I made a hat!
the machine
I used my friend’s knitting machine. It exclusively makes circles/cylinders. I didn’t know anything about knitting, and I was able to make a hat in … well okay probably two hours. But there are people online making one in 10 minutes! I probably could make one in ten minutes with some practice. (also not including buying yarns).
crank away!
The yarn is threaded onto this machine and you crank the handle. There’s a little counter and you just count — 60 loops. Put on the next color (literally just snip the yarn with a long tail, put it inside, then thread on a circle with the second yarn). Crank away again another 40 loops. Realize you don’t have enough yarn and change the colors again. Here is a video.
casting off (and cursing)
At the end, you take a needle and thread yarn through all the final knits at the top and pull them off the machine one loop at a time. This is where the cursing comes in, because if you accidentally pop one off the machine because you’re a clumsy ape, then it can start to slip through multiple rows of yarn. You have to stop this process and then carefully re-knit them one row at a time.
It’s surprisingly hard to follow individual yarn threads and find the tiny loop that you dropped. If my friend hadn’t been there I think multiple hours of youtube videos and a general disillusionment would have resulted from the casting off process.
cinch and add a pompom
Once the hat is cast off, you have a long tube. You cinch it tight at the top. At this point I also made a pom pom (see previous posts) on the spot by wrapping yarn around four fingers, taking that tail from the cinched off hat, and using that to cinch off the pom pom also.
Then, tie a square knot or two.
As a final act, we hide the thread. To do so, you scrunch the hat and thread the yarn through a few loops (in this specific pattern which follows existing yarns) and then when you un-scrunch you can poke the thread through into the center of the hat.
Hat!
the end.
appendix
Notes on yarn
There’s a bit of trickery with the yarn, it has to be yarn 4 (?) and fit in the needles and also slide off of them well. This Sentro machine has 43 needles I think which come up one at a time and grab the thread being fed in and then back down. Here is the thread I used.
other more complex inspiration from youtube
We also looked up how people make patterns on their hats (other than just solid swathes of color). Seems like they just manually do so — loop one thread, then the next, then another color, etc.
Fixing a stitch: https://youtu.be/VhtOs-5lwI4?feature=shared&t=341
Manually knitting over the original to put in a design (“duplicate stitch”)
Or you can stitch, then cut the yarn, then stitch the new color, then cut the yarn, etc. It’s kind of intense
https://youtu.be/JMV49F45xuQ?feature=shared&t=1278
Future work — DIY automated ugly christmas sweater?
in order to really make an ugly christmas sweater though, we can’t just be doing tubes all day e’ery day. So to do that you need to have two linear machines that interleave with each other. And to do that you first have to have one linear machine…
So some research (from above friend) on this.
The commercial linear ones are around $250 — $500. www.amazon.com/Knitting-Machine-Stitches-Domestic-Accessories/dp/B09KG8X6XT
In terms of DIY — This is a circular one (perhaps among the best?)
https://www.printables.com/model/355228-circular-sock-knitting-machine-for-my-mom-and-you
But no linear DIY / OSHW ones exist. So, maybe tbd?