I was approached by a University student who was planning a final project for an advanced cartography course. He was familiar with my work with the img2track project through my membership and activities at Sector67.

His concept was to design a map depicting distribution of wool exports from New Zealand and to have it knitted (in wool). I was very intrigued by the project and agreed to do the knitting.

Although the final project grew out of all recognition in size and scope, it was a very interesting one to work on and definitely polished up my double bed jacquard skills! I’m quite pleased with the outcome.

Final statistics:
• Overall dimensions: 5’4” x 3’7” (163cm x 107cm)
• Total weight of yarn use: 3lbs 2.5oz (1,431gm)
• Total Labor ~40 hours, including 25 hours of design consultation, project prep and setup and 15 hours of knitting
• 1560 rows & 624,000 stitches

The student originated the concept and designed the graphic. I further adjusted it and then use img2track to load it into the knitting machine.

The graphic was too wide to knit in one segment, so was split down the center, into two sections, uploaded into the KM using img2track, and the piece was knit in 2 panels, each 200 stitches wide, which were then sewn together. In this case, because I was using the Brother 930, which has the smallest memory of the Brother electronic machines (2k), I had to load 24 separate tracks to complete the project! Fortunately img2track does all the work of chopping the image into appropriate sized chunks and you just load them in order (eg. track 1, track 2, etc) (Note - click on the B&W image to see one of the files that was uploaded to the KM using img2track.)

Because I’ve had trouble getting a tight enough cast on for DBJ projects, I elected to use the “broken toe cast on” and rather than pulling the first row of yarn out, I left it in and used it to snug up the cast on when I was done. It worked very well.

The map will hang in the University of Wisconsin Cartography Office for the next several months. After that? I’ve heard that the New Zealand government office dealing with wool exports is interested;-)