Archive for October 2025

Machine Knitting: sleeves!

This post will be part of a series, as I join KnitFactoryImpl's knitalong of a set in sleeve crew neck sweater for channel members. KnitFactoryImpl (aka Carson)'s videos have been a huge help and source of inspiration on my short knitting journey so far, so it's really fun to get to join in and participate!

I got serious about learning machine knitting just this year, and only just finished my first sweater (which I need to post about!), so I think I barely qualify to do this project. It uses a combination of techniques that I have used in isolation, like increases, decreases, and short rows, but all together. I recently got an attachment for doing ribbing, which I've barely learned to use, but I want to do ribbed hems.

Adding to the challenge, I didn't quite know what sweater I actually wanted to make! Thankfully, producer Amy saw some promise in our yarn stash and made a request of a 4-color striped sweater made from some cotton yarn in sorta-trans-pride-flag colors.

Always be swatching

Following the instructions for the knitalong, and Carson's evergreen advice, I made gauge swatches for the body, with a couple of different striping options, as well as a sample swatch of ribbing. I used a tension that I've been pretty comfortable working with this yarn so far. We plan to machine wash and dry the finished sweater, so we treated the swatches the same way to see how the fabric turned out.

We were both pleased with how the swatches came out! I think the finished sweater will look nice based on these. More importantly, during swatching I learned that I absolutely do not have it in me to do a 4-color striped knit at the point in my knitting journey! 😅 Until I am able to invest in a color changer, I am going to focus on fewer colors, so we agreed on a pattern of black and purple stripes, evenly spaced at 12 rows each.

Sensing a pattern

With gauge swatches in hand, it was time to visit the pattern generator for the set in sleeve crew neck sweater and punch in my gauge measurements, as well as producer Amy's measurements for how she wants the final sweater to fit.

The resulting pattern is a set of written instructions for each part of the sweater: front and back panels that are worked the same from the bottom but differ as you approach the top, sleeves worked up from the cuffs, and the neckline which is worked as you combine the pieces.

Carson recommends starting with a sleeve, for many reasons, and that's the topic of her first video for the knitalong, so that's where I started!

One does not simply knit a sleeve

Each sleeve is a journey, starting with a cuff (25 rows of ribbing, in my case), then switching to stockinette ("regular") knitting for the long body of the sleeve, with regular increases as you widen the sleeve from the hand to the arm hole. At the maximum width, we're not quite done. We bind off some stitches for the underarm, then do a few different sequences of gradual decreases, and finally some round shaping with short rows, before finishing the piece to remove it from the bed.

For this sweater, color stripes would add extra complexity. No matter what else was happening in the pattern, I would need to stop every 12 rows to switch out one color for the other. In theory, the mechanics of each is not difficult - my machine has a little notch at the ends to park one yarn while the other works. But I would have to make a color switch every 12 rows while also following the rest of the pattern, such as increasing every 10 rows. In a way, I would be working two sets of instructions at once. Thankfully, I once again followed Carson's advice and printed the pattern on paper. After much fidgeting and scrunching of my face, I was able to scribble out number sequences until I was pretty sure it would work.

Sleeve time let's go!

With pattern in hand, I set up the machine and got to work. I followed my machine manual instructions for casting on 1x1 ribbing at the required number of stitches and knit the cuff. I transferred all stitches to the main bed for the body of the sleeve and knit my first 10 rows to an increase. Two more and it was time to switch colors. Increase again at the next multiple of 10. Then another color change at 24 rows and oh god-

I believe I improperly set the yarn in the feeder after changing colors. With the incoming yarn failing to feed, the machine promptly dropped switches from their needles. I was most of the way across the bed before I realized this.

In theory, it was possible to save this piece. I used my transfer tools to pick up a few stitches, but between the weights on the work and my clumsy fingers I was going to have to rework a lot of stitches. I decided to cut my losses, unravel everything so far, and call it a day.

Sleeve time, let's carefully go

The next day I started again, this time taking extra care to check that the yarn was properly ready to feed whenever I changed colors. Keeping track of all the changes was challenging, and at times during the decreases and short rowing I ended up off by a stitch here or there. But I made it through!

At this point I took a break, cast my ballot in early voting, and enjoyed my afternoon.

What's another sleeve?

With one sleeve done, the second was sure to go faster. I felt much more confident in the rhythm of the changes and techniques. I even stopped to take a progress photo!

This photo was taken after the long sequence of increases, which end with binding off some stitches on either end to make a "shelf" for the under arm. Completely by coincidence, I took this photo right before I made a horrible mistake.

After the bind-off for the underarm shelf comes a sequence of decreases, at difference cadences. Starting from this photo, I was meant to knit 12 rows, decreasing a stitch on each side each row, followed by a couple of sequences which involved decreases only every third row.

