Check Out This Amazing Knit Circuit

I will never say that I’ve seen it all when it comes to knitting, because people are endlessly creative when it comes to uses for knitting, ways to knit and things to knit that I don’t think there’s an end to it.

A case in point is this article from Make:Zine about an electronic art professor, Jesse Seay, who has developed a way to use a knitting machine to wire and knit working electronic circuits.

As shown in the accompanying video, the knit circuit can make lights flash or make a solid light, and you can work them in whatever pattern you like so long as the electronic components are all connected.

Seay says he used machine knitting for speed but the same idea would work for hand knitters as well, and that basically the knitting is “like stripboard, and each row is a track. Planning out the circuit isn’t so different from planning a stripboard circuit.”

See the full tutorial at Instructables.

How cool is that?

[Photo via

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It’s well known (among knitters, anyway) that knitters seem to love chickens as a motif and a subject of our knitting projects. The Emotional Support Chicken and all the other chicken knitting patterns are just the beginning of our devotion to farmyard friends.

For example, there’s Farmer Dennis’ Chicken Hat. This free pattern from Stacy Black is a simple worsted weight beanie sized for adults and decorate with a couple of little rounds of colorwork fences and a flock of chickens strutting around the body of the hat.

You don’t need a lot of any of the colors for the chickens, their facial features or the fences, so this is a great project for using little leftover bits from other projects. The main color for the body of the hat is less than a skein using the yarn suggested, so you might just have everything you need in your house to start stitching up this hat right away.

The colorwork is presented as a chart, with a 16 stitch section that repeats around the body of the hat. All the color changes are shown on the chart but I think it would be easier to knit the whole chicken in the chicken color and add the eye, beak and other features using duplicate stitch when the knitting is done. That way you don’t have to carry those yarns around the whole hat for just a few stitches.

As the name suggests, the original hat was given to a farmer who shared their eggs, but anyone who raises chickens or just has a thing for the fowl is sure to love this cute hat. It wouldn’t be too difficult for someone new to stranded knitting or reading charts to make, either, so if that’s you, give it a try.

The pattern is available for free on Ravelry.

[Photo: Stacy Black]

Knitting Patterns for Little Chicks

Tiny Hens to Knit

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