Last year I wrote a draft of a book about knitting that I’m working on revising and also drafting something of a sequal to. The book contains a discussion of some fundamental techniques but mostly describes the process for knitting a collection of projects, mostly sweaters, but a few other things as well. The chapters exist somewhere between an unconventional pattern and a long form account of the design and construction process of several specific garments, though I hope there’s a sort of companionable air about it, even if the details end up being mostly technical.

In any case, this post is an attempt at the same form, more or less, but focused on a hat that I recently completed.

I’m going to be knitting a hat with a sort of unconventional empirical construction. There’s not a lot of preparation work that you need: no gauge, no sizing information, no counting stitches (unless you want,) just knitting and figuring it out as you go along. The hat itself is a simple beanie-style knitted cap, with a “lining” for extra warmth and potentially comfort.

Cast on 16 stitches. Your gauge probably doesn’t matter, within reason. I chose a fingering weight wool on the heavier side of fingering, and US size 0 needles. 16 stitches is about an inch and a half or two inches: from these stitches you’ll knit a strip of fabric that will encircle your head, so better to keep it narrower than 3 or 4 inches at the outside. I cast on using the long tail method, and I made sure that there was a generous tail left over afterwards as I intended to take advantage of this tail.

Knit, in garter stitch, until the strip is long enough to fit around your head.

I, for my part, made the strip 21 inches or so, around. My head is (unfortunately) 24 inches around, and I think if or when I do it again, I’d make it shorter: maybe 19 or 20 inches around. You can figure out the length empirically, buy placing the knitting around your head and seeing what fits. It’s okay to stretch the band a bit for a closer fit, but because there’s going to be another layer of knitting on the inside of the hat, it’s even expected that the hat will be a little bit big at this point.

When the strip is large enough, bind off, but do not break the yarn. You should have the tail from the cast on be on the same side of the work as the end of the working yarn from where you cast off.

With the same working yarn that you just bound off with, pick up stitches, knitwise, along the side of the strip, creating one sititch in every garter “ridge.” When you get all the way around the strip, join and knit in the round. Knit about an inch plain, and then begin shaping the crown.

I do this weird crown shaping that I wrote about here 15 years ago (!!) that I adapted from the toe shaping of a sock. I think it works better for hats than socks, and is great when you don’t want to figure out how to evenly divide into 4 or 5 “spokes” and have a spiral decrease. Convienetly, it also structures the decreases so that you switch to double points relatively late in the process. It does something like: repeat “knit eight stitches, decrease once (e.g. knit two together),” all the way around a single round, and then knit 8 rows plain. Then replace 8 with 7: knit 7 stitches and decrease, repeating around, then knit 7 plain rows. Continue on in this manner, moving the decreases closer together in the decrease rounds, and moving the decrease rounds closer together. Eventually, all your stitches will be decreases, and you can just alternate “decrease and plain” rows until you have 8 stitches or something, and then graft the remaining stitches together. I definitely always have the feeling of totally winging the ending: worry not.

Once you take have taken care of the crown stitches, I break the yarn and weave in this end. Turning my attention back to the long tail, I sew up the cast on and bind off ends of the original strip, and have the tail ready and the lower edge of the hat. With this yarn I fuse in the remaining working yarn using a felted or sewn join, and pick up stitches along the remaining garter edge, again at a rate of one stitch for every garter ridge, all the way around.

Knit about an inch here, until the hat is your desired length: I like to have 4 or 5 inches between the lower edge of the hat and the start of the crown shaping, but this is a point of personal preference. When the hat is the proper length, purl the next row to provide a turning round, and then stop. It’s important at this point to make some decisions about the lining of the hat:

• if you plan to knit the interior hat with the same color and yarn as the exterior hat, purl a second row and continue.
• if you want to switch colors, knit the next row with the new color, and then purl the following row in the new color, before continuing.
• if you want to switch yarns to a different weight, be careful, but proceed as if you were changing colors (even if you’re not!) and do increases or decreases as required so that the interior hat is either the same or slightly smaller than the exterior hat.
• if you aren’t changing yarn, or are changing between two colors of the same yarn, then you could omit all purl rounds, and just knit plain.

