Knitting Program: bitKNIT

Almost 10 months ago to the day I started a blog called “Processing Processing”. I started it to document the process of learning the visual programming language, Processing.

My first post, published on February 16th 2014, lists 10 reasons why I wanted to start to learn to program. Reasons like “because I like making stuff”, “because up until now I’ve always thought that coding is for someone else”, and “because I became a member of an awesome maker / hacker space”.

My most recent post (10 months later) is about a wonderful wonderful knitting program called bitKN1T that I am currently making. It reads the brightness of an image, and converts it into the right format to be used as a knitting pattern for intarsia knitting. I love knitting, and started this because I wanted to make my illustrations into knitted pieces. Programs to convert images for knitting already exist, but this just seemed like the perfect opportunity to make another one, and hopefully I can add something wonderful to the library of knitting programs.

The program is by no means finished, I have a few more functions I want to add. But, I knitted my first test samples so I wanted to share them. Gosh I am so proud of these knitted beauts!

Since starting on the bitKN1T project my programming skills have developed dramatically, and it just goes to show the the “project based learning” pedagogy that I so often apply in teaching is having an huge impact on my own learning.

I plan to post all the code online so people can add to it and make their own knitted wonders, I will do this soon, and show a bit more of the process. But in the mean time you can check out posts on the Processing Processing blog.