After a somewhat fraught Chattie hat commission I decided to go ahead and make one for myself!

I think it came out ... fine!

Lessons learned:

Transfers: I'm still having a hard time using my transfer carriage to move ribbing stitches from the front ribber bed to the back main bed. This time I bent a needle on each bed! 😱 I also discovered that this transfer process is where some of my dropped stitches came from in the previous hat. I ended up recovering most of these before seaming, which saved a lot of fixing up time later! 😅

Joining / seaming: somehow, for the second time, I have set out with the intention of joining the hat body to the brim with the seam on the knit side of the hat body, where it will be hidden by the folded brim, but ended up with it on the purl side, against the head. I'm also still getting the feel for seaming things on the machine. I decided to hang the hat body on directly to the needles with the finished brim and do a transfer-tool bind-off, but found the hung-on stitches really got in the way. After dropping a stitch (and some f-bombs) and losing the yarn tail, I backed things up and did a crochet-style bind-off with the latch tool, instead. I still managed to drop four or so stitches along the way. I manually repaired these later.

Grafting: I had a better time seaming up the side of the hat using Kitchener stitch. After my last go at it, I found a video tutorial on Kitchener for machine knitting from Diana Sullivan that made a lot more sense. This time I only screwed up one thing about it. Unfortunately that thing makes the resulting seam pretty obvious! A Kitchener stitch graft is supposed to look invisible, because you're basically creating new knit stitches by hand. However, if you create those new stitches from the wrong side, what you get is a row of purl stitches on the knit side of the garment!

Despite the issues, it wears just fine!

I'm happy to wear a hat that I made for myself! I was proud to wear it on outings yesterday and this morning. Possibly the last cold days of the season! 😂

What's next? I think I'd like to make another thing for myself. Probably a vest, using these beauties:

Thanks for reading! See you next time.