Knitting Goes High-Tech with Knit “Muscle” Fabric

Knitting can be used for a lot of purposes other than making a warm hat or a pair of socks. And scientists keep coming up with ways to use knitting in medical procedures or in other cool ways that have the potential to make the world better for people.

Check out this story from Science Advances (via Science magazine) about knit and woven fabric that responds to electrical impulses and could be used one day as a form of synthetic muscle.

Researchers coated cellulose yarn with a polymer called polypyrrole, which stretches in response to electricity. They found that the yarn was stronger when woven and more flexible when knit, so it could be helpful in forming muscle-like attachments in future exoskeletons or prosthetic limbs.

Pretty cool, huh? Next time someone tells you knitting is old-fashioned, you’ll know how to respond.

[Photo via Science magazine.]

Next Pattern:

I don’t even know what to say about this amazing knitting pattern. The Bestiary Scarf from Monstra & Mirabilia is so full of details it’s a little intimidating to talk about.

It features, as the designer describes it, an “artistic encyclopaedia of Western mythical creatures.”

The pattern includes a dragon, harpy, Medusa, chimaera, centauress, phoneix, kraken, mermaid, sew serpent, cyclops, wyvern, Pegasus, amphiptere and amphibaena. (It’s a good thing there’s a photo of the proejct with everything labelled because I definitely didn’t know the names for everything.) It’s also designed like a landscape, with water and land creatures toward the bottom ends and sky creatures toward the top.

The dragon is at the center and is worked sideways so it will show as upright when you wear it.

The scarf is worked in double knitting, so the colorwork appears in the opposite colors on the other side.

It’s worked in light fingering weight yarn (on size 0 US or 2mm knitting needles) and the colorwork is shown in charts. The pattern also includes some video tutorials and written instructions to help you along. The designer says the pattern is for intermediate knitters, and “advanced beginners may succeed with patience and the help of the video tutorials.”

When I was an advanced beginner this kind of a pattern would have brought me to tears, but if you love a challenge, and a project that you’ll wear and get tons of astonished reactions every time, this is the project for you. And of course if you have a few double knitting projects under your belt and are comfortable reading charts, this project shouldn’t be hard, but that doesn’t mean it’s fast. But lots of great things take time, and that’s never stopped us before, right?

You can get a copy of this pattern from Monstra & Mirabilia on Ravelry.

[Photo: Monstra & Mirabilia ]

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