Fresh off the knitting machine is this algorithmically morphing scarf with a pattern that changes by one pixel in each repeat. The software was made by Laura Kogler and used by me with the hacked Brother KH930 I currently have. Laura Kogler’s pattern generator script is meant for mosaic knitting but I knit it as a standard two color fair isle pattern on my KH930. Knitting mosaic or slip-stitch on the KH930 is very operator intensive. It’s much faster to knit fair isle on the machine. It is a two-sided scarf with one side black on pink and the other side inverted with pink on black. I hand-seamed the whole thing together (which took days) and kitchenered the ends. It is knit in Hamburger Wollfabrik 3-ply Merino in a dark pink and black. It’s incredibly warm and soft, beyond the general nomminess of the algorithmically generated morphing pattern. The scarf has it’s own ravelry page.

The output I used from Laura Kogler’s script is pictured here below in teal and dark teal:

The output pictured above is 7 repeats wide, but I knit it 3 repeats wide for each side of the scarf. Each repeat is 26 stitches (pixels) wide, and the total length of the file sent to the knitting machine is 361 stitches (rows, pixels) long. I flipped the pattern upside down for the second half of the length with the KH930’s built-in pattern flipping functions.

I’m working on some general open source scripts for generative patterns for knitting machines, and so far I have thrown together some Processing code for creating random blocks in definable sizes: http://pastebin.com/ysm8zptS. Eventually I hope to have some general open source algorithmic tools for the knitting machine to allow you to create much longer pattern morphs where the pixel mutations are more prominent. I also am writing in some auto-fill tools to add in patterns to blank areas in picture knitting so they turn out better with two-color knitting on knitting machines. The other killer feature will be to have options to limit the amount of repeats of one color in one row, to keep floats short on the reverse side of the knitting. Happy knitting to all you warmth-creating people out there!