After a somewhat fraught Chattie hat commission I decided to go ahead and make one for myself!

I think it came out ... fine!

Lessons learned:

Transfers: I'm still having a hard time using my transfer carriage to move ribbing stitches from the front ribber bed to the back main bed. This time I bent a needle on each bed! 😱 I also discovered that this transfer process is where some of my dropped stitches came from in the previous hat. I ended up recovering most of these before seaming, which saved a lot of fixing up time later! 😅

Joining / seaming: somehow, for the second time, I have set out with the intention of joining the hat body to the brim with the seam on the knit side of the hat body, where it will be hidden by the folded brim, but ended up with it on the purl side, against the head. I'm also still getting the feel for seaming things on the machine. I decided to hang the hat body on directly to the needles with the finished brim and do a transfer-tool bind-off, but found the hung-on stitches really got in the way. After dropping a stitch (and some f-bombs) and losing the yarn tail, I backed things up and did a crochet-style bind-off with the latch tool, instead. I still managed to drop four or so stitches along the way. I manually repaired these later.

Grafting: I had a better time seaming up the side of the hat using Kitchener stitch. After my last go at it, I found a video tutorial on Kitchener for machine knitting from Diana Sullivan that made a lot more sense. This time I only screwed up one thing about it. Unfortunately that thing makes the resulting seam pretty obvious! A Kitchener stitch graft is supposed to look invisible, because you're basically creating new knit stitches by hand. However, if you create those new stitches from the wrong side, what you get is a row of purl stitches on the knit side of the garment!

Despite the issues, it wears just fine!

I'm happy to wear a hat that I made for myself! I was proud to wear it on outings yesterday and this morning. Possibly the last cold days of the season! 😂

What's next? I think I'd like to make another thing for myself. Probably a vest, using these beauties:

Thanks for reading! See you next time.

Play bad title pun games, win bad title pun prizes.

The Chattie hat continues to tempt and taunt me. After my first test Chattie came out OK despite some major issues during construction, and my second Chattie didn’t work out.

Producer Amy has ultimately adopted the “test” Chattie as her own, wearing it through this strange NYC winter, and even held onto it when a friend and colleague politely but firmly attempted to transfer ownership. Consequently, I received a commission request for a new Chattie.

Planning-wise, the commission called for something in dark colors, slightly smaller than the one Amy wore, but similarly fuzzy and warm. I had a spool of fuzzy cotton from the “Skinny Latte” series that I picked up at Fab Scrap in black, that should work exactly as well as the white yarn I used for the “test” hat.

Construction began with the top body, which is knit sideways with 10 sections of short rows. It went astonishingly smoothly! This yarn is quite thick, knitting at a T9 tension when doing single-bed, and T4 on both carriages for ribbing. My tension mast also didn’t want to feed this yarn nicely, but I settled into a rhythm of moving the carriage slowly and pausing as needed to pull more yarn through.

Not Pictured: Struggles

I’ve been watching eBay for accessories for my standard gauge Brother knitting machine setup, which has included a Brother KA-8300 Transfer Carriage and a Brother KA-8310 Linker Carriage.

I knit about 3.5" inches worth of 1x1 rib, across enough stitches to form a reasonable circumference for the brim of the hat. After the Dishcloth Chattie fiasco, I knew to use make the rib at least 2/3 the number of needles wide as there were rows in the top of the cap.

When done with the ribbing, I used the Transfer Carriage to move the stitches from the front ribber bed onto the empty stitches on the main bed. This mostly worked, actually, leaving me with just a couple to transfer by hand.

I then took the whole brim off on waste yarn. This got a bit weird, with not every stitch actually knitting cleanly onto the first row of waste yarn. I managed it, but it was weird, and probably caused problems to come. I believe I should have knit a final row of regular knitting before taking things off onto waste yarn.