For my part, I switched colors and to a different yarn type with a substantially finer gauge, and increased rather a lot at this point. I think I probably increased a bit too much, though the hat still works fine. I think I’d probably tend to keep things more simple in the future.

Finally, knit the interior hat straight away until the distance between the lower edge (purl round(s)) and the beginning of the shaping row are the same, and then repeat the shaping for the interior hat, and finish it off. Fold the inner at into the outer hat and place on head.

Observations:

• the hat will be quite warm, so knitting with finer yarn is probably better. Also because the hat is so heavy, it’s viable to knit a bit loser than you might if it were single weight.
• making sure that the inner hat’s total length from the brim to the crown is the same as the interior measurement of the outer hat can be a bit tricky, but getting it right avoids flaring in either direction. Avoiding the purl/turning round entirely gives you a bit of wiggle room, if you like.
• this is a weird hat: while the hat looks great while on my head, it doesn’t quite lay flat. While I could have re-knit the crown to have a less aggressive decrease sequence (e.g. start with k9 k2tog, etc.) over more rows, I kind of like the flatter top look. Hats are super forgiving, and hats don’t really need to lie flat anyway because heads are three dimensional.'

I know it seems like I write a lot about knitting, and it is the case that knitting covers a lot of the “stuff I do” it’s certainly not the only thing I’m doing, and I thought it’d be fun to quickly review a bunch of things:

• As of this week, I’ve been working at Interchain GmbH on Tendermint Core which is a consensus engine for state machine replication. After spending a huge part of my career on projects that were either “enterprise technology” (e.g. writing documentation for database engines), or technical operations (e.g. systems administration), or mostly internal facing (e.g. developer tools,) it’s been really interesting to work on something that is definitely core product engineering with a great team. My work has mostly focused on what I think of as “platform concerns:” service construction, networking, workload management, and test architecture: these are the things I really enjoy, so that’s been great.
• More recently I’ve begun reballancing my time work to spend some time (intentionally) on what I think of as “engineering issues” rather than “software issues.” I’m still writing basically the same amount of code as I ever did, but I’m also thinking about how to support teams as they grow and function. At basically every organization and team that I’ve worked in, the main constraining factor in shipping features has always been coordination with other engineering projects and not really “how quickly can I write code” (I’m pretty fast, all told.) I’ve always thought that challenges of how people coordinate their labor and organize their efforts in distributed (conceptually, temporally, geographically) environments, is one of the cool/hard problems.
• I’ve been cooking a lot more. I’m getting better at making simple dishes that last for a few meals that I enjoy eating. I’ve been really getting into bean and letils, and have also made some good lentils making a lot of white bean and sausage dishes, lentils, pasta sauces, roast veggies.
• I’m knitting a lot! Most of the time I have 2 or 3 projects going: a sweater, a pair of socks that is easily portable for travel or times when I’m not at home, and more recently a series of plain white socks. I’m quite enjoying all of this. As a backdrop to knitting, I’ve been watching Poirot recently, which has been fun.
• I have a couple of “writing about knitting” projects that I’m writing and preparing drafts of. These are mostly book-length (though on the short side,) type projects, and one needs more editing (which I’m hoping to hire someone to help with,) and one is roughly half way through a first draft. The idea is to provide a lot of technical depth about the craft of knitting--techniques, skills, and design--combined with discussions of projects (mostly from a process perspective,) with some personal reflections and anecdotes sprinkled in. It’s been a fun exercise, both because writing about things you understand well is fun, but also because (as weird as this sounds) it’s been nice to sort of explore the boundary between technical writing and more creative writing.
• I’ve been doing a bit more things that I think of as “general personal care/growth:” reading more books just for fun and because reading is good for inspiration generally; doing duolingo every day (Russian, which I studied as a kid in school); upgrading a bunch of my personal computing practices (new laptop, better remote editing environments, staying on top of my email, switching to tmux, etc). I definitely go in cycles of paying greater and less attention to all of these sorts of things, but I think it’s worth while to dedicate time and attention to these kinds of things.

