Designing Tessellating Knitting Patterns

Craft & Design Yarncraft

My knitting machine comes with some crazy two-color knitting patterns, which its capable of executing one row at a time by way of a magnetic encoder switch. It sounds complicated, but the operator (me) just has to push the carriage back and forth across the needle bed instead of laboring over each stitch. The pattern gets programmed ahead of time into the machine’s computer. In order to tile properly, the gridded pattern must be a tessellating rectangle. If you poke around online, you can find a few tessellation generators that can help you make designs. Nathan Rosenquist designed the two patterns pictured. I’m having such a good time experimenting with colors!

sierpinski.jpg qbert.jpg

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Becky Stern is a Content Creator at Autodesk/Instructables, and part time faculty at New York’s School of Visual Arts Products of Design grad program. Making and sharing are her two biggest passions, and she's created hundreds of free online DIY tutorials and videos, mostly about technology and its intersection with crafts. Find her @bekathwia on YouTube/Twitter/Instagram.

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