Co-Dithering for Jacquard Knitting
Abstract
Machine knitting is an industrial fabrication technique that can create a wide array of shaped, colorful textiles from yarns. However, while knit shaping has been the subject of a tremendous amount of research innovation, the recipes used for colorwork remain largely unchanged. We revisit and generalize one class of colorwork, double-bed Jacquard. Whereas previous double-bed Jacquard techniques either require the front and back of a fabric to be inverse images (tubular Jacquard) or fix the back pattern to a checkerboard (bird’s-eye Jacquard), our technique allows independent images on the front and back of the fabric, subject to constraints on yarn reuse and bed-crossing. We show that the “co-dithering” problem – the problem of determining the stitch pattern which gets as close as possible to target front and back images while respecting these constraints – can be optimally solved using dynamic programming. We present results from testing our technique on a varied set of images and over a wide range fabrication scales; and demonstrate the effects of different parameter choices.
Files
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Paper; authors' version, includes some images removed from the ACM DL version.
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Supplemental material; includes code to produce knitout, raw result images, and more results.
Citation
Yue Xu and James McCann. 2025. Co-Dithering for Jacquard Knitting. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication (SCF ‘25). (In press.)
@inproceedings{xu:2025:knit-dithering,
author = {Xu, Yue and McCann, James},
title = {Co-Dithering for Jacquard Knitting},
year = {2025},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication (SCF ‘25)},
note = {In Press}
}