The two yarn shops I visited were "Bayshore Yarns" in Silverdale, Washington, and "Stranded by the Sea" in Edmonds, Washington.

Both are neat little stores, helpful, friendly staff. I look forward to buying more yarn from each.

I made this hat in wheat / cranberry / forest green heather yarn, which has a "New England Christmas" vibe to it.

You can't see, but the cranberry stripe extends down under the brim - if I were to remake this hat, I'd adjust it to show a little more of that stripe.

A large proportion of my machine-knitting knowledge comes from Quinn Bender: www.youtube.com/@quinnbender
who mentioned (in some video) a few yarns that work well with the Sentro circular knitting machine, including "Wool-Ease" yarn, a wool/acrylic mix, it's soft and scratchy in a way that I like.

I look forward to wearing the combo through the holiday season - blue and gray isn't super on-theme for holidays I celebrate, but neither is it blatantly contrary.

#sentro #knittingmachine #circularknittingmachine #hat #scarf #wool

I *only* knit 165 rows, still had enough for a little pom pom at the end. As I was casting off, I dropped a few stitches, but I managed to rescue them using my crochet hook and newfound skills. Also, I hid the mistake inside the hat.

So, to go along with the scarf, I decided to make a hat (I know how to do two things on my circular knitting machine, and one is a scarf, and one is a hat). So I weighed the scarf, weighed the remaining yarn, again did math, realized I could knit another 200 rows, which sanity told me would be nuts.

I'm pleased with the look and feel of this yarn, and the scarf makes me happy.

#sentro #knittingmachine #knit #scarf #luckyscarf #wool

You can see by the yardstick that the scarf measures a little over two yards in length, which is unnecessary, but gives me numbers for future scarf projects - this particular yarn works out to ~6 feet for 400 rows.

I watched a handful of YouTube videos, including talking about using a "joining stitch" with a crochet hook. I practiced a bit with a throwaway bit of yarn, and got enough of the hang to plunge forward with this scarf.

The googly eyes are probably not what I'm going to use, but I think they're funny, so maybe there's a googly-eye project in my future. (Cookie Monster?)

#sentro #machineknitting #knittingmachine #hat

The product of last night's knitting is a two-color light green / dark green beanie, a step towards my eventual plan to make a Kermit The Frog-inspired hat.

- I've started using "claw weights" to pull the knitted tube down and away from the needles

I don't know if any one of these is more significant than the others, but my superstitious self will do all of them for a while to get my hat-momentum back.

[cont]

Things I did that seemed to have helped (in whole or in part?)

- I rewound my yarn onto cakes using a yarn winder
- I made sure to go slow on the first few rows
- I regulate the tension by holding the yarn in my left hand before it goes into the tensioning guide

[cont]

Eventually, I jiggled the pieces into position, and the machine worked again.

I took several tries to make a new green hat on the machine, which is one of the two projects I feel competent to attempt. I kept getting tucked stitches, and got increasingly frustrated.

So, a few days ago, I disassembled the machine, wiped surfaces clean, applied fresh silicone lube to relevant surfaces, reassembled. This was a little more of an adventure than I wanted - there was a step where things were nearly back together, but resting loosely. [cont]

my previous hat was 120 rows, and felt short. I attempted to knit a hat after that, but the machine was binding up, stitches were getting dropped - I still don't know if the problem was in the yarn, in the machine, or in me.

This hat had about half looking good, half kind of gross. More practice.

I consider this a "first draft"/"practice" hat, with ambitions of attaching some sort of eyeballs to the top for a "Kermit the Frog" styling - perhaps using off-the-shelf googly eyes either from Amazon or the local craft store. Perhaps pom poms?