I want to find more ways of writing little things quickly. There’s that old quip “sorry for writing a 10 page letter, I didn’t have enough time to write a one page letter,” but also I think that I do most of my writing in the morning and tend to not do this on days when I’m working, though this seems like a tractable thing to reorganize and think through ways of doing more writing (and other projects!) throughout the week.

A while ago I packaged up my emacs configuration for the world to see/use and I’m pretty proud of this thing: it works well out of the box, it’s super minimal and speedy, and has all of the features. I don’t think it’s the right solution for everyone, but I think there are a case of users for whom this configuration makes sense. I’ve definitely also benefited a lot for thinking about this “configuration” as a software project at least in terms of keeping things organized and polished and reasonably well tested. It’s a good exercise.

Historically, I’ve used my emacs configuration ans as a sort of “fun side project” and while I tried to avoid spending too much time tweaking various things, it did feel like the kind of thing that was valuable (given how much time I spend in a text editor,) without being too distracting. Particularly, early in the pandemic, or during periods over the summer when I was between jobs.

Then, I put the configuration in a public repo, and I basically haven’t made any meaningful changes since then. One part of this is clearly that I put a lot of time into polishing things in the initial push to get it released, and there haven’t been many bugs that have inspried any kind of major development effort. Another part is that, the way I use an editor isn’t really changing. I’m writing code and English and using a couple of applications (e.g. email and org-mode) within emacs, but I’m not really (often) adding new or different kinds of work, and while this isn’t exacting from a blogging perspective* it is exciting from a “things just work perspective.”

I have refered to myself as a degenerate emacs user. I’ve sometimes said unrepentant, but I think it’s basically the same. I’ve also realized that, given that I’ve basically been using emacs the same way since 2008 or so, I’m kind of an old timer, even if it doesn’t much feel like that, and there are lots of folks with longer histories.

I think I used care more about what tools other people used to edit text, even a couple of years ago, I thought that having good initial configuration and better out of the box experiences for emacs would lead to more people using emacs, which would be cool because they’d get to use a cool piece of software and we’d get more emacs users.

Increasingly, however, while I think emacs is great and people should use it, I’m less concerned: people should use what they want, and I think there will always be a enough people here and there who want to use emacs and that’s good enough for me. I think having good out of the box experiences are important, but it’s not a one-size fits all kind of situation. I also think that VS Code is pretty great software, and I like a lot of the implications for remote editing, even if I’m not particularly interested in it for myself.

Enjoy the repo, and let me know if there’s anything terrible about it. I’ve been getting back into blogging recently, and have started tweaking a few things about the ways I use computers/emacs, mostly in terms of exploring tmux (hah!) and also considering avoiding GUI emacs entirely. Stay tuned if you’re interested!

There’s this relatively minor Emacs bug that I’ve been aware of for a long time, years. The basic drift is that on Linux systems, when running with GTK/Emacs as a daemon, and the X11 session terminates for any reason the Emacs daemon terminates. Emacs daemons are great: you start Emacs once, and it keeps running independently of what ever windows you have open. You can leave files open in Emacs buffers and not have move between different projects with minimal context switching costs.

First of all, emacs’s daemon mode is weird. I can’t think of another application that starts as a daemon (in the conventional UNIX double-forking manner,) and then a client process runs and spawns GUI (potentially) windows. If there are other applications that work this way, there aren’t many.

Nevertheless, being able to restart the window manager without loosing the current state of your Emacs session is one of the chief reasons to run Emacs in daemon mode, so this bug has always been a bit irksome. Also since it’s real, and for sure a thing, why has it taken so long to address? Lets dig a little bit deeper.

