Diploma project
Spring 2019
Institute of Design
Some makers are drawn to the meticulous qualities of traditional knitting techniques, favouring needles or hand-powered machines. Others would rather embrace new technology, adopting new gadgets into their craft, picking up ideas and dropping stitches. This project is for the latter group.
Hack 1 Knit 2 focuses on whole-garment knitting: a technology that enables the creation of fully formed seamless garments that don’t require additional assembly after exiting the knitting machine.
Throughout this project, I use practice-based research to explore how designers outside the mass-market fashion industry could incorporate whole-garment knitting into their practices, if the technology to use it was made more accessible to the general public.
I achieve this by programming with Knitout—an open-source file specification developed by the Carnegie Mellon Textiles Lab—to produce a range of knitted samples exemplifying techniques that designers across a range of disciplines could use. This demonstrates that it is possible to create usable, designerly pieces while largely avoiding the unintuitive, and restrictive software created by Shima Seiki and other whole-garment knitting machine manufacturers.
Jess Peter / jessicapeter92@gmail.com
Hack 1 Knit 2 focuses on whole-garment knitting: a technology that enables the creation of fully formed seamless garments that don’t require additional assembly after exiting the knitting machine.
Throughout this project, I use practice-based research to explore how designers outside the mass-market fashion industry could incorporate whole-garment knitting into their practices, if the technology to use it was made more accessible to the general public.
I achieve this by programming with Knitout—an open-source file specification developed by the Carnegie Mellon Textiles Lab—to produce a range of knitted samples exemplifying techniques that designers across a range of disciplines could use. This demonstrates that it is possible to create usable, designerly pieces while largely avoiding the unintuitive, and restrictive software created by Shima Seiki and other whole-garment knitting machine manufacturers.
Jess Peter / jessicapeter92@gmail.com
