In February of 2007 I worked out an argyle pattern based on my blue skull logo (see graph paper drawing below). In June of 2008 I knit the two color pattern up by hand (see shot in front of graffiti above). This week, August of 2011, I knit my skull argyle on a hacked knitting machine (Brother KH-930, documented here, code on github here). Sometimes it takes years to complete a project, especially if a project requires a new machine with which to make it.

The finished ipad sleeve (see images below) is knit from cotton on the hacked KH-930 (with computer control) and finished with a sewing machine. It isn’t all that complex, and is drawn pixel-wise on the Gimp and exported to the knitting machine with some code to emulate a TDD Tandy floppy disk drive, a bit of hardware, and some code to parse the resulting bitmap into a format which the knitting machine will recognize. This happened during cccamp11 where I had brought the knitting machine to demo in the HXX hardware tent. In the process I have learned all about the mechanics of knitting machines, their capabilities, how to get them to be computer controlled and the yarns that knitting machines like. In the end, I really still hate hand knitting two color stranded patterns, but I love the way the finished products look. The machine gets to offload that burden and still output beautiful pieces.

Update (September 18th, 2011): I redid the sleeve in a cotton that doesn’t fuzz so much, made the pattern repeat properly, and made the skulls right side up on both sides. The ravelry page for the first version is here, and the second version is here. The second version is pictured below:

and a before and after shot with the old on the left, new on the right: