If you’ve ever used a knitting machine designed for home use you know how laborious it can be. You still have to do a lot of the work by hand, such as ribbing, increasing and decreasing, and of course all the pieces of a garment would have to sewn together once the knitting was done.
Industrial knitting machines can do all that automatically, but they’re much too large and expensive for home use. Brother used to make electronic knitting machines for home use that some people have hacked in really cool ways, but there’s not a good option for people who want to use knitting machines at home that are more automated than the currently available models.
That may change with the advent of Kniterate, an automated knitting machine that will use more industrial needles and software to allow for more professional and varied knitwear design for home use and maker spaces. A report on Make talks about how the machine might work, as a purchased unit possibly with open-source programming and the ability to share patterns among users.
The machine is likened to a 3-D printer in the way it might revolutionize knitwear production for hobbyists and making protoypes. It sounds really cool and will be interesting to see how it all works out.
[Photo via Make.]
