I’m traveling but that doesn’t mean I’m not machine knitting!

I am so grateful to Cristina Talpa for her make-a-scarf workshop. Amy found it via the Makery and we thought it seemed too good to pass up.

And it was! While the workshop is geared for total beginners to machine knitting, Cristina smoothly adjusted to work around things I already knew. She taught me some great new techniques and helped me improve some less-than-optimal techniques I came to the workshop with.

Plus, this scarf! I love it! Amy enjoyed posing me on an outing in Berlin today to snap a few photos.

I’m so grateful for the opportunity to meet an expert (and experimental!) machine knitter, work on a garment together, and chat about the state of the craft.

Thanks so much, Cristina!

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!

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!

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. 😉

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.

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!

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.

Files

machine-stand-foot.scad

1145 bytes. Updated September 7, 2025.

machine-stand-foot.stl

2084 bytes. Updated September 7, 2025.