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I got into designing my own knitting patterns. I enjoy that I can customize everything — the yarn material, color (including marling, helix knitting, double kni
by afc 6mo ago
I got into designing my own knitting patterns. I enjoy that I can customize everything — the yarn material, color (including marling, helix knitting, double knitting), yarn weight, needle size (e.g., resulting in "airy" vs "packed" textures), knit textures (e.g., stockinette, linen, miss, etc.), construction process (e.g., can I figure out a way to knit in the round vs flat?), cables, gradual increases/decreases, selvedge/cord, desired ease, etc..
I wrote software to generate patterns given configurations and keep track of which row I'm on. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307089
I am sharing some of my patterns here: https://alejo.ch/2s0 https://alejo.ch/2s0
I'm currently working on my second ruana.
- eru 6mo agoA few years ago I helped the wife write her own Haskell software to help her generate her knitting patterns in LaTeX. Fun times. Should be much easier these days with all the AI help available.
- srean 6mo agoPlease consider writing a blog about this. Would love to know more.
- eru 6mo agoSorry, I don't have time. See https://www.mathemaknitter.com/ https://www.mathemaknitter.com/ for her (sadly neglected) blog that also links to her ravelry account and patterns. Mostly the conceptual evolution was: Knitting patterns have a lot of numbers with mathematical relations between them. You could keep track of them by hand, but spreadsheets are already an improvement. Especially when you want to make edits to earlier parts of the pattern. Well, spreadsheets aren't too bad to write, but they are basically write-only software, impossible to audit. She'd already learned programming in Haskell before, so going from there to using Haskell for making the numbers work out was a small step, conceptually.
- afc 6mo agoShe has a cool blog, I liked her articles! How does she keep track of what row she's on, as she knits? I wonder if she'd be interested in specifying her patterns in a format my knitting software (visualization) could consume. Anyhow, cool stuff!
- eru 6mo agoI have contact details in my profile. If you send me an email, I can put you in touch.
- srean 6mo agoThanks a bunch.
- srean 6mo agoWonderful. Knitting and weaving gets me nerd sniped. Not the act of actually doing them by hand but the geometric puzzle solving part. These topics hit the HN first page quite often.