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!
BIZZO (IG: @bizzonyc)
AM 2 PM (IG: @anthonyjulian_improv)
UP TO NO GOD (IG: @uptonogod)
I’ll be playing with Bizzo, as well as with Michael and the rest of the Level Up!
Looking forward to it! And to seeing you there!! (Yes, you. Come on out!!!)
I made this test-version of a chattie hat, learned some lessons, and decided I was ready to try a "real" one for producer Amy. I have this pretty-weird cotton-blend yarn that I got from Fab Scrap some months ago. It's green, it's got slubs, some kind of elastic core maybe, I dunno. Every time I make something with it I think "this feels like a dish cloth".
Mirror-assisted selfie showing the front and back of the beanie known as the dishcloth chattie.
The main body of the hat was made the same as my test version, with a little more care and no dropped stitches. I wanted to do as little off-machine hand-sewing as possible, so I started the rib with a fresh cast-on, then joined the finished rib to the hat body on the machine. I also hung the side edges together to seam up on the needle bed. This is where I made some mistakes!
I sewed up the side seam inside out. 🤦♂️ I was eventually able to un-pick the seam and re-do it, but popped some stitches in the process. Re-seaming was somewhat difficult.
Once the seam was finished, I tried it on and found I had not made enough ribbing! This material is not very stretchy and I simply did not cast on enough stitches. The end result was a TIGHT band on the hat.
The photo above is slightly misleading - this was actually the hat right off the machine, before washing and blocking. The washed hat was too tight to wear.
Oh no!
Thankfully, Home Ec NYC (the wonderful Brooklyn fiber arts workshop and studio of Hillary O'Dell) was hosting a sweater upcycling workshop, taught by Anne Warren, all about disassembling knits to reclaim yarn.
Producer Amy and me, at a wooden work table, picking apart some knits.Amy has separated the band from the body of the hat.
Everyone at the workshop was lovely. And it was so fun to learn that Anne is a machine knitter with a studio in Industry City, and a great newsletter full of local knitting events and resources!
Unfortunately, the chattie did not survive being de-seamed, re-seamed, and de-seamed again. We weren't able to unwind it back into usable yarn.
Thank you for your brief service, dishcloth chattie. Sometimes our purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others. Your sacrifice shall not be in vain.
Keen eyes might have noticed a familiar blue sweater in front of me in those photos. I don't own any thrifted sweaters or other knits that I wanted to disassemble in the workshop, so I decided to embrace the circle of life. I decided to let go of my first sweater, and the crop-top life that could have been.
I was able to fully unseam one arm of the sweater during the workshop.Back at home, I used my yarn winder to form to both unwind the sweater parts and cake the yarn at the same time.The five panels (front, back, sleeves, and neckline) became 8 balls of yarn of various sizes.
While I didn't quite get the clean conversion of five panels into 5 big cakes of yarn, there was a lot less waste than I expected!
Here's to this yarn becoming something new! Preferably not crop-length.
🎼Retro-post, retro-post. Post whatever, a retro post.🎶
For producer Amy's birthday this year, we went to one of her favorite places: Fab Scrap!
Fab Scrap helps fashion brands divert pre-consumer waste to be recycled or resold. Fashion companies send them literal tons of stuff that needs to be sorted into what can be resold, what can be shredded, what's recyclable, and what's trash.
The perfect birthday activity? Doing a three-hour volunteer sorting session together. Afterwards, they let you take home up to 5 pounds of scrap from your own sorting or from their resale store. And 30% off items that are sold individually!
Amy picked out a bunch of fabric goodies for her sewing projects, but I only had eyes for yarn. These are sold on cones, sometimes multiple pounds, in a pretty weird variety of materials and colors. I'm probably never going to find a fancy-schmancy merino wool, but there are some pretty neat cotton and synthetic blends in interesting colors and textures. They're already pretty affordable as-labeled, but at 30% off, it feels like a steal!
So, I filled up a bag and hauled a bunch home!
Before I can really make anything with these, I need to practice with them on the machine, find the right tension to work with them, and so on. So, it was time to make a bunch of tension swatches.
Five knit swatches on a countertop. Details below.
From left-to-right:
A very fine dark blue, synthetic blend. This yarn is too thin to use single-ply, so I wound off a small sample and threaded in two strands. Even then, it knit at a very small stitch size. The swatch here is 40 stitches wide, with two sections of 50 rows each. One at tension T2 and one at T3. The stitch count is the same as the samples next to this one, but this fine stretchy yarn comes out quite small! I will probably try this in three or four ply, or combine it with another thin yarn, before planning a project with it.
Neon pink cotton-synthetic blend. Nice and fuzzy! This needed to be knit at a much larger stitch size. This swatch is the same 40 stitches wide, with 3 sections of about 50 rows each, at T7, T8, and T9. It's so pink! I'll probably use it for accent colors unless I come up with some absolutely ridiculous project.
In the middle is a red acrylic yarn. It's slightly thinner and easier to work with than the fuzzy stuff. This swatch was made the same way as the pink swatch. It's a real red's red.
Next up, and this lighting doesn't do it justice, is a swatch of purple. This is a synthetic blend, that's very dense and not very stretchy. I made this swatch with the same 40 stitches and 3 sections of 50 rows. Suitable for Grimace cosplay, probably.
