitFactoryImpl channel, but also old websites, shopping guides, and more. I ended up making a sort of "curriculum" for myself.

First up: I ordered some pre-coned yarn (I'll cake later, when I know my machine works well), got the ol' machine out of storage and confirmed it all still moved and grooved, made some gauge swatches. And then... needed a project!

I decided to make a hat, following a combination of techniques from these KnitFactoryImpl videos:

• Absolute beginner's guide to hats
• Intermediate hat tutorial
• Absolutely everything you need to know to get started with the lk-150 | Free pattern

That last one is for a very different machine from mine, but more clearly shows the steps and techniques.

Anyway, I made a hat!

It was fun learning to do some of the pre-planning work, like measuring for a pattern, calculating stitches and rows, and writing out a pattern.

When actually working the pattern on the machine, I also practiced hanging a hem, gathering up onto a long tail to make the pinched hat top, and mattress stitching the seam. Practices in patience, eyesight, and fine motor skills.

I ran it through a load of laundry and it came out much better!

The fit seemed a little loose, but I feel like it sits on my head the way the Carson's sits on her head at the end of her video. I'm taking that as a success for process!

From here I thought a good level up would be to make a new hat with some design tweaks and, because I want to rush to get AYAB working some Fair Isle patterning using the Brother's built-in patterns. Consulting with Producer Amy, I decided to double the length of the brim without lengthening the hat overall. Amy picked a pattern, and I decided to try creating a stripe of it between the brim and the top of the hat.

Something was not quite right with the knitting carriage. The "MC" button used for two-color Fair Isle knitting was stuck to the "T" button below it, which engages tuck stitching. The result is that the pattern came out all wrong and also this whole paragraph is foreshadowing for some later posts.

The pattern should be gray contrast on black to match the rest of the hat, but instead is mostly-gray with some black peeking through, as well as some interesting texturing from the machine treating the pattern as a tuck stitch.

Despite the patterning issue, I am pleased with how this came out. It's made of cotton rather than wool, so it stretches out a bit as it is worn, but it's still pretty cozy! Producer Amy requested that the next version have patterning from the brim to the top. I look forward to trying that again soon... when I am able! (That's still foreshadowing.)

Okay, that's it! See you next time!

Our shop does not have a public restroom for customers, so we ask for your understanding! Yes, yes!

It’s been a while! Excited to return to IndieWebCamp, in Berlin, no less!

Of course we try to forget some of our most painful memories, but there’s always one lurking.

Whaddaya mean I’m not excited enough? It’s my day off, OK?