There are two GNOME bugs related to this:

• Closing Displays
• Emacs Disconnect Followup

What’s happening isn’t interesting or complicated: Emacs calls an API, which behaves differently than Emacs expects and needs, but not (particularly) differently than GNOME expects or needs. Which means GNOME has little incentive to fix the bug--if they even could without breaking other users of this API.

Emacs can’t fix the problem on their own, without writing a big hack around GNOME components, which wouldn’t be particularly desirable or viable, and because this works fine with the other toolkit (and is only possible in some situations,) it doesn’t feel like an Emacs bug.

We have something of a stalemate. Both party thinks the other is at fault. No one is particularly incentivized to fix the problem from their own code, and there is a work around,¹ albeit a kind of gnarly one.

This kind of issue feels, if not common, incredibly easy for a project--even one like emacs--to stumble into and quite easy to just never resolve. This kind of thing happens, in some form, very often and boundaries between libraries make it even more likely.

On the positive side, It does seem like there’s recent progress on the issue, so it probably won’t be another 10 years before it gets fixed, but who knows.

Having recently started knitting a new sweater I realized that there are a lot of little things that I do, that are worth collecting in one place:

• Do not tie a slip not to start, simply twist the yarn around the needle as a basis for casting on the first stitch. This twist looks like a stitch, but isn’t, you should decrease it at the end of the row, with the last stitch to complete the join.

• Always used the German Twisted long tail cast on variant, which makes things a bit more elastic and just looks great, particularly when knitting ribbing, which I often do at the beginning of a sweater.

• Wrap the yarn around the needle once per number of stitches that you need to cast on to estimate the length of the long tail that you’ll need to cast on. I find this overestimates a bit, but I’ve rarely regretted having too-long of a tail rather than having too short. While you can start again from the beginning in the case that you run out of tail, you can also splice in a second yarn.

• If you do run out of yarn while casting on for the sweater, and you’ve been using the long tail for the finger yarn (loops around the needle,) you can sometimes get a few extra stitches out of switching to having that needle

• Place markers periodically to make it easier to count, roughly every 20 stitches or so, and I try and make sure that one of the markers gets placed half way through the round. For example, to cast on 228 stitches, I placed 12 markers every 19 stitches, and the 6th marker was the “half way” point.

  I did one sweater where I put markers every 32 stitches and one sweater where I put markers every 16, and found that I spent far more time casting on the one with fewer markers because I had to double check my counts more. They really help.

• Cast on to a needle that’s a bit bigger than the size you intend to use. I’ve been quite happy using a US 2.5 to cast on for a US 0 sweater. I’ve been using interchangeable needles, and being able to replace the larger needle for the smaller needle before beginning to knit has made things much easier to knit for the first row. It’s also an option to hold two needles together for the cast on.

  I also have to think about not pulling on the “thumb yarn” at all, as this will also make things tigheer.

• While it’s good to be careful to avoid twisting the first row, if you do accidentally twist, undo the twist between the last and first stitch, which will hardly be noticeable.

I’ve been working my way through C.J. Cherryh’s Alliance-Union stories for a few years: in part because I’ve not been reading as much, in part because some of these stories are a bit hard to get into and only available in paper books, but mostly because I’ve been hording them. These are incredibly me-type stories, and I’ve found them really inspiring. I’ve ‘wanted to collect a number of things about these stories and world that I’m quite excited by:

