Knitting with directed graphs

Abstract

Knitting has historically been communicated by its means of construction. For hand knitting, this is typically a list of instructions or a pictorial grid with knitting symbols. For machine knitting, a similar pictorial grid is used to express needle-level instructions. However, these formats suffer by the nature of their tight coupling with the method used to construct the garments they represent. Alternatively, we use Knit Meshes, which represent knitting structures by their geometry separate from a directed graph description of their topology. This thesis presents an algorithm that can generate a natural, deformed two-dimensional layout of Knit Meshes as well as a conversion pipeline that converts written hand knitting instructions to and from Knit Meshes and an algorithm that converts certain Knit Meshes into knitting machine code.