Machine knitting typography

This project is a research developed during a residency in the textile fablab Green Fabric in 2023. The starting point was a question: how to design typography for machine knitting, considering the way this kind of machines work? With the software AYAB, it is possible to knit a two-color pattern by sending to the machine a black and white image.

A knitting stitch can be compared to a pixel in an image. So I decided to design typography in pixels myself to make sure the letters would render exactly as I thought it once knitted. The first step was using Libre Office Calc to design letters within a grid, then the spreadsheets could be converted in pictures with a Python script. The last step was to setup a web tool so I could call the images of the letters in a canvas HTML element and do a typesetting work before exporting the content of the canvas in PNG, file that can be sent to the machine using AYAB. This way I knit typography that was designed considering the constraints of machine knitting. It is also possible to rotate or stretch the text in the web tool I created.