• I really like that it’s all so concrete: Cherryh’s talked about designing the stories by taking a star chart and drawing out the “map” on stars that are near to Earth. This makes the setting feel both really big, because stars are far apart and also quite small, because there are really a small selection of planets and they’re pretty close in relative terms, so it’s
• I enjoy the ways that it’s a product of its historic moment. The medium of information storage is “tape”, and I think if someone was writing this today, there’d be more planets, say. Similarly, While there are computers, the way characters interact with technology is much less ubiquitous and networked.
• The scarcity of planets, and the cost of getting out of a gravity well creates these interesting economic effects which drive a lot of tension in the stories. I enjoy that Earth exists, but that most of the people on Earth are very disconnected from what happens in the world of the stores (either by distance before FTL, or by isolationism.)
• While there is FTL travel, it doesn’t 100% throw relativistic effects out of the window, so “ship time” and “station/planet” time (and lives!) move at different paces, and the stories explore the impact of this on culture/society/economics/lives. FTL is also hard on the people who travel this way, so while many of the characters we interact with are spacers it’s clear that they’re a minority. Also, there aren’t ways for messages to pass faster than ships, which has the effect of making the world seem small at the same time.
• These elements of the setting (distance between stars, limited goods from planets, cost of travel, etc) feed back into the imagined economics of the society, with lots of interesting thoughts about taxation policy, and what we’d call “local economies/currency” these days.

Anyway, I read a few dozen pages of the last of the “mainline” Alliance-Union book in my queue (Tripoint). I’m thinking about going back and re-reading Downbelow Station (the first I read) and Cyteen (because I love it), but also am going to enjoy reading other things for a while.

My knitting projects, recently (and currently!) have been big not just “knit sweaters out of fingering weight yarn on US 0s, which I’m certainly doing, but big on another scale. I’ve written about this kind of project as epic knitting, but I’ve really gone down the rabbit hole on this one. I’ve started thinking about knitting projects less bounded by a single object or garment, and more as a “meta project,” here are the two examples:

• All socks are hand knit. Right now I mostly wear machine knit socks. I have about 10 or 12 pairs of wool socks, and I just wear them every day. The thing I like about my current socks is that they’re comfortable, easy to care for and very easy to match up when I’m folding laundry. I also have three weights of socks, and the heavy and medium socks are definitely good even in warmer months.

  To avoid needing to buy new socks when the current batch wear out, I probably need about as many socks (10-12, maybe a few more to cover light weight cases,) and a slightly longer laundry cycle if I want to segregate sock laundry. But the project isn’t exactly about “just enough” socks, but also about having socks that are mostly the same, not just in terms of pattern, but also in terms of yarn content.

  In persuit of this, last week I sat down with a 1.5 kilo cone of sock yarn (merino, bamboo, nylon) and cast on for a sock, and I’m already on the second sock, of what I expect will be many. Gotta figure out some situation for dying them all the same color.

• I’d kind of like to explore some more corners of the seamless yoke sweater paradigm. I’ve made, I think, 2 raglan sweaters ever, and a few of the “set in sleeve” type and that’s it! I don’t know that I’ve ever made saddle shoulders! I’ve also gotten into the habit of wearing sweaters more often these days, I think I’d like to do something more comprehensive along these lines. Having really nailed down a sleeve, as well as a way to shape the body of a sweater, it seems fun to explore different shoulder shapes for variety. The truth of the matter is that I really like knitting plain sweaters, so this gives some exciting opportunity.

  There are other kinds of sweaters that I’d like to get better at: cardigans, mostly, and also I think I’d enjoy exploring hems that aren’t ribbing, and also finding ways of knitting crew necks that I’d enjoy knitting.

In persuit of this, as alluded above, I’ve acquired a bunch of un-dyed yarn, in interesting fibers to knit “a few” sets of socks (maybe some gifts!) and to really get some practice in on these different sweater types. I’m definitely hunkering down into knitting at this scale and thinking about the ways that this broader

Even if it makes for somewhat less exciting blogging about knitting.

“Ah, yup, just knit another white sock.”

Anyway! I hope, if you’re knitting, you’re enjoying it as much as I am.

I know I’ve been bad at blogging regularly, and it may be obvious from reading things here or talking to me that I’ve been knitting a lot. What is less obvious is that I’ve been writing a lot about knitting.

