Knitting

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Knitting Made Musical with Cyberknitics

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Cyberknitics translates the action of knitting into sound.Thanks to Make, I learned about this really cool project that Teresa Lamb made for her master’s thesis called Cyberknitics. She made a leather harness a knitter can wear as they knit, which also connects to the knitter’s arm and uses circuit boards to translate the movement of knitting into sound.

Here’s what that looks (and sounds) like:

[vimeo 165971570 w=600 h=350]

This is really cool, and would be interesting as a piece of performance art, or even just knitting for yourself and listening to the sound your knitting makes. Or how about outfitting a knit night full of knitters for a knitting symphony? How cool would that be?

Here’s what she says about the project:

Cyberknitics is the study of the relationship between craft, technology, and humans. Crafting is calming, healing, communal, expressive and empowering. It fills a basic human desire that transcends its utility. My work explores what it means to be a crafter now, and what it will mean in the future.

This is really fascinating to me and I’d love to try it out myself. What about you? What do you think your knitting sounds like?

[Photo via Teresa Lamb.]

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Comments

  1. Will the sound patterns change with different movements, such as purling, yarn over, double decreases, cabling, and psso, for example?

Have you read?

Knit a Leopard Print Shawl and Learn about Yarn Substitution

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations. 

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind. 

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca. 

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl. 

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions. 

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic). 

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only. 

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns. 

[Photo: Yarnspirations]