Co-Dithering for Jacquard Knitting

A knit cloth made by co-dithering two famouse Hokusai designs.

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

Paper; authors' version, includes some images removed from the ACM DL version.

thumbnail of image table from supplement

Supplemental material; includes code to produce knitout, raw result images, and more results.

thumbnail of table of contents of the code repository

Source code; our implementation of the co-dithering algorithm.

Citation

Yue Xu and James McCann. 2025. Co-Dithering for Jacquard Knitting. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication (SCF ‘25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3745778.3766646

@inproceedings{xu:2025:knit-dithering,
author = {Xu, Yue and McCann, James},
title = {Co-Dithering for Jacquard Knitting},
year = {2025},
isbn = {9798400720345},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3745778.3766646},
doi = {10.1145/3745778.3766646},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication},
articleno = {19},
numpages = {14},
keywords = {knitting, colorwork, double-bed jacquard, dithering},
series = {SCF '25}
}