I got mixed up and did 12 rows at the slower cadence of decreases. 😭

I'm not skilled at it, but I was able to "unknit" a couple of rows, pulling the previous stitches back onto their needles. I suspected this would become confusing or problematic when I got to the rows where I had decreased, requiring complex moves to "un-decrease". However, before I got to that point, the unknitting process was causing stitches to fall off needles entirely, multiple at a time.

At this point I needed a new strategy. Thankfully, another of Carson's videos, where she makes this absurdly wonderful wolf sweater, had the answer.

I removed the weights from the piece and carefully removed the piece from the needles. Then, I found the stitches from the row in the photo above, just after completing the bind-off for the underarm shelf. I carefully re-hung that row of stitches across the number of needles from that row of the pattern.

Then I tucked the knitting back in, added weights, and restarted the pattern as if I had not completely goofed it.

And... this worked out totally fine! After finishing the piece I went back and unraveled the "teratoma" from my miscounted piece. The anomalous row is barely visible, and I think the only side-effect is that I'll have a couple of extra ends to work end during assembly. Whew!

With two sleeves completed, I could not resist asking producer Amy to help me complete a familiar shot from Carson's videos.

Next time...

Neither of these sleeves is perfect, but I think overall they look really nice, and the little imperfections will be hidden in seams as it all comes together. Producer Amy is really loving the look so far, and we're both looking forward to how it shapes up after washing and assembly.

The body panels are expected as the next pieces in the knitalong. However, I'm not going to have much time to knit in the next couple of weeks! 😅

I look forward to checking out other folks' progress and a (careful, controlled, certainly not rushed) busy weekend of catching up when I get a chance.

Thanks to everyone involved in making this knitalong possible! I am grateful to be learning so much and feeling like part of a community of folks doing the same!

#machine-knitting #sweater #KnitFactoryImpl #sleeves #knitalong

🔗 October 26, 2025 at 1:00AM EDT • by Marty McGuire

The mini-rustoid is among the delightful horrors waiting to be exhumed in Animal Crossing New Leaf.

#game-a-day #ACNL

🔗 October 21, 2025 at 11:27PM EDT • by Marty McGuire

Machine Knitting: The Secret Sweater

Hello from the future. This has been retro-posted. You're welcome!

Okay, this title is probably a bit misleading since, if you knew me around the time I was making it, I couldn't shut up about it.

After a couple of successful hats and a pair of failed socks, I was looking to check another major type of garment off my list. I wanted to have made a sweater.

The internet is, blessedly and cursedly (blursedly), haunted with sweater designs and patterns for machine knitters. I eagerly watched videos and scrolled instructions, letting my perfectionist brain absorb an understanding of the big choices to make, the major sections of the project, the techniques I'd need to skill-up in, and more. I even started to ponder what I might want in a sweater, despite thinking of myself as a person who wears hoodies, not sweaters.

All that ruminating came to an end when I came upon this bonkers deal on Craftsy-dot-com: Renée Callahan's Machine Knitting: Sweater Basics (DVD + Streaming), a $49.99 value, discounted 92% to $4 USD. An entire how-to videos series (available to stream whenever I want), with worksheets, and they mailed me a DVD, for way less than a recurring Craftsy membership, or even "buying" just the streaming content.

In fact, most of Craftsy's DVD courses are deeply discounted in this way. I don't know why they do this! Possibly they're losing money warehousing all the DVDs?

Think of the savings!

How is sweater formed?

Renée's design for this class is a drop shoulder jumper, featuring front and back body panels (knit from the bottom up, with hem options), sleeves with simple increases (knit from the wrist up, also with hem options), and a neckline with several options (knit by re-hanging the body panels to the machine).

Renée breaks the class up into six sessions: understanding your machine and choosing yarn, basics of casting on and binding off and making a gauge swatch, using your gauge and body measurements to customize the pattern into specific instructions with stitch and row counts, details on the back panel, the front panel, a sleeve, and sewing it all up.

I was familiar with my machine and with making and blocking a gauge swatch, so the first really meaty part of the course for me was the worksheet. Renée actually provides several worksheets, each the same sweater in a different size. I printed out the design that was closest to my chest measurement without going under, got out my computer's calculator app, and worked through the calculations along with the video.

When shaping a garment on a knitting machine, it's pretty common to make, approximately, trapezoids. You start with a certain number of stitches, and end with a different number of stitches (more, or fewer, depending on what you're shaping). This is often represented with instructions like "decrease one stitch each side every 2 rows until 162 stitches remain". I find these reasonable, conceptually, but I prefer turn-by-turn directions. I rely heavily on my machine's row counter to know where I am in a pattern and where I should be going, so I embellished my worksheet with row numbers for each increase, decrease, etc.

