Coded Mittens

Colorwork knitting provides a wonderful creative template for learning to code and it isn’t the first time that people saw the link between textiles and computers. The punchcards used in Jacquard looms inspired Charles Babbage in his early Analytical Machine and laid the foundation for modern computer programming.

For anyone who has followed a color-work knitting chart, you’ll be familiar with the colored grid cells that guide you in what color to knit each stitch. Open an excel spreadsheet and you have a creative canvas to design your own knitting patterns.

Looking for creative ways to teaching programming concepts I naturally turned to knitting. You can explore a few of my tutorials and projects below:

Interactive mitten generator

Coding mittens

Swatch Creator