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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, I made a hat!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heck yeah, I’m retro-posting. Hello from the future!

It’s August 3rd, 2025 and time for more machine knitting!

I started the day practicing some of the techniques from day one of the class.

I have forgotten the first technique Elaine taught us for the day, but it let us work in a second yarn by hand as each row is knit. Seems like maybe a cool way to work in wires or conductive thread??

Next up, we learned about putting working needles in hold, aka short-rowing, which allows you to “grow” sections of the knitting by adding rows just to one section, while other parts of the work stay put.

Next it was time for two-color patterned knitting with fair isle, powered by punch cards!

The knitting carriage needs several adjustments to begin following the punch card pattern.

Then… knit a bunch of rows! Here’s a little video.

When you’re done patterning, you can snip the contrast yarn, turn the carriage back knob back to ‘NL’ and disable the ‘MC’ button, then proceed knitting in your main yarn color as normal.

After a lunch break, we spent most of the rest of the time practicing what we’d learned so far. Near the end, Elaine taught a few important techniques that you do off the machine.

Note to self, or anyone who wants to book some studio time to do some machine knitting at the TAC:

And that was the end of the class! I learned so much, but mostly that I have so much yet to learn.

Besides the big swatch of worked-in yarn, here’s the rest of my swatches for the day!

From top-to-bottom, left-to-right:

• Blue swatch with yellow short-rowed triangle sections.
• Blue and red swatch partially mattress-stitched into a tube, with several lace holes.
• Long blue and yellow swatch with practice sections of short-rowing and lace, as well as a long section of floral fair isle pattern. The end of the piece is ragged from a failed bind-off.
• Fair isle swatch with blue-on-purple.
• Fair isle swatch with purple-on-blue.
• Long purple swatch with sections of blue.
• Blue-on-yellow fair isle swatch.
• Yellow-on-blue fair isle swatch.
• Short blue-on-yellow fair isle swatch with two ragged edges: one from removing the swatch without binding off, and one (I think) because I had a "weird" number of stitches compared with the pattern, leading to some edge stitches being dropped.

Will I continue my machine knitting journey?? Stick around to find out! Subscribe in your favorite feed reader, and so on, and so forth!

Happy HTML Day!

I'm taking a two-day machine knitting workshop intensive, so I did not have the energy to join the folks at the Valentino Jr. Park meetup.

Instead I am writing this post (in HTML) while watching along to Jenn Schiffer's "HTML Day From Home (hdfh)" stream.

The workshop is Machine Knitting 101, from Brooklyn's Textile Arts Center's line of Machine Knitting classes and workshops. Today, our instructor Elaine walked us through some of the basics.

• The parts of the machine (Brother KH-840s. Punch card reading cuties from the 1970s!)
• Choosing yarn
• Threading the machine with tension
• Casting on with "e-loops", comb and weights
• Knitting rows, managing weights
• Moving stitches horizontally and vertically, making holes and ladders
• Blending colors and swapping colors
• Increasing and decreasing the number of stitches not-at-the-edge
• Casting off (the hardest thing we covered, probably)

We bought a knitting machine, a Brother KH-930e, back in, checks notes, =chokes= like 2011 or 2012?? Enticed by Becky Stern's post on on hacking the KH-930e. As it turns out, the electronics hacking was NOT the difficult part of working with one of these machines! After some rounds of buying replacement parts and maintenance, we got a couple of little projects out of it, but found it challenging enough to work with that we stopped messing with it. But, we still have it, and I'm excited to try again!

Here's a photo of the workshop syllabus, as well as some of my debris from today's workshop.

From top to bottom, left-to-right:

• A long run of purple and green blocks, with a mix of clean color changes (where you cut one yarn and start antoher) and blending (where you knit with two yarns at once!). This run also includes a "flap" where I used vertical stitch movement to "close up" a small block of green.
• A long run of purple yarn with holes and "wrinkles". These are tests of moving stitches horizontally (holes) and vertically (wrinkles).
• An unraveling run with one block each of purple and green. A failed attempt at casting off.
• A small unraveling block of purple. A failed attempt at casting off.
• An unraveling run with two blocks of purple divided by a small block of green. A failed attempt at casting off.
• A non-unraveling block of purple. My one success at casting off!
• An unraveling block of purple. A failed attempt at casting off.
• A run with a large green block and a large tapering purple block. Practice at increasing and decreasing stitches. I decreased down to one stitch lol.
• A small unraveling block of green. A failed attempt at casting off.

Thank you for reading. I hope to post more knitting projects. I hope to read your HTML Day creations!

'til next time!