For the next step, I could have grafted / seamed the brim and hat body together by hand, but I really wanted to use my new Linker Carriage. So, after thoroughly reading the manual several times, I:

• hung the bottom edge of the hat body (which, being knit sideways, means I was hanging on stitches of a finished side edge).
• hung the live stitches from the brim in front
• pulled the body stitches over the live brim stitches, so the live stitches are the only stitches remaining on the working needles, having been pulled through the side stitches. This was a cool-sounding maneuver that in practice I found very fiddly.
• knit one row of a thinner (but same-colored) yarn at the loosest possible tension, to form a final row of live loops.
• used the Linker Carriage to crank my way across the bed, letting the carriage pull one loop through the next all the way to the end.

Or, well, that’s how it was supposed to go.

I had two false starts with the Linker Carriage, followed by one absolute failure which locked the whole thing up, requiring several minutes of struggle to even free the carriage from the machine. In that chaos, I dropped several stitches and several f-bombs.

After leaving it to rest overnight, I came back the next day and finished the loop-through-loop bind-off by hand, then went back and “rescued” the dropped stitches.

Checking my work afterwards, I found that somehow a couple of dozen live stitches from the brim, likely all from the front ribber bed side, had simply not been picked up in my attempt to seam things together. So, I grabbed a sewing needle and a long line of waste yarn, ran it through as a “lifeline” for all the dropped ribbing stitches I could find, and once again the project got to rest for a day or two while I stewed about it.

I have very little in the way of hand-sewing, hand-knitting, or hand-crochet skills, but I finally decided that I could “rescue” these dropped live stitches as if they had been correctly handled on the machine, by running a sewing needle down through the bottom edge of the hat, through a dropped live stitch, pull the stitch up through the edge, then secure it with a knot or a backstitch, depending on how far away the next dropped stitch was. This took at least a couple of hours over a couple of sessions.

Finishing

Finally, it was time to seam up the side of the hat. Though it had been my original plan, I opted not to try the Linker Carriage again for this. Instead, I made my first attempt at a Kitchener stitch, which is meant to seam together two edges of live stitches in an invisible way that looks like just another row of knitting. Mine … doesn’t look that nice. But it is still pretty hard to see unless you’re looking for it, so I’ll call that a win (and try harder next time)!

I also mattress stitched the ribbed hem together, making sure to put that seam on the outside of the hat, because the brim is meant to be folded up.

Then it was a matter of running a line through the top 10 stitches at the top of the hat to pull them together and close it up.

Then a trip through the laundry to see its final form!

I really should go ahead and make one of these for myself, and stop wearing beanies that came from a store. For my version I think I would make a few extra changes:

• add a row of plain knitting on top of the brim before casting off onto waste yarn.
• join the brim to the hat with the seam on the “outside”, since the brim is meant to fold up to cover it anyway.
• probably try the linker carriage again even though I got so burned by it. 😂

Thanks for reading! As bonus content, here are some photos of the finished Chattie on the head form that Producer Amy bought for her own hat-making purposes!

Until next time!

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's it for now. Thanks for reading!

Today was a good day, I think, for knitting together.

This is a retro-post. Jump scare!

I sure have read a lot of 2025-in-review posts recently! I am impressed by all that you have accomplished.

Here's my 2025 wrapped (in yarn), in 20 photos about my machine knitting this year!

• 1, 2, and 3: my machine and samples from my first workshop at the Brooklyn Textile Arts Center (TAC). Workshop day 1. Workshop day 2.
• 4 and 5: my first hats.
• 6: a Fair Isle patterned hat, made after disassembling and cleaning my machine carriage.
• 7: socks with hems too tight to wear
• 8, 9, and 10: three little guys! First little guy, second little guy, third little guy.
• 11: A bag for a power brick I made for a friend.
• 12: (Not-so-) secret first sweater.
• 13: A scarf from my workshop day in Berlin.
• 14 and 15: little green bow, little red bow.
• 16 and 17: my ribbed hand warmers, producer Amy's ribbed hand warmers.
• 18: A swatch for the knitalong sweater.
• 19: Finished knitalong sweater.
• 20: My current machine setup, with added ribber, 3D printed parts for the ribber cover and to cover the new AYAB electronics. Photo from this WIP sweater knitalong post.

