Stitch and Glitch: Needle art in the age of machines
Part one: Knit and Perl?
This hack day’s theme challenged us to build something “tangible” - something we can touch when it’s completed, not just some code or images on a screen. I love needle crafts and wanted to see if I could make needles go tech.
I originally set out to learn more about knitting machines. Knitting patterns are basically code designed to be run by humans rather than computers.
For example, see this pattern for knitting a rib:
Row 1 (RS): (k5, p1) rep to last 5 stitches, k5.
Row 2 (WS): (p5, k1) rep to last 5 stitches, p5.
First, you need to know the meanings of the abbreviations (variables, I suppose): RS is right side, WS is wrong side. k stands for knit and p for purl, two different ways of knitting a stitch — they will look differently on the finished product, with the purl stitch being slightly raised. By alternating them, you can create a ribbed appearance.
So this is our little program: In row 1, knit 5 stitches, purl 1 stitch, then repeat this until the end of your desired width of knitting, then add 5 more knit stitches (to give the whole piece a symmetrical look). The pattern might more often than not tell you exactly how many times to repeat a certain rhythm:
Row 1 (RS): [k5, p1] rep 8 times, k5.
Look at that! A loop repeating 5 times.
I was intrigued by the idea of how a machine will interpret patterns. But I soon realised that it takes more than 1 (hack) day to build a knitting machine. I did, however, have access to someone with such a machine in our building: Jennie Cox from Bobble Design was happy to show us her studio and how a pattern gets from the computer into the knitting machine (spoiler: it travels on an SD card).
To demonstrate things, she asked us for something we would want on a scarf and we sent her a couple of image files. My image was the logo of a housing co-operative that I was part of setting up: a hand-drawn logo that had been scanned. Modern tech means we don’t need to write the pattern by hand and create punch cards. Jennie imported the image file into her software and a basic pattern was automatically created, but it took a lot of cleaning things up and bringing out the image before she was happy to transfer the result onto a scarf. Even though it was a black and white image, turns out grey scales do not translate well into a two tone design.
Once finished, the pattern was moved to the machine and two contrasting wool colours were threaded in. After that: a press of a button and about 5 or 10 minutes later: a beautiful new scarf! But wait, no, she was not happy with the result! The cast-off had gone awry! It took her 10 minutes of closely studying the pattern to find a mistake in the final row. And off we went again, this time a beautifully finished scarf with no mistakes. I was actually excited to watch somebody else in a different industry go through what is a large part of my day job: take the computer program to the test, find an error, and try to debug it!
What I have learned from my excursion into the Bobble Design workshop is not so much that machines will do all my work for me, but that knitting with machines is exactly like working with computer software. Quite a lot of time was spent on creating the pattern — just like writing code is time-consuming. Of course, even if we were to round up and say that the scarf creation took 2 hours, these 2 hours include the pattern design, the debugging and the knitting period. This is still a lot faster than knitting it myself! Granted, I am not a fast knitter but of course the actual benefit from machine knitting doesn’t lie in speeding up one project! Our co-op only has 5 members so even if I wanted to make a scarf for everybody, that is just 5 times of running the program. Imagine making scarfs for a football club! Or all the fans of your football club! The ROI (return on investment) comes with the repeated application, just like with any automation process. Just like with my day job, where I constantly have to decide whether or not it is worth automating one of our testing processes, or if it is faster to just do it manually.
Digi Stitch
Now that the machine had eaten my idea for a hack day project, I had to find an alternative. For inspiration, I took a long look at Cogapp’s large pile of old tech components, tools, half-finished projects, and broken dreams. I found something called LilyPad. These are tiny sewable electronic components. Sewable Electronics? I’m in!
The first challenge was to identify the available components because, of course, they were in a cardboard box labelled “Lilypad” without any instructions. Intriguing! I had miniscule LEDs, a vibration motor, a cell battery holder, a tiny button, a temperature sensor, and of course the lilypad arduino (the little computer board). After some searching and help from colleagues, I even had conductible thread! It can be used to sew and — guess what — it conducts electricity between your components. I also had ideas-overwhelm. I had to narrow things down significantly.
