The Physics of Knitting - unravelling the mysteries

It seems that scientists are finally turning their attentions to trying to understand how knitting works and wondering what a deeper understanding of the physics behind it could lead to in terms of high-tech fabrics.

Thank you for sharing that video Burra. I've always been fascinated by the nature of stretchy knitting, and how the yarn takes on a will of it's own (at least in my case!). I remember when I worked in composite material research coming across sandwich fabrics, which used the tension in yarn to create a space in between layers...I'd quite like to make use of that in knitted garments to make padded areas where the fabric is likely to wear due to rubbing - like elbows and heels.

Mind officially scrambled.   The sock mentioned at the beginning has since been found to be a looped construction, simple nalbinding.

I'd quite like to make use of that in knitted garments to make padded areas where the fabric is likely to wear due to rubbing - like elbows and heels.

  It's possible to do this by working double layered knitting - see video.  It's not necessary to work the layer across the whole width, but it takes a bit of concentration to work as a patch, and is easier when working flat, but possible when working in the round.  It just needs coffee, chocolate and/or cake.   Edit: to correct spelling

While I love Sci Show, in this one there were a few mistakes, pointed out en masse by passionate fiber-loving commenters.  This video very respectfully addressed the issues:  Scientist and Knitter Reacts to SciShow's Knitting Video

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Awesome video Karen! Outrageously funny.  Makes me think the scishow video which I have not yet watched must border on not nice, safely camouflaged by our culturally sanctioned attitudes towards women and traditional knowledge and skills.

Thanks so much for posting it!

I think I will seek out more of this woman’s videos!  

Thekla McDaniels wrote:... Makes me think the scishow video which I have not yet watched must border on not nice, safely camouflaged by our culturally sanctioned attitudes towards women and traditional knowledge and skills.  

I haven't watched the reaction video, but the comments beneath it certainly support your conclusion.

I've been watching a fair bit of video about new thinking on early hominids, and more that a few archeologists have suggested that Neanderthal were very smart and skilled, and that most modern humans would seriously struggle to learn all the things they took for granted that children should learn.

I really enjoy Kristine Vike's videos.  She's soft-spoken, well-researched, a working scientist interested in historic textiles and the science of textiles.  I'd highly recommend her.

I completely agree with the idea that we would struggle to learn all the things we would need to know to survive, if we tried to learn as adults.  If we started as children, our brains would be full of the nuance of the natural world and what we might perceive as resources within it.  We would spend all of our time (no such thing as "free time"--free from what?) doing things that mattered to our survival:  finding, recognizing, gathering, saving food;  creating and enhancing community through shared knowledge, story, song, and resources;  engineering ways to interact with our world.  So we could do it, and we would, because that's all we'd do, starting from day 1.  String is the oldest technology, plied cordage over 30,000 years old being found.  The fact that we are often too tired to do the things like fiber work or gardening that we long to do, things many of us learn as adults, says something about how much brain space everyday life takes up.  The fact that we can and do make time for them speaks volumes!

Karen

Back to that "troublesome" sock - here ia a link to the one I was thinking of - particularly interesting are the comments on the dyes used.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews-history-archaeology/1700-year-old-sock-spins-yarn-about-ancient-egyptian-fashion-180970501/
Love the right of reply summing up!  Thanks for Posting Karen.

This must be interesting, so I'll go watch those videos. I already did watch some of Kristines videos before, I trust her when it's about textiles.

Before watching I already have some opinions:

Everyone who tells the old Egyptian socks were knitted ... did not do his/her homework well! I have an old book (1950s) that says so, but then 'needlebinding' was still unknown (except in Scandinavian countries). Much more research is done now!

Everyone who thinks people in the past (including Stone Age) were less intelligent than people now ... is less intelligent him/herself!

Now I watched Kristine's video I have seen enough. That 'sci-show' (at least the parts Kristine showed) looks like someone who uses a lot of words to hide the fact that he doesn't really know what he's talking about.

Though interesting that there are now attempts to computer model the 3D behavior of knitted goods, the SciShow video was a bit disappointing, what with all of the muddled or mistaken info, and the general attitude that something doesn't matter until it's been reductively analyzed.  I'm no expert, but I was pretty sure that there was something a bit hinkey with the sock dates, too.  But, a means of predicting the behavior of a finished pattern - or even to design a pattern to meet a desired 3D behavior - is very interesting to me.  A long time ago, I used a software package to model the drape of slitted camouflage netting (with mixed results - meaning I have no great confidence that those results reflected the physical reality).  Being able to predict the behavior of knitted goods, based on the stitch pattern and yarn materials, weight and twist would be quite a feat, and could be very useful.