While I’d like to do some meta posting about these projects, instead I’m going to just jump in with a bit about the way I knitted the sleeve of the last sweater I made that I’m already duplicating because it was just that good.

I’m not a huge fan of well fitted sleeves on sweaters: I like to wear layers, and having a sweater sleeve hug my wrist often just means that I won’t wear the sweater: it’s good to get the sleeve right, in this context. At the same time, too bulky and the sweater looks goofy (to my sensibilities) and the sleeves take forever to knit. I’ve solved this problem, often, by knitting sleeves from the shoulder down: this way I can try things on as I go and easily re-knit the last few inches of the sleeve if things feel off.

The shoulder-down method works, but it’s bulky to carry the entire sweater around to knit a relative small piece of fabric, and it precludes knitting single-piece seamless sweaters, as you have to get too clever to make it all work.

Here’s what I’ve come to:

Start by casting on as you would for a sock: for me this means fingering weight wool with 64 stitches, US 0s (2.00mm) on 4 double pointed needles in knit 2 purl 2 ribbing. There should be 16 stitches on each needle, and knit for 2 inches.

This has several advantages not the least of which is you can chicken out after 2 inches and just knit a pair of socks. Your wrists and ankles (or calves) might be different than mine, and while my wrists are slimmer than my calves, ribbing is elastic, and I know that it won’t be too small. I know Elizabeth says to figure out the chest circumference and derive the sleeve from that, and you could do that, but chest circumferences vary more than wrists.

In the next row switch to stocking stitch, and increase to 72 stitches, or 18 stitches per needle. I use a raised bar-type increase between the knit and purl stitches on the first and third ribs.

Increasing a bit after the ribbing helps achieve both “the cuff pulls in and isn’t floppy” which is desireable, and also “sleeve isn’t too tight”. You could achieve this by using smaller needles, but I like to avoid needles smaller than US 0s whenever possible.

For sizing the rest of the sleeve, I believe that the “top” of the sleeve should be as wide as my expected yoke depth. To unpack: if the distance between the shoulder and the underarm should be 9 inches, then the sleeve should be 18 inches around. Given a gauge of 8 stitches to the inch, this means 144 stitches, and given paired increases in sleeves, 36 pairs of increases.

I do increases every 5 rounds. This means, knit five rounds, do an increase, knit five rounds. This means that there are actually 6 total rounds in any increase repeat. The increase are paired on either side of four stitches.

“Increase every 5th row” is a common knitting instruction and it’s pretty ambiguous. Do you mean “increase on the fifth row,” or “increase after the fifth row”? In computer programming we call this “a fencepost counting problem,” and over the course of 36 repeats (as is the case )

In the past I used to pair increases around an odd number of stitches so that there’d be a single “seam” stitch, but as the sleeve has an even number of stitches, and most sweater bodies have even numbers of stitches and I haven’t been particularly keen on EZ style pseudo seams, particularly since putting the increases 4 stitches away creates a clear “seam”-like effect. It definitely works.

The target size (144 stitches, or increasing 36 times for a total of 72 stitches,) means that the sleeve doubles in diameter between the end of the cuff and its final sleeve. My arms are a longer than average (particularly for my height, but that’s no matter,) but given everything, it means that after doing these increases I only need to knit 3/4s of an inch before I’m done with the sleeve. Perfect. In my estimation if you can space your increases evenly across the sleeve the result is pretty enjoyable. Having a sleeve that’s slightly longer than your arm increases the blousing effect, which by a little isn’t always a problem. If you need a longer sleeve, putting more plain knitting at the top is good too, and the increases can always be closer together at the beginning of the sleeve if needed. Having an idea of your row gauge can help figure out the math.

There you have it!

While I was writing this up, I managed to knit both sleeves for another sweater, but I have yet to figure out how I want the lower hem of the body of this sweater to go, so I think I’ll knit some socks in the mean time.