I feel like I should be knitting more and, sure, I should. But this is also a lovely set of accomplishments from August to the end of the year.

This is reflected, a bit, in the growth of my knitting setup.

• I got a knitting machine stand, so Amy and I don't have to fight over counter space for our fiber arts projects.
• At long last, I replaced the electronics with an AYAB interface board and spent an incredible  undocumented-on-my-blog amount of time making some badly designed 3D parts to replace the cover. These hold the row counter and AYAB board as well as keeping stuff and cats out of the machine.
• I found a new-ish-in-box KR-850 ribbing attachment on the electronic bay. The box was damaged in shipping, and it was missing its plastic cover, but I was able to 3D print a replacement ribber cover just fine. And now I can do ribbing!

I'm looking forward to a lot more in 2026! Here are some ideas so far:

• I have acquired, but not yet used, a KRC-830 color changer. I'm excited to tinker with multicolor designs!
• I love Saga's sweater in Alan Wake 2, and there's a pattern for making it. I don't know about making the whole sweater, but I think it'd be fun to make something like a hat using the fair Isle design bits.
• I want to make a cardigan for myself of some kind. I don't yet know what kind! That's hard.
• I want to keep up with the folks in the machineknit.community, who are planning a whole 12-month set of online classes and meetups to skill-up and level-up.

See you in 2026. Happy knitting!!

Yeah, I'm retro-posting. Hello from the future, ding-dongs!

This post is part of a series, as I play catch-up on KnitFactoryImpl's knitalong of a set in sleeve crew neck sweater for channel members.

In the previous installment, I wrote about failing to get a good neckline for this sweater.

Well, I decided to try sewing it up as-is, rescuing dropped stitches as I went. After my hand-warmer adventures, I was a little more confident about how to sew up a ribbed edge.

The process was slightly harrowing, but resulted in dropping only one stitch! What! Incredible!

So, of course, at this point I put in a box because I was afraid to finish it. I had intended this to be a gift for producer Amy upon her return from Berlin in early December. When she came home, we had other stuff going on, I got distracted, and I definitely wasn't constantly thinking about this unfinished sweater every day.

Just finish the sweater, Marty!

No! Well, okay! I mean: sort of!

What I did do was finish seaming the neck and shoulders before Amy left in mid-December to visit family. I packed it with a length of yarn and a tapestry needle, as well as links to the videos on how to finish the sweater.

I gifted producer Amy a sew-it-yourself sweater kit. 😅

In truth, this was actually her idea. Several times she brought it up and I declined, insisting I would finish it, but eventually I relented.

So, the rest of this story is hers!

Okay, uh, finish the sweater, Amy!

She did! After watching Carson's video, and finding another video explainer or two on mattress stitching, this was Amy's on-the-road project for December.

She got it finished on December 24th and popped it in the wash.

On Christmas morning, she found Santa had delivered a perfectly decent sweater! A bit short in the sleeves, and there's that dropped stitch in the back of the collar, but it's recognizably a sweater! And, according to producer Amy, it is quite cozy and I have seen her wear it several times. Amazing!

Thanks for reading

While I'm still somewhat embarrassed that I didn't finish the sewing-up on the sweater, I am really proud of how it turned out. I'm grateful that Amy graciously took it on as a DIY project. I certainly learned a lot, and Amy learned some new techniques, and we have finished a successful collab together.

And it looks like a thing!

This feels like a pretty great project to have accomplished at the end of 2025. A year that has been panned by critics, and most everyone, alike.

Until next time!

I am pleased to report that producer Amy approved of the mittens I posted a couple of weeks ago, which were a bit too small for me.