Some technical knits are used to reinforce composite materials, for hollow/tubular pultrusions.

I was quite struck with Kristine Vike's reference to steganography in knitted items.  I've entertained thought experiments of doing just this with woven goods, and will now have to suss out the details of this bit of historical cloak and dagger.

Oddly, we just now have a pressing need at work for a braiding machine to make overbraid on stranded Litz wires.  It's a long story (too long for here), but it looks like there are plenty of DIY and 3D printed wire braiding machines.  And, one of the videos which discussed how to set up the bobbins for various braids was using a software package (TexMind) to show the loose and tensioned finished braids for different bobbin counts and arrangements.  However (and I may be underestimating, here) braiding seems trivial (to me) compared to knitting, from a modeling vantage.

Nefarious knitting?!

Madame Defarge in Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities sat by the Guillotine knitting.  Some say she was patterned after one Olympe deGouge, a playwright, an early feminist a French revolutionist who eventually was beheaded herself.  
In the wikipedia article on the fictional Defarge, it says deGouge was a founder of the apocryphal “Club of Knitting Women”.  I wish I knew more about that!

In the 70s, I visited my sister who lived in Washington DC.  We went and sat in the gallery above the Senate.  My sister told me that she had gone to listen to the Senate one afternoon, had brought her knitting because she intended to stay a few hours to overhear discussions of the day’s topics.

She was either asked to leave or put her knitting away.  I forget which, it was more than 50 years ago. 🤷🏻‍♀️.  The point is, one is not allowed to knit in the gallery of the US Senate!

What’s the problem with knitting?  Is it really potentially that subversive?

We’re a long ways off topic here, the thread started with ideas about physicists and scientists being confused by knitting.  Sorry OP, I just couldn’t resist.  When else do I get a chance to talk about the perceived dangers of knitting?

I had no idea that knitting was so objectionable.  Subversive, even.

Along the lines of keeping busy (though not while observing  deliberative body!), a clerk at one of the local hardware stores sometimes has a crocheting project in process while at the register.  If business is slow, she picks it up and works a few stitches.  Most recently, I think it was a doily of some sort, though I ought to have asked (and thus revealed the full depth of my ignorance).  But that's not knitting, either, so perhaps safer for the general public

A year or so ago, I picked up a couple of used knitting looms - one an original Knitting Board, about 3 feet long, the other a small sock loom - but I haven't yet put them to any serious use.  I had intended to give them a workout last winter, but life intervened with other priorities.  So, this winter...

I wonder, are knitting boards more or less subversive than using needles?  More unwieldy, almost certainly.

My sainted mother ensured that all of us kids knew how to do the basics - knit, crochet, darn socks, make gravy, and more.  I've used the cooking and mending lessons more than the rest - I've even replaced the zipper in a pair of M1951 Army surplus wool pants (the brass teeth were falling off the cotton tapes), using an old Standard Rotary sewing machine with no treadle, just spinning the wheel by hand - but you never know what you'll need, and learning skills has almost always paid dividends for me, even if not immediately.

But, back to knitting...

I suppose you can look at the act of decoding the mathematics of knitting in two ways - it both deskills the craft so that a computer can 'create' a shape as well or better than a master craftsman, or alternatively creates a danger of losing the skill altogether. I think it does create possibilities and who knows what may result.

There seem to be a few companies already set up with the knitting machines that create the interesting shapes that the first video discusses:

knobbled

Another knitted thing (from which the image was taken) seems to be more about creating artistic garments and priority designs to create knitted prototypes.

I remember being taken by the cryptographic possibilities of the knitters at the guillotine..knitting and pearling is basically 0s and1s so could easily be used to code messages. I think it would be interesting from an artistic point of view just to see what a panel knitted with an encoded book might look like.....It was pretty common to knit basic initials into fishermen's gansay jumpers.

Kevin Olson wrote:Though interesting that there are now attempts to computer model the 3D behavior of knitted goods, the SciShow video was a bit disappointing, what with all of the muddled or mistaken info, and the general attitude that something doesn't matter until it's been reductively analyzed. ...  But, a means of predicting the behavior of a finished pattern - or even to design a pattern to meet a desired 3D behavior - is very interesting to me. ...

Probably the scientists are new to this knowledge. But the knitters know about the 3D-behaviour of knitted goods for centuries. And they know how to describe it in patterns for at least since the 1880s.
Roxanne Richardson talks about this in several of her 'Casual Friday podcasts', she has knitted sweater patterns of every decade from 1880 to 1990. I found this one, but her project starts earlier:
About hidden codes in knitting she has told too (several times).

I followed the linked webpage, and found Victoria's MFA thesis, here:
MFA Thesis, Victoria Salmon

After giving it a cursory flip-through (and there are some amazing designs and samplers in there!), I didn't see anything analytical (no high order partial differential equations or logic tables or what-have-you).  Obviously, a quick breeze-through isn't a careful reading, but it looks to me like she is still focused on art over analytic mathematical models, even if she does program the fancy industrial knitting machines to do her bidding.

So, now I'm curious as to exactly what developments the SciShow video referred.

Some of the lacier knits on the Another Knitted Thing page linked above are probably not far beyond what's needed one of my eventual plans - rebuild (i.e. unravel and re-use the yarn) my long handled wool underwear (now showing a fair bit of wear in the areas most prone to that) into wool fishnet string underwear.  I don't need fancy stitches, but a very open knit is the big idea, to facilitate moisture management next to the skin in cold weather during high output activities (skiing, snowshoeing, cutting or hauling firewood, etc.).  Stop and go activities, in particular.  Standard rib knit at the cuffs, hem and neck line, some stockinette or maybe even double knit at knees, elbows and on the shoulders (where pack straps or a canoe yoke will bear).  Lowers probably need to be fully fashioned (drop seat, fly, etc.) but the top may be knittable in the round (separate torso and sleeves, though).  I have no idea what I'm doing, but there's nothing like a good project to motivate some learning.

Of course, there's a reason I selcted the Browning quote for my sig block...

Kevin Olson wrote:So, now I'm curious as to exactly what developments the SciShow video referred.

Perhaps to this paper, by Niu, Dion and Kamien, in PNAS:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2416536122

Which uses "Föppl–von Kármán equations" to predict the behavior of knitted fabrics.

In this paper, they describe yarn as "one-dimensional", but anyone who has knitted knows that yarn isn't a theoretical Euclidean line, but has all sort of nuance - fiber type, number of plies, Z or S twist, smoothness or lack thereof, degree of twist, etc.  So, as a first approximation, this effort may leave quite a lot on the table.

There's an extensive bibliography at the end.  Another rabbit hole, down which to tumble...

With regards to braiding, Kevin, have you looked into Kumihimo?  

What Is Kumihimo? Learn the Japanese Art of Braided Cords

John Marshall, a specialist in Japanese textiles, does a Youtube series episode on kumihimo and a related form of braiding, kumiori.



Someone asked, what is it about knitting that makes it so subversive?  Well... it's a traditionally women's craft, so undervalued until it goes onto someone's radar.  If you don't understand it, it is mysterious in its workings.  It is a form of binary coding.  It's multidimensional creation out of linear material, which we can respond to emotionally as a form of alchemy, but is also a form of engineering, and yet how many things can be described as such and yet happen on the living room sofa?  If you watch someone knit and they are just doing it absently while listening or watching something else, it can remind one of court reporting...  Just a few thoughts.

Karen Radcliff wrote:With regards to braiding, Kevin, have you looked into Kumihimo?

Karen -

Nope - heretofore, I was completely unacquainted with this Japanese braiding and weaving technology, so thanks for (yet another) trail to pursue.

My experience with braiding (and hitching) has been from a distinctly Western perspective - Bruce Grant (Encyclopedia of Rawhide and Leather Braiding; How To Make Cowboy Horse Gear) and Ron Edwards (How To Make Whips).  I think it's fair to claim Ron Edwards is "Western", even though he's from Oz - definitely the Anglosphere, anyway.  And of course the standard Boy Scout projects - zipper pulls, key chain fobs, compass lanyards, and so on.

But I was unaware of Japanese braiding and weaving (and the Chinese antecedents from which the Japanese technology apparently derives).  The round version of the braiding stand would have been very helpful to me when doing the old Boy Scout projects.  Some of the more loom like devices are also fascinating, including the "caboose" peg shift mechanism - simple but very clever!

It might be possible to use the round stands - either the downward or upward tension versions - to over braid the Litz wire for our custom inductive power coils, but I suspect that the best use of someone's time in the long run will be to make a braiding machine to do the job.  We have a full machine shop and some rapid prototype capability in house, as well as 3D modeling and mechanical analysis tools, so making tools and fixtures to increase productivity, to minimize process variability, or to pull production in house to decrease lead times is de rigeur.  If we could churn out several tens of feet of over braided stranded wire on demand, that would be ideal.

And, I'll now feel compelled to research the Treasure House building profiled in the beginning of the video.  Any timber framed building that has endured for 1400 years has my attention!

Thanks again!

Kevin

Karen -

One more question: do you know what the dobby head or Jacquard style loom for making the kumihimo braid/weave is called (seen at about 24:00 in the video)?

I am a bit perplexed as to how the mechanism works.

In the standard issue Western braiding machines, the only programming happens up front - how many bobbins, and where they are placed in the mechanism.  After, it's just enable/inhibit to control the length of the braid.  However, John Marshall implies in the video that bobbins (or more probably, groups of bobbins) can be controlled in some manner by the punch cards.  I can imagine a couple of actions that could be controlled: "side track" bobbin(s) so that the threads on them aren't woven (this would make a "float" on either the front or the back, depending on whether it was shunted to the outside or inside of the braid); or, advance or retard the bobbin(s) by a notch or two in the small plates of the gear train, so that the braid or weaving pattern is altered (i.e. from over one and under one, to over two and under two, or whatever).

But how that sort of control is accomplished mechanically has me scratching my head!

I'll keep poking at the internet.  If I can discover the correct terms to use, I'll probably be one my way...

Thanks again!

Kevin

P.S. I see that I have - once again - successfully derailed a topic.  Mea culpa!

When I read 'bobbins' I think of bobbin lace.
I knew bobbin lace can be made with machines. Here's a machine making bobbin lace:

Inge Leonora-den Ouden wrote:When I read 'bobbins' I think of bobbin lace.
I knew bobbin lace can be made with machines. Here's a machine making bobbin lace

Inge -

Thank you!

After a bit of digging, this seems to be a "Barmen" type lace machine, named for the town ( in then Prussia, now Germany) near Wuppertal (the cable way public transport system of which I once used as an example in attempting to steer the local university away from building a multi-level parking structure).  Or, something very similar to a Barmen lace machine, at any rate.

For anyone who, like me, is curious about how these work, see:
Lace Braiding Machines for Composite Preform Manufacture

which shows (at least some of) the mechanism of a modern version (a bit in section 4.2, but much more in sections 5 and following).  Presumably, the Jacquard mechanism would replace the solenoid(s) seen in the modern iteration, with some complicated linkage between the Jacquard cards (and the pins or plungers which drop into the punched holes) and the cam and drive clutch for each "biconcave disk" (Figure 6).

The text of the above article implies that much of the detail of how these machines are (and were) built and operated remains as proprietary trade secrets, closely held.  But, I now have my foot in the door, so to speak.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Kevin

But how that sort of control is accomplished mechanically has me scratching my head!!

Hi Kevin, a few more thoughts - stockwhips are manually plaited around a core. . . climbing ropes have a rope as the core and a plaited covering. . . the flex on my computer charger also has a plaited outer covering 6 or 8 strands, I'm not sure.  Surely the two latter must be done by machine.  Watch this space, I may come up with more ideas.  Edit to add: my iron flex also has a plaited textile outer layer. [We are barely acquainted]

Interesting to see researchers dive into the physics of knitting. When you knit, you can feel how each loop affects the tension and structure of the fabric, but it's wild to think of it in terms of materials science. I imagine understanding these dynamics could lead to innovations in technical textiles and maybe even inspire new patterns for hobby knitters like us.

For the 'hobby knitters' who want to knit 3D structures: Olga  Buraya-Kefelian (Olga Jazzy on Ravelry and Instagram) has several interesting patterns. Here's a blog about a course she gave:
3D knitting with Olga

Evie saw the Sci show and then reacted in her own way: