No, it does not. Take a look at your carrier's specific list of exemptions from the carry-on rules. Note that all of the major carriers have filed rules, e.g. must enforce, requiring special tagging and that the extra item may only contain the machine and anything else required for the specific flight.

The knitting needle issue above is unrelated to the issue of carry-on abuse and is the typical result ocurring more and more often on FT of perfectly reasonable questions and discussion devolving into extraneous issues having nothing to do with the thread.