Hats

Yes, I am back to my favorite knitting. We went to Florida for a while this winter and I took my knitting machines (standard and midgauge) and knit hats. While Frank drove down and back I also hand knit hats.....but we won't talk of those
Because I took the ribber for the standard gauge km I did some hats with ribbing. For the midgauge 350 I started with waste yarn and handknit the ribbing afterwards, while sitting out in the sunshine.

At the April knit-in I also knit hats. Oh, I forgot to mention in that post that one of our TMK members had passed away over the winter and had left her yarn and magazines to our club. We got to look through these items at the knit in and choose which to take home with us. We did donate money to our TMK for the items we took home.

I had been trying to use up all the LionBrand Homespun that I had in my house by making hats. Well some of the yarn left to us included this yarn, so I got even more!! I did manage to knit 4 hats with the Homespun while at the knit in and I have knit 6 more since I have gotten home. These are just basic ribbed hats. I did write up the pattern and it was published in the May issue of the Carolinas Machine Knitters Guild newsletter.  I do like those ribbed hats in Homespun because the yarn usually varies in colors and I can mix up various leftovers to make even more interesting hats. Look out Warmth for Maine  as I plan to send these to you as part of my 100 donated hats this year!!

That is for the Country Knitting of Maine, News&Views magazine hat contest which has been held each fall for the last few years. I think that by now I have made hats for all the people in Maine Well maybe not. It is good to make things for charity. 

I have made other hats in worsted weight yarn and in the weight that knits on the standard machine. I keep trying different styles and hope to make some of those furry looking pompoms for some of this year's hats. I've got the material here right next to me.

Here are some of the Homespun hats. The second photo shows them before seaming.

April 2018 knit in

Yes, we do love our knit-in's! In April we met for 5 days, off and on for some people. We were in the same location as last fall, and as my last blog so I did not take photos. But I do have some photos of the bedrooms! 

There were 14 people signed up and of those 12 spent all or some of the nights. Those others just came to knit and eat, but slept at home. We had another 3 people who joined us briefly on Saturday for our regular monthly machine knitting meeting (Triangle Machine Knitters). One of our members did the demonstration for the meeting as we take turns doing this throughout the year. This time Shirley talked about lace and the various tools we could use for selecting the needles or transferring the stitches. She demonstrated making lace on the knitting machine. She passed around an unbelievable shawl which she had made on a km from such lightweight yarn that we could not believe it. As the shawl was passed from person to person you could see our hands rise up as the shawl was not nearly as heavy as we expected!! It was like a cloud of, what else?, laceweight woolen yarn! After the demo we each got to show and tell about what we have been knitting lately.

We did not do yarn dying this time, but 3 of us did take time to help a new machine knitter to make her machine work. There was a problem which took a while to figure out. Apparently a refurbished sponge bar was in the SR 860 machine and it did not work as it should. The ribbon on the foam came off and jammed in the needlebed. When the ribbon was removed the machine worked as it should....but a new sponge bar needed to be ordered as we were sure the sponge would quickly wear out.

This was also a time where I saw DAK being used to knit from screen on a brother machine and I got to help the new knitter use DAK to knit from screen with the SR 860....what fun since I have not knit from screen and do not have experience making this work with the SR machine.......Some expert I am!!??  As I mentioned above, we help each other out and learn a lot along the way.

This was a lot to accomplish with the new knitter and her machine. This was definitely not something she (or any of us) could have done on our own. By pooling our knowledge and building on what others said we worked through the problem!!

I love knit-in's!!

Rambling about machine knitting

Wow, I have not updated this since last fall. Our fall knit in was wonderful. We were in a different building with a loft where some people set up their machines. We had 8 bedrooms so most of us got to have single person rooms. There was a real kitchen where we took turns making the meals, or part of the meals. We even got to sample dying our yarns outside!! There were about 14 of us for this knit in.

The kitchen is under the loft. The loft has lots of room for knitting machines as you can see in the third photo. The bedrooms were off to the sides of the lower knitting level. Each bedroom had a queen bed and a bunk bed. Each bedroom had a private bathroom. It was so nice that we booked it for the spring of 2018!!

Someone hacked my blog

Sorry I haven't visited here recently. I just checked and someone hacked my blog and tried to post 2 different times to put up a link. Luckily they just got the draft written and did not post it!! They or someone else also started sending out links to people in my contact list.

What is the matter with these people? Don't they have any useful hobby?
I'll post about my knitting in another message.
If you get any messages from me with just a link (and not my usual long chatter) then delete that message!!