“Upon visiting Openhouse’s 3DEA Pop Up Store at the Eventi Hotel, we were taken with the evolving 3D printing technology and how it has been applied to fashion and design. Designers Aaron Trocola, Heidi Lee, Mary Huang, Pauline van Dongen, and Dirk van der Kooij showcased fashion and industrial design pieces that push the boundaries – creating custom items that are strikingly beautiful and unique.”
Once upon a time, there was a warm, fuzzy hack. It was 2010 – Becky Stern and Lada Ada (Limor Fried) built on Steve Conklin’s disk emulator and knitting machine resources to allow their modern computers to work with the ancient microcontroller of a 1980s knitting machine. This meant that they could now knit designs made with modern tools, too complex or tedious to easily knit by hand. They shared their work with the world and since then, following an open hardware model, they and many others have contributed hardware and software improvements, smoothed the workflow, and allowed other models of knitting machine to be hacked. I went for a beautiful autumnal bike ride over to Wedding and caught up with Fabienne Serrière (FBZ), who has contributed a number of improvements to the original hack and has the wonderful woolens to show for it. We talked about the history of knitting machines, this hack, open hardware and Fabienne’s various projects, and started plotting to make an open source sweater to keep me warm in the winter months. We covered so many different things that I can only show you a brief introduction to her projects now, but there will be more to come!