On the importance of checking your measurements

Keen-eyed readers may have raised an eyebrow earlier when I mentioned that I selected "the design that was closest to my chest measurement without going under" and, if you are among them, congratulations your sweater would have turned out better than mine.

What I did not do, but should have, was checked the other measurements of the sweater, either against my person or against an existing garment.

I ignored a strong hint from the relative lengths in the diagram in the sweater. I also ignored a strong hint from Renée herself, when she said "if you want to make a tunic-length sweater, add a few inches to the body."

"Wow," I thought, "tunic-length would be pretty long."

Make the sweater already

Okay, okay!

I made the back panel according to the pattern instructions. Which wasn't hard, because it's just a rectangle in this design. I did think something was weird about the proportions, but I distinctly remember thinking "wow, I guess that will shape up when I block the sweater."

Then I worked the front panel. It's mostly a rectangle, with some shaping for the neckline which involved putting some stitches in hold, some decreases, and casting everything off on waste yarn.

Finally, I could hold the two pieces together and get a sense of the final shape!

Okay, so it's a cropped length sweater. It'll be, uh, the first of many cropped-length things I own, maybe. I'm a person who wears cropped toppes, now! That's the ticket.

Anyway, I made my next bad decision by making the neckline only about half as long as the pattern called for.

With two major regrets committed to cotton, I decided I should actually measure for the sleeves, so I didn't end up with a sweater that only came down to my forearms, or with cuffs too narrow for my hands. This was a good idea and even almost worked out correctly!

The sleeves required the most manual work per row, with several increases and decreases. I got through this mostly successfully, with just one eyelet left where I failed to pick up a purl bump to fill a gap during an increase. I consider that to be pretty good.

With the pieces all knit, I promptly put the project in a box because I was afraid to finish it.

Some Time Later...

I wanted to be a person who had finished a sweater, dang it, so it was time to finish it.

Stitching up all the seams was really time consuming, wowee wow. It was made a little more difficult, I think, because I made the stitches really tight. I wanted the fabric to be nice and wooly and hide the stitches, but, it's cotton. You can definitely see the stitches and it was hard to work with! I was so concerned with pulling everything tight that I popped the seaming yarn a couple of times. Once during the seaming-up process, and once later when trying it on.

I got a lot of practice with mattress stitching. And some with mending the popped seam stitches! But the thing I practiced the most? Was my patience. 💪

Here is is before washing and blocking. But it's a sweater!

Here it is after washing. And some coming-to-terms. You can actually see in this photo that I did the top seam of a shoulder inside-out. And that the sleeves are too long because I forgot that the design is drop-sleeve and measured from the top of my shoulder. And man, that collar is weird.

I am, of course, fixated on the mistakes in this sweater. We learn from mistakes! But I feel pretty good being a person who has made a sweater. It's actually pretty cozy, and the sleeve length is just about perfect if I flip the cuff inside out.

Thanks for reading!

It's really rewarding taking on projects, learning a bunch, making mistakes, but in the end having a thing that I made. I am glad to be able to share these things here.

Will this sweater return? Well, I don't think I'll be wearing it out and about, but we'll see. For now, producer Amy has adopted it as an occasional around-the-house cosy layer. Which is a lovely result!

Okay, that's it for now. See you next time!

#machine-knitting #sweater #craftsy

🔗 October 20, 2025 at 8:24PM -0500 • by Marty McGuire

Machine Knitting: A Bag for Bricks

There are so many techniques to learn (and practice!) when learning to machine knit. I thought it would be fun to solicit some smaller projects, so I “opened” “commissions” by asking some friends if they had any small project ideas after showing them a successful hat.

By buddy Chris took me up on it! He has a large power brick that he found was getting scratched up in his luggage and asked if I could make a cover for it.

This sounded like a totally doable project, so I decided to take it extremely seriously.

I asked Chris to send me some measurements and a reference photo.

I used the measurements and photos to 3D print a test-dummy brick.

I offered up some terrible photos of my yarn stash to pick colors, and some patterning options to cover the bag.

I used these selections to make a gauge swatch at a few different yarn tensions.

With the gauge chosen, I measured out the number of stitches and rows per inch. Then it was time to write up a pattern.

This bag is knit as a rectangle from the top down.

1. Start by casting on enough stitches to go around the two short sides (actually, a little less, since we want it to be snug).
2. A half-inch hem is made by starting with an inch of knitting, then folding it over and re-hanging the initial stitches to form a tube. A cord will go through this hem to let us pull the bag closed.
3. The main body of the bag is then knitted in two colors using Fair Isle pattern number 031 from Brother’s Stitch World. It’s as long as the long side of the brick, plus a little extra for the bottom, which will be stitched shut.