Finally, the largest swatch is a neon safety-vest yellow swatch. This is bigger than the others because it's actually 50 stitches wide, and I did it in 4 tensions, from (I think) 7 to 10. Suitable for Big Bird cosplay, probably!
We learned that Fab Scrap would be hosting some special tours and sorting sessions for Martin Luther King Jr. day. So, of course, we signed up to return. I was a little more picky this time.
Two gauge swatches on a gray countertop. Descriptions below.
On the left here is a bright safety-vest orange in my favorite fuzzy cotton-synthetic blend. On the right is a two-stranded blend of blue-green and white, also a cotton blend I think. Both swatches are 40 stitches with 3 sections of 50 rows each, at tensions T7, T8, and T9. The blue-green-white one was pretty painful to work with, and I dropped a bunch of stitches in the final section of the swatch. Thankfully it's just a swatch, so I was able to pick them up and work them into a section of waste yarn.
Not pictured here is another very fine synthetic yarn, this one in light blue. I want to try this one three- or four-ply, maybe blended with the dark blue yarn from my first haul!
Since these were all cotton and/or synthetics, I simply ran these through a machine wash and dry cycle on delicate. They haven't been pressed or steamed, so this is how they roll after drying.
I should maybe plan to practice and swatch more than just plain stockinette with each yarn. Samples of ribbing and fair isle might save some time when considering which yarns might be good for project ideas. Then again, they might not be! Each project has its own needs, and I should be prepared to spend the time and materials experimenting to find combinations that work for each one.
A lot of these yarns are on the thicc side for my setup - a standard gauge machine with needles spaced 4.5mm apart. This leads to a paradox where I have a bunch of yarn, but a lot of the projects I see out in the world are not really designed for these materials. I let this intimidate me more than I probably should. I can't help feeling that if I had more experience I would know better how these different yarns would produce different outcomes, or maybe that it was a mistake to purchase these.
But I don't know better, so I'm going to learn! Here's to putting these to good use!
In 2025 the folks at machineknit.community did a 12 Months of Hats knitalong. I only joined at the end of the year, and am still getting my practice in with a lot of basics, so I was a bit too intimidated to jump into any of these in the actual year of 2025.
Based on an interesting hat design request from a friend, for my first knitting project of 2026 I chose Kurt Payne's "Chattie" design, which was the November 2025 knitalong.
Unlike my first hats, which were basically rectangles sewn up and gathered at the top, the Chattie is knit sideways in 10 sections, using short rows on one side to form the rounded crown. This results in a neat sort of spiral look to the crown. Also unlike my first hats, the brim of the Chattie is added after-the-fact.
The Chattie is a very flexible design. However, before I get into any complexities like color work, I made this "quick" one out of plain white fuzzy cotton+polymer blend just to get practice with the techniques.
The good:
Kurt's instructions were great. He starts with gauge swatches before walking you through taking measurements and using a chart to convert measurements to stitches and rows. Instructions were also included for different brim variants. I chose a single band of 1x1 rib for this test.
The end result came out about the size I expected! At least, it sits snug on my head and just covers my ears when the brim is folded up.
I like the look and the feel of the 1x1 ribbed brim and the overall shape, I think.
I seamed the hat together on the machine and I think that went pretty well. There's a feeling of "certitude" I get when all the stitches to be joined can be counted and hung up on needles that I don't get when hand-seaming. I might be interested in getting a linker carriage for my machine to make this even faster.
I made some mistakes (see below) but decided to power through and finish. This was a test hat, so I didn't need a pristine result, just a finished object that tells me what I might want to change for a future design.
The oops:
My math worked out so the body sections had an odd number of rows, which was pretty chaotic when it came time to bring held needles back into work. I think in the future I will either make sure that I round that row count up or down to the next even number for all sections, or perhaps alternate round-ups and round-downs to end up with the same number of rows.
I dropped two stitches in the body of the hat. That's really not bad. I think this happened because of weight management, or possibly pulling multiple needles out of work in a single row because I got distracted with said weight management.
I decided to work the brim by re-hanging the hat body sideways on the machine, and I just couldn't seem to get the weights consistent. I had a lot of trouble with needles not knitting, or getting caught on the gate pegs and causing later rows to knit incompletely. This was a stressful, time-consuming mess. Surprisingly, the end result only had a couple of awful stretched out stitches, which I fixed up and pulled to the "inside" of the brim.
Unfortunately, to fit correctly, the "inside" of the brim gets flipped up to become the outside, so you can definitely see my mistakes and my seaming, haha.
I think I misremembered how to do a stretchy finish on 1x1 rib, or just plain pulled it too-tight as I went, resulting in the brim edge being too tight. This is just enough to be noticeable and annoying, but not quite fatal for the hat as a wearable object.
For the future:
I'm interested in doing color work on a design, but a great deal of the visible parts of the hat have short rows such that the number of stitches per row is constantly changing. Simple patterns in cool contrasting colors should tolerate that fine, but doing nice all-over patterning like I want may end up being tricky!
I'd like to skip sewing up 1x1 rib edges for a bit. I think for a future hat I will start the ribbing on the machine, the graft the live stitches onto the hat body directly, which should leave me with a nice stretchy edge without testing my still-poor hand finishing skills.
