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Acknowledgements: A lot of content, amazing visuals, code bases, and code examples were developed by folks at the Carnegie Mellon Textile Lab, and they also have a series of great tutorials. Knitting machine and operations illustrations were taken and modified from "Digital fabrication of soft actuated objects by machine knitting." Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2019.

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This knitout 101 tutorial was developed for the 2025 digital machine knitting workshop, specifically for using the JavaScript frontend for programming the Shima Seiki SWG machines.

Prerequesites

• Install node.js if it is not already installed (check with node -v in your terminal)
• Download the JavaScript frontend from https://github.com/textiles-lab/knitout-frontend-js

Knitout as a File Format

Knitout (.k) is a file format that can represent low-level knitting machine instructions in a machine-independent way. Detailed documentation can be found at https://textiles-lab.github.io/knitout/knitout.html.

The file has some headers, but most operations follow the following format:

• operation name
• parameters
• comments

A toy example of a sequence of operations:

Knitting Machine:

Operations:

• tuck