"How nice," I thought, "to have made something functional and enjoyable. Now to make a new pair for me. I'll use this different sock yarn, that Amy bought me in Berlin, so we can easily tell them apart. This should be nice and straightforward!"

Ha ha ha! Ha-ha! Ha.

Readers to enjoy a tl;dr: this worked out fine, but not before multiple failures and some wrestling with broken self-confidence.

This is still a variant of the Fingerless Mitt to Knit by Diana Sullivan (from Austin, TX). Here were the changes that finally worked for me, with this yarn:

• Body of the mitt is 55 stitches wide. Thumb is 4 stitches wider, using needles from 14L to 15R.
• Knitting tension is T7 on both carriages. Near (but not at!) the loosest possible tension for my ribber carriage.
• Manually loosen the yarn in the tension mast before knitting each row. The carriages screeched and often jammed, but I was able to jiggle them across with great anxiety about breaking my machine.
• For the top of the mitts, I learned how to do a proper 1x1 rib bind-off. I liked Diana's "Simpler Smiles & Frowns Bind-Off" video for this.

I really like how they turned out! I'm excited to put them to the test in the cold season!

Now, for the strong-willed reader, let's talk about some challenges!

Like most machine knitting projects, my issues can mostly be traced back to skipping the swatching step(s). This design relies on the stretchiness of two types of rib. The mitts "at rest" appear quite small, then stretch to snugly cover the hands. I'm not confident I would have been able to consistently measure gauge in a way that allowed comparing the stretched size of different yarns and tensions. But I should have tried!! I might have decided early on what I believe now, which is that this particular sock yarn is too thick to work well with my standard gauge machine.

Instead, I jumped right into a first attempt with extra stitches and rows, but holding everything else the same, including the tension. This was a miserable experience, with the carriages jamming constantly. The machine was basically telling me "no no no, stop, no" the whole time. Would that I had listened! I managed (through sweat and anxiety) to finish it, but the resulting fabric was uncomfortably thick and tight. The loop-through-loop bind-off at the top of the mitt was also still too tight to spread my fingers while wearing it.

For attempt number two, I decided to up the tension to T6, but otherwise go back to the original stitch and row counts. This went a little better in terms of process and the fabric, but it was still too tight to wear.

I got a lot of practice doing the hand sewing to make-up the pieces into the mitts. This was starting to feel like a lot of work for two disappointments. So I ended up taking a break for several days. I spent some of that time researching properly stretchy bind-offs and focusing on non-knitting projects, but mostly I was just feeling the sting of failure, haha.

Finally, I did some practice at looser tensions, doing a few rows at T7 and T8 to see if I could find a technique that would actually knit smoothly with this yarn. I couldn't! But I did found that T7 was the least likely to bind up. I finished the body of the mitt at T7 well enough. I decided to "do an easier version" of the bind-off, skipping the step of casting off onto waste yarn and stitching it up on the machine, freeing each stitch from the machine as I sewed it up.

It was during a break in this process with many needles out in hold position, that I carelessly waved my hand and impaled my left pinky finger on 2 or 3 needles. With some help from producer Amy, I got bandaged up and returned to work.🩸🩹

The result was... fine? It looks very inconsistent when the mitt is at rest, but it's very nice and stretchy and, when stretched out on the hand, I think it looks OK. Hooray, mobility!

For the last mitt, I combined all my hard-earned knowledge so far, and did a proper waste yarn bind-off to finish the top ribbing. The added steps felt more time-consuming, but I think the sewing up went a lot faster. It certainly looks a lot better!

I'm not sure what I'll do with the failed mitts and the as-yet-unused portion of sock yarn. The machine definitely does not like it. Probably it should be used for someone else's hand knit or crochet project.

Thanks for reading! I have more knitting projects I'm looking forward to posting soon.

Yesterday was a good day to make a little bow.