WWW: Open hardware knitting machine; Lightsaber knitting needles; KIP-ing at sporting events

A great ‘introduction’ to yarnbombing, courtesy the Canadian media and culture magazine ‘Spacing’.

And an interview with Brenna Macdonald, knitter, teacher and member of the Lettuce Knit team in Toronto.

An absolutely fascinating collaboration: Neuro Knitting. Artists Varvara Guljajeva and Mar Canet worked with Sebstian Mealla, a scientist from ‘the Music Technology Group’ in Barcelona, on the project. They use a knitting machine to make a scarf with colorwork patterns based on brainwave readings from EEG scans.

An EEG scan records brainwave activity over 10 minutes of listening to Bach’s Goldberg variations, and the results that would normally print out on paper are rendered into a one-of-a-kind scarf.

A related story explains ‘Knitic‘, an open source knitting machine control module that is used to knit the scarves. The Knitic module controls a Brother knitting machine, allowing any pattern to be fed to the machine by computer, and the pattern to be changed on the fly.

The developers of Knitic, also the developers of the Neuro Knitting project, aim to explore the intersection of science, technology and art. Their first project with a knitting machine was “SPAMpoetry“, creating poetry from spam email messages, and giving them knitted form.

A tutorial over at Instructables for making lightsaber knitting needles.

That light up.

Yes, you heard that right.

Knitting needles that look like lightsabers.

During WWKIP, there’s been a rash of sightings of knitters at sporting events… scaring the muggles a bit, maybe? A Norwegian football/soccer fan was recently spotting knitting in public, at a international juniors match in the UK. And a baseball fan was photographed knitting (although that could be crocheting, too) at a recent Washington Nationals game.

Pub-goers in Bath, UK, are knitting a 2-mile long scarf as part of a charity initiative to support a local hospice. The scarf will line the route between the pub and the hospice. When the event is complete, the scarf will be divided into pieces to make blankets for residents of a local home for the elderly, and for animals as a local shelter. Worth a click to see the photograph of the pub landlord wrapped up in the scarf!

Designer Kaffe Fassett is to have a rose named after him. The beatiful floribunda rose is a fitting choice, given the designer’s love of extravagant color and texture in his work.