Cool Knitting Tricks: A Brain Wave Scarf

Talk about a personalized project. NeuroKnitting is a company that uses an EEG headset and records brain activity while a person listens to portions of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, then takes the resulting activity and incorporates the brain waves into a machine-knit scarf.

Check out the video for more on how its done (and a pretty pairing of Bach and machine knitting).

According to the company’s website:

The knitted garments picture the listener’s affective and cognitive states during the experiment. It is a way of making tangible the implicit the states of users and visualizing them in an original way as a large and personal data footprint.
Neuro Knitting represents a novel way of personal, generative design and fabrication. An approach that brings together affective computing and digital crafts. And thus, it offers new applications and creative thinking to both areas.

The project was a collaboration between artists Varvara Guljajeva and Mar Canet and phD candidate Sebastian Mealla, whose research focuses on “possible uses of brain and body signals for multimodal interaction.” Not sure what that means, but isn’t this project cool?

[Photo via VisualNews.com.]

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I feel like it’s been a while since I’ve shared any patterns for our circular knitting machine users. I know these devices aren’t for everyone but even though I much prefer knitting by hand, it is kind of fun to crank things out on these machines.

One of the most common early projects for a circular knitting machine is a scarf. Which makes sense, because it’s just one long tube and you can make it as long as you like.

One problem that comes from knitting scarves on the circular knitting machine, though, is that it can be hard to know how to finish the ends of the tube so that it looks like a finished scarf and not a tube of knitting.

If you’re not a knitter or crocheter, the most basic way to finish a circular knitting machine scarf is just by cinching up the ends and maybe adding a pompom to each end to cover up any hole that might still be visible at the end.

But if you have a little knitting or crochet skill or are willing to learn, there are a lot of different options for closing up the ends of a scarf. And this would also be true if you hand knit a tube scarf!

I recently wrote a post over at Our Daily Craft that includes five different ways to close up the ends of a tube scarf:

the simple cinching method mentioned above
sewing the stitches together
three needle bind off
grafting
crochet bind off

Grafting is my favorite because I feel like it gives the cleanest, closest to a seamless look. If you’re a knitter you may already know how to do it but even if you don’t it’s not that hard to learn.

Do you knit tube scarves by hand or machine? I’d love to know how you like to finish them!

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