First, I decided on my craft: I wanted to stick with my original idea of needle crafts and decided on embroidery, which I’ve recently been learning and so did not need to start from scratch. I wanted to make a pattern that I could actually embroider in half a day or so (the other half being reserved for figuring out electronics). That meant abandoning the option of programming the computer to do sophisticated stuff.
Instead, I decided to keep it simple: just light up something, give my embroidery a glow. What glows? Fires glow! I would embroider an image and light it up from inside!
(Note: It turned out to be my best-scaled hack day project so far. It took exactly the allocated amount of time and I was even able to add some extra finishing touches before Tristan yelled “Demo time!” at half 4.)
Campfire Stitch-up . A thread.
Step 0: Use a whole evening before the actual event to try to connect your components. Yes, there were just two of them; but surprisingly, they were rather reluctant to cooperate! The light just wouldn’t come on.
As it turns out, conductive thread is a bit vulnerable to splitting, and it also needs to be connected rather tightly to its parts by several stitches. A simple knot won’t make for a reliable connection. Also, I think my battery holder was a bit temperamental, and the battery needed to be in a very exact position which meant not pushing it all the way in. (Actually, my end product is still temperamental and sometimes needs a bit of careful prodding before it works — but I can live with that.)
Step 1: Gather all your crafting supplies and tools. Inevitably, forget some at home and resign yourself to working with a very dubious pair of scissors for the rest of the day.
Step 2: Design the image. Keep it very simple so it won’t take more than a few hours to complete. Realise that you don’t have a chalk pen to draw on the black fabric that you chose for your night-time campfire image. Wing it on a prayer and with the help of very carefully handled acrylic pens that threaten to bleed outside of your assigned image area.
Step 3: Sew the LED light into the centre of where the fire will be. Realise that the tiniest LED light you have ever seen is actually still fairly large once you have to stitch over it (can’t change colours in the centre of electronic components as they are not to be penetrated). But okay, a very simple fire embroidery can have a large centre, that’s fine.
Step 4: Get out the gun! The LED is very bright and I was worried it would be a bit harsh behind the embroidery — too focused. I wanted a warm glow for the fire, not the appearance of a torch shining through threads. Fortunately, our office has everything (except sharp scissors, of course). So I took a glue gun to the LED.
Step 5: Stitch the actual embroidery. Yellow centre, orange and red flames further out. Add some logs for the proper campfire feel. The main challenge here was to leave the conductive thread alone. I needed to preserve the long pieces hanging down the backside of my embroidery to later connect them to the battery. They constantly got in the way and insisted on entangling themselves with my DMC thread. I was worried I might make it split so much that it wouldn’t conduct anymore. But I succeeded: at the end I was left with two pieces of conductive thread and I had not created a short-circuit either.
Step 6: 2 hours left. Plenty of time! Time to panic. Yes, I had two lovely long pieces of conductive thread. Yes, they were not mixed up and I had not shorted anything. But which one was plus and which minus? I understand enough about electronics to realise this may matter to some degree…
Despite my excellent stitching over the LED and my copious amounts of glue applied to it, I was able to push the threads apart enough to find the remnant of a plus symbol. Phew!
Step 7: Make things pretty: Frame the artwork. I had not really made much of a plan for this part as I had not expected to have enough time. I found a small cardboard picture frame in my stash of supplies and used command strips to glue the embroidery to the backing of the frame. I threaded the conductive threads through the mount. Then I used another command strip to attach the battery holder (why mess with a winning strategy?)
Step 8: Connect to the light. Sew the battery holder on with the conductive thread sticking out the back of the frame. Don’t mix up plus and minus!
Finally: Turn the switch and watch the fire come to life! Finis!
I really enjoyed this hack day. I had scaled my project well and hardly ever panicked throughout the day. And I learned to not fear electronics. I would love to build on this and make something more complex in the future. Hopefully actually program that Arduino too! Add more lights. How about a fireworks display? Or make the fire glow. Or a night sky with sparkling lights that come on when it gets darker (there are light sensors for the LilyPad!) Stay tuned.
Scout is QA Lead at Cogapp, a digital agency specialising in the cultural sector. Please get in touch if you’d like to hear more about our work.
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