Last summer I figured out the mechanics of machine-knit intarsia, and discovered that it was the perfect vehicle for some self-striping mercerized cotton DK yarn that I had had lying around for several years. My first intarsia summer top, made of Uneek Cotton yarn, was supposed to have been a stash-buster, but it came out so well and was so much fun to design with that I am now in the habit of using what I have and then buying more for the next project. I also bought a hand-knitting pattern that had a very usable chart for a heart shape, which I could have charted for myself if I liked chartin ..read more

Last year’s January Swatchathon, my annual month dedicated to making swatches and trying new techniques, was a particularly productive one for numbers of swatches and new techniques attempted. But in terms of completed garments based on the swatches, it was a bit of a bust. I was overly ambitious. When I first started dedicating my Januaries to swatching and experimenting, the point was just to try things out and see what new things I liked enough to do again. It was a theoretical exercise, and whether I actually did anything with the things I tried was secondary to the information I gained. B ..read more

It seemed in September 2022 like something I could knit on the machine with plenty of time to spare before my younger daughter’s birthday in late November. It was a blanket design by Nicky Epstein that I saw once in my friends’ activity on Ravelry, made up of garter stitch squares in different colors, sewn together after all the squares were knitted, with a flower-shaped appliqué sewn onto the center of each square, and fringed at two edges with a different color for each abutting square. The original design was beautiful, but every step of the process seemed like pure mind-rotting tedium. Tha ..read more

You know that thrill of meeting someone for the first time and hitting it off? When they seem completely perfect and everything seems so effortlessly natural? Then you spend more time together and you discover each other’s limitations, and starry-eyed illusions collide with reality? That happened to me very recently, not with a replacement for my husband of 40+ years, but with my LK150 knitting machine, which is located at my daughter’s house in Madison, Wisconsin, where it and I had a love-at-first-sight connection last summer. After the drama I experienced trying to learn how to use my Broth ..read more

I have been using modular machine knitting techniques for some time as a way to create design elements while extending the width limitations imposed by a 200-needle knitting machine bed. Until now I have avoided concocting designs that had half of the neckline knitted vertically and the other half knitted horizontally because that requires one set of shaping maneuvers for the side-to-side knitting and another set of maneuvers to shape the up-and-down knitting. This is necessary because knit stitches are wider than they are tall, at a ratio of three stitches to four rows. I might have used the ..read more

Over the course of the last eight or nine months, I have mentioned in my posts that the needle selection mechanism of my Brother KH965i electronic knitting machine was malfunctioning. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to fix it, so I figured out some clever workarounds to my panic over the fact that it was going to be hard to find someone else to fix it for me. One workaround was embroidering over the missed stitches, another was choosing patterns that were simple enough that I could move the misplaced needles into their proper place before moving the carriage. I flirted with the idea of inte ..read more

When I got married decades ago, I was very tempted to get married the way my parents did when they were 22 and had no money, in a rabbi’s office with next to no guests, no catering, no band, nothing but the legal essentials. But I thought that I might be sorry later on if I didn’t have a wedding dress, guests, a meal, a band, so we did that and I hated every single second of my wedding day because it was stressful and the things we spent money on had no real meaning to me. After it was over, I turned to Charles and said, “Let’s take a suicide pact.” Fortunately being married is very different ..read more

Monogamy has a specific meaning in knitter jargon: it means working on one project at a time until the project is finished. Before I retired, I was a monogamous knitter, and it was satisfying to me to focus all my thought and knitting time on the project and seeing it steadily grow. Then I retired and got a knitting machine and became bigamous, one project upstairs on the knitting machine, not movable until I got to the finishing stage, and another handknitted or crocheted project that I could stuff into a bag and carry to the yarn store or work on it from the living room couch while I watched ..read more

There’s a sentence in the Duolingo German course that’s intended to be funny because it’s deprecating to grandmas and knitters: My grandma’s riskiest hobby is knitting. After absorbing the condescension, ageism, and sexism implied in the sentence, I concluded that it was actually true in my case, because some of my projects are wild and bumpy rides. Breaking a leg isn’t the only way to take a risk. I really didn’t think I was taking on a particularly gnarly adventure when I first conceived my plan for my second machine-knit adaptation of Junko Okamoto’s Kurt pattern. This is my first one, knit ..read more

The first thing I do every morning is to go on Ravelry. I check in on my group, The Interior of My Brain, to contribute to any discussions that might have taken place in my absence if I have something to add, and search through my friends’ activity for interesting projects or patterns that might interest the members. I have hundreds of Ravelry friends, and the things they make or fave give me a curated digest of what’s new and interesting on Ravelry. One day last fall I ran into a form-fitting skirt knitted in garter stitch in colors arranged as a color TV test pattern. It was a free pattern i ..read more