The bag is formed by sewing up the rectangle on two sides. I found this a little tricky on the bottom, as I had the pattern go all the way to the edge, so it’s a little lumpy!

The cord for the bag is knit on the machine by casting on 3 stitches, setting the carriage to tuck in one direction, then knitting a bunch of rows until it seemed long enough.

I added a 3D printed lace lock to hold the cord in place when the bag is pulled tight.

I did a bit of a knit-finishing crime, here. Specifically, I had washed my guage swatches before measuring them, but I did not wash the finished bag. By the time I had sewn it up and added the cord I was ready to be done with the project. So, the final bag is slightly larger than intended, unless and until it gets washed or steamed to let the fibers relax and shrink up.

But, whatever, it’s a finished object! I sent it to Chris, who sent back this photo!

It was super fun to go over the top on this project. While it might feel like a “simple” one, it gave me good practice thinking about each step and not cutting corners. Well, not cutting corners until I decided not to wash and block the finished bag!

Many thanks to Chris for humoring me on this project, sending encouragement as I overshared process photos and video, and giving me permission to share this project on my site!

My knitting commissions are closed at the moment, as I have a good number of things I want to work on. Stay tuned in case they open up again, though. 😉

#machine-knitting #commission #bag

🔗 October 19, 2025 at 11:23AM EDT • by Marty McGuire

📕 Finished reading In Defense of Dabbling by Karen Walrond ISBN: 9781506487656

#books

🔗 October 12, 2025 at 9:59PM EDT • by Marty McGuire

Today was a good day, I think, for making a little guy.

I started with the base pattern from Machine Knitting Monthly Oct 2025, intending to make the little guy without the hat. Instead of subtracting the rows for the folded brim in the pattern, I left them in, so he became extra looooong. I ended up stuffing some of the body rows inside during the sewing-up process, but he’s still kind of a tall bean.

Instead of the hat, I made a little mop of i-cord hair, inspired by KnitMachineImpl’s “Megan Donner hat” video.

#machine-knitting #little-guys #making

🔗 October 12, 2025 at 9:27PM EDT • by Marty McGuire

Great news! my candle dealer bugs rock is back with a new line for spoopy season! Order now and get these monstrous creations:

• bad apple (plus baby sample powerful enough to spoil somebody’s bunch)
• a sweet hex (feel like Pandora (not the streaming service) as you open the lid! then instead of hope you are left with a sweet candle to burn)
• mischief nite (this moon cannot be obscured, knows what you did)
• evil side up (I guess Sam I Am wanted the ham)

Plus some bugs rock matches and stickers and maybe some little plastic scaries and a temporary tattoo!

As a bonus you can guess which of these made me sneeze a bunch when I opened the box! (I’m fine, my allergies and I have come to an agreement. Thanks for asking!)

https://bugsrock.online/

#bugsrock #candles #2025 #october

🔗 October 12, 2025 at 2:21PM EDT • by Marty McGuire

🗓️ The Level Up

4

Oct

2025

Saturday

10

30

PM

EDT

Magnet Theater

📆 Add to Calendar: iCal | Google Calendar

The Level Up is an indie improv showcase. Join us as we watch amazing New York indie improv talents gain XP on the Magnet stage, unlock new achievements, and reach new milestones. Or do comedy.

Come support Michael as he dons his hosting-duties cap for three exciting indie teams!

• Good Towel
• Sweat Treat
• Hyperkinetic

I’ll be playing in with Michael and the rest of the Level Up!

Looking forward to it! And to seeing you there!! (Yes, you. Come on out!!!)

Saturday October 4th, 2025 @ 10:30pm
Magnet Theater
254 West 29th St (btwn 7th and 8th Ave.)
New York City, NY 10001
Tickets $10: https://magnettheater.com/show/tickets/60022/

#improv #show

🔗 October 4, 2025 at 10:30PM EDT • by Marty McGuire

Looks like Vimeo is being acquired. To my eyes it appears to be a private equity play by a private equity player with a history of making a mess of their toys.

I know that some folks have seen Vimeo as an alternative to the algorithmic ad-ridden hustle-bustle hell-world that is YouTube. For example, Vi Hart moved all of her 10+ years of YouTube to https://vimeo.com/vihart ! I worry for the future of all those works.

For my part, I uploaded a single video to Vimeo almost 16 years ago to see if it would be a suitable place to post video for sharing to the social networks I was on at the time. I guess I didn’t love it. I’ve now mirrored that single video to my own site. No big deal: MakerBot #131 printing bike handlebar mount bottom

#Vimeo #capitalism #video #hosting

🔗 October 2, 2025 at 10:15AM EDT • by Marty McGuire

See also: