Kevyn Jacobs snapped this knit (crocheted?) Dalek bollard cover at the corner of West Magnolia Street and Commercial Street in Bellingham, WA. No clue as to the manufacturer of said confection, but bravo.

#Knitted #Dalek bollard cover (Thanks, Hagrid!)

Artist Shanell Papp has a project called "Bawdy," which is about bodies and textiles. The centerpiece is "Lab," a yarn skeleton with a complete set of organs.

Lab (skeleton) (via Making Light)

From Brilliant Knitwit's Tumblr, an optical illusion TARDIS scarf, knitted as a gift. From the front, it just appears to be a striped scarf; at the right angle, the hidden TARDIS heaves into view.

Look at this scarf. Nothing here but stripes. Until you look at it from this angle…. (via Neatorama)

Invented in 1801, Jacquard looms are really an add-on to already existent mechanical loom systems, which allowed those looms to create patterns more complex and intricate than anything that had been done before. The difference: Punch cards.

When you weave, the pattern comes from changes in thread position — which threads were exposed on the surface of the cloth and which were not. But prior to the Jacquard loom, there were only so many threads that any weaver could control at one time, so patterns were simple and blocky. Essentially, the Jacquard system vastly increased the pixels available in any weaving pattern, by automatically controlling lots and lots of threads all at once. Punch cards told the machine which threads were in play at any given time.

It's a really cool process, and I wanted to share a couple of videos that give you a good idea of how these looms work and how they changed the textiles industry. You can watch them below. But probably the best example is the image above. It's a picture of Joseph-Marie Jacquard, woven in silk on the loom he invented — a fantastic demonstration of the design power that loom offered. In just a few years, people went from weaving simple stars and knots, to weaving patterns that almost look like they were spit out of a printer.

Fourteen-year-old Luna Ito-Fisher started making her own clothes and accessories when she was nine, after attending a friend’s birthday party at a sewing studio in LA.

“I remember at the beginning, threading was so hard and I could never get it through the needle,” Luna tells me as she sets up her machine on her family’s dining room table. Now, she slides the thread through the tiny clips across the top of the machine, guides it up and down the rigging, licks the end and pokes it, like nothing, straight through the eye.

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Mark Newport, whose hand-knit superhero costumes have been mentioned here before, has a gallery show at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville's Ewing Gallery. I really love these pieces -- they'd make great jammies (or, without the legs, hoodies).

IN ACTION: Mark Newport (via Neatorama)