Meet the digital tailor which can knit your sweatshirts in an hour – OpenKnit

What do you do when you need new clothes for winter and you don’t know how to knit? Go buy one. But what if you want it to be customized? Go to a personal tailor. What if I can tell you that you can buy a digital tailor as a one-time investment and just buy the wool as and when it runs out? Here’s OpenKnit, a device better than the current 3D printers in terms of making woolen garments.

What does OpenKnit do?

OpenKnit looks a lot like a normal loom and occupies a good amount of space. First, you have to design your own woolen garment and store it in a digital file. These digital files can be what you’ve created or you can just choose from existing designs (but what’s the fun in that?) This file is then uploaded to your digital tailor.

How does OpenKnit knit?

I found a video that explains the entire working of this machine beautifully. In fact, the rendition is so good and clear that you might as well build yourself one instead of buying one.

Here’s the short version of the video’s content in case you can’t watch it:

There’s a needle bed on which needles are assembled and a carriage that rides along with it. There are a few sensors to detect the position of the needles and a slider that changes the position of the needles. A decreasing carriage is used to transfer needles from one stitch to the next, a thread guide and the threads. You may need to refill it and place the colours as per your design. Using these components, your digital tailor will produce sweatshirts easily in an hour.

It is called “Open”Knit for a reason. It is an open source design. Which is why the complete description is given out to everyone. So, try making one yourself, or improvise the existing design (maybe convert a few manual tasks this machine requires to be automatic too…) or buy one at EURO 550.