GoKawiilThis is the fourth in a series of blog posts about the Material Programming Project. We are developing malleable knitting software for the Kniterate, a semi-industrial knitting machine. The first post, on the Knitout project, is available here, a longer post about the Kniterate machine is here, and a guide to the different file formats is here.
This week I learned 2-bed knitting on the domestic machine, and made some progress on the Knitout-> Kniterate code visualiser. We also managed to get a bunch of tests to run on the Kniterate, most of which worked fairly well. We also visited an exhibition of some work by visiting students from NAFA (Nanyang Academy of Fine Art Singapore), which featured a really great and inspiring bit of Kniterate work.
making friends with the ribber
This past weekend, Rosie and I went to Knitworks to do a workshop on the Brother ribber. Neither of us had worked with one before, and it was really useful for getting a material understanding of what’s happening on a 2-bed machine.
a plated 5x5 rib sample made on the Knitworks ribber. The ribbing pattern is made by transferring stitches between the front and back beds
Setting the ribber up in my studio
We practiced a cast-on, different ribs, and experimented with plating and racking on the front bed (which might be a nice thing to re-create on the Kniterate). After the session, I went to my studio to set up the ribber that had come with my Brother machine, but that I’d not used before! It was pretty straightforward to set up: the hardest part was figuring out how to attach the brackets to the ribber as they’d been taken off. These are sprung, to allow the bed to latch up and down.
kniterate testing
testing the waste section
The first thing we did at Chelsea was to test the waste section sample we’d generated last week. All I needed to do was add a set of rows of front bed knitting. I decided to do this by using the waste generation file as intended – I made a rectangle on the front bed, and then appended the waste section using a script.
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