Our Story

Darin is a talker, so whenever Wei Jing was counting her stitches, Darin would inevitably walk in and start jabbering, interrupting her count and forcing her to choose between divorce, murder, and insanity.

Fearing life, limb, and jail time, Wei Jing and Darin - who did his Ph.D. on Machine Learning topics - came upon an idea: isn’t counting stitches a perfect use case for Machine Vision? (see below)

We enlisted Sahil, an MIT Ph.D. in Artificial intelligence, and together the three of us are committed to a simple mission: bring technology - especially Machine Learning - to the amazing, millenia-old craft of knitting.

To start, we’re training a robot to count stitches! In doing so, our hope is to save many knitting households from the inevitable yell of “SHH, I’M COUNTING”

How It Works

We are trying to use “Artificial Intelligence” to create a tool that lets you count the stitches in your cast on or working row by snapping a photo of it on your mobile phone; it’ll eventually look something like this:

 
Explained v2.png
 

Here’s how the technology works:

  1. We create a “robot” - a set of software algorithms (specifically Deep Neural Network Machine Vision algorithms) that looks at pics of knitting WIPs and tries to count the number of stitches it sees

  2. We collect example images of knitting WIPs (thanks to the knitting community, we now have over 15,000!)

  3. We “annotate” each one of them - counting the stitches in each one (that takes a bit of time…)

  4. We train the robot - showing it all those example images along with the stitch counts for each. By looking at thousands of images and the count for each, it starts to learn how count on its own!

The end result is a robot that can look at a WIP photo and count the stitches in the working row!

Once we have that, we’ll create a mobile app interface - like the one above - so knitters can use the tool on their phone - just snap a photo of your WIP and it’ll count the stitches for you!

Our first goal is to count the stitches in a cast on row, and from there we hope to someday add on:

  • Counting mid-project stitches in the working row

  • Counting rows

  • Counting between stitch markers

  • Counting crochet stitches

  