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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.
I was in such a good mood about my progress that Amy snapped this photo of me asking "This could become a hat, right?"
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.
KA-8300: An elephant is about to charge through your live stitches.KA-8310: 🎼Just turn the crank, snap the plank, boot the marble right down the chute- 🎶
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.
With the waste yarn, this reminds me of Audrey II.
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.
Before washing and drying, it's definitely hat-like!
Then a trip through the laundry to see its final form!
It is a hat!
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!
