Knit Your Image: From Photo to Fabric

Ever wondered how a photo becomes a piece of knitted fabric? In this hands-on workshop you’ll learn how to turn your own images into knit patterns and watch them come to life on our digitall knitting machine.

We’ll start in GIMP, the free open-source image editor, where you’ll learn how to prepare a design for knitting: cropping and resizing so every pixel becomes a stitch, simplifying it down to two colours, and adjusting contrast so your image stays clear in yarn.

Then we’ll load your pattern into AYAB (All Yarns Are Beautiful), the open-source software that lets a computer control a vintage electronic knitting machine. You’ll see how the machine reads your design row by row, and knit a sample swatch of your own to take home.

No experience with knitting or image editing needed. Bring a photo, drawing or logo you’d like to try, or use one of ours on the day.

What you’ll take away: your own knitted sample, a digital pattern file, and the know-how to design for machine knitting using free software.