As you may know, I can’t seem to stop making Exocolonist merch.
I’ve been intrigued by Jacquard loom woven textiles that are getting easier to make on-demand. The design is woven into the stitches instead of printed onto fabric! I bought a cool scarf from the A MAZE Berlin festival this year, which might have been made by German company wildemasche.com.
They have an online creator and no minimum order size, so of course I was instantly hooked.
I’m wearing the scarf!
Automated knitting has been around since the dawn of the industrial revolution (and lead to the first computers!), but only now is it automated enough to let us consumers easily design our own knitted fabric.
Yes, you too can create a singularly unique ugly Christmas sweater. Or you can buy the Exocolonist-themed one I designed!
Chunky knit sweater with acrylic yarn. I don’t think we’ll sell any of these officially, but you can order it directly from the manufacturers here (size chart):
Small
Medium
Large
X-Large
XX-Large
These are made on demand. I suggest you get a size up to go for that loose and bulky look.
Another option: fine knit sweater with cotton yarn.
These are tighter knit with thinner yarn so there are less visible stitches (2 stitches per pixel). These look less like a hand knit sweater and won’t keep you as warm. They’re thinner and softer, fancier and more expensive (Compare):
Wildemasche also makes Beanies, Football Scarves, and bolts of custom-knit fabric you could sew into whatever. My Exo design doesn’t tile easily since every row has a different tile width, but here is the raw file if you want to modify it.
You could also conceivably knit this pattern by hand!
You can drop any image in the Wildemasche creator to start designing, but if you want to do a traditional stitch sweater, here’s what I did:
- pick yarn colors first (4 max, limited selection)
- pick size: size S acrylic is 226×242 pixels and XXL fine-cotton is 347×324, I don’t know the others but I used 300×300 with a gutter at top and bottom which worked for most
- draw your pixel art image
- paste it into their designer on all four pieces, and set the images to 100% scale (200% for fine-cotton)
- you can also use their editor to tile if your pattern supports tiling (mine doesn’t)
- line up the sleeves and the front/back by matching the bottom of the images
If you buy one, or modify this one, or make your own, I’d love to see it! Make sure to tag us on socials or come show it off on the Finji Discord!
