3D-Knitting: The Ultimate Guide

I interviewed these guys for an article on the use of seaweed in yarn and fabric. And I bought the 3D knit seaweed sweater. Great team, with a lot of heart and good intentions.

I'm also a hand knitter, and I don't really see any conflict between what they're doing and hand knitting. The grist of the yarn that you use as a hand knitter is generally much thicker than these machines commonly use. Commercial 3D knitting machines can do all of the stretchy, thin, and light stuff that the modern wardrobe is built around.

As folks note, this technology was really pioneered by Shimaseki's work in Japan just decades ago. What OC and the similar Brooklyn-based Tailored Industry are really innovating on is the business model and connection to production process. Folks like this are really serious about not producing all of the waste that comes with most fashion production processes, and it shows up at several levels of the stack.

For the HN crowd, TI's platform gives you more of a sense of why this sort of tech is really like the cloud for knitwear: https://tailoredindustry.com/platform

Really a fascinating part of the global fashion production world, and one we would all benefit from seeing grow.

They pitch this as the panacea to fast fashion, but surely the solution to fast fashion is just to not buy and throw away so many clothes? I don't believe we buy cheap clothes because we can't find good quality clothes that last, but because we like owning lots of clothes and keeping up with trends. When my last laptop broke I was kind of happy. I thought "ooh now I can upgrade to a shiny new laptop guilt-free". I think that's the real problem.

This is an ad for a company that drop ships their product from another company that has made its business on offering production and fulfillment of canned (but customizable) 3D knit styles.

Interestingly, this potentially has applications beyond clothing.

A while back, Lee Valley did a 3D knitted chisel roll using Kevlar and other materials, in support of the Canadian company which invented the 3D knitting process used (unfortunately, at the time, I didn't have the money or need for --- I've since updated my woodworking toolkit and have a nice set of chisels which it would have been perfect for, except it was discontinued and is no longer available...)

Would be cool if it could also de-knit to modify clothing or reuse later. I.e if there is a hole: automatically deknit, splice in a replacement and fix it. Or if your belly growth: deknit and make that section slightly wider.

And can you use finer yarn as well, like lace? The reason a sweater is knit like it is, is because of the tradeoff between knitting time and material needed. But if labor becomes free, you should be able to knit much bigger yet more delicate stuff.

Edit: ah, deknitting is called frogging

Funny that they speak so negatively about "fast fashion". If anything I would expect on-demand clothes production contribute to an _increase_ in that phenomenon, rather than the opposite.

They seem to have left out the most interesting part - what does that machine cost?

What a thoroughly modern world we live in. My first reaction was to check if this was an April Fool's blog post.

My grandfather wrote a scifi utopia featuring printed-on-human garments similar to this ("Fahrt nach Futuras").

So you would wake up, wash then stand on some platform and have your daily outfit knitted on you. Not sure how he worked around the risk of strangling though lol.

Still funny. Thanks making it reality!

So this is an ad for company that purchased an off-the-shelf industrial knitting machine and is trying to sell it as some new novel innovation with cringe "3d knitting" branding. If you go to the the manufacturer site you can find same talking points and plenty of logos: https://www.shimaseiki.com/wholegarment/

Uniqlo offers a few 3D knit items, I’ve been meaning to try them out. Pretty basic styles though.

Right now I'm doing the opposite: 3D printing a loom for hand-knit garments.

https://www.printables.com/model/1483991-fall-is-looming-the...

So in theory 3D-Knitting can produce a made-to-measure garment on demand, and has been able to for years.

And yet, no one actually offers to sell you a made-to-measure knitted garment. Why?

A few theories: - Knits are stretchy so there's limited demand for M2M - DFM/software issues - no one actually knows to generate a pattern from a set of sizes without human intervention - Issues with OEE - it's inefficient to wait for orders to produce the garments because the capital cost of the machines is so high. - Logistics - you don't want to deal with shipping everyone the right order.

Why are you posting this to HackerNews?

This isnt a hype board, for consumer products. Its supposed to be a tech first community.

I understand the appeal of this tech to techies. It's so cool to automate knitting!

Though it totally misses the point of actually knitting something, with your own hands. The time it takes, the details you need to think about, the skills you work on perfecting, the quiet evening on the sofa or in a cafe with friends, chatting and knitting away, all that goes into a piece of clothing that you've knitted. Letting a machine do that is completely missing out.

I feel similarly about AI generated music. Taking the musician out of the loop misses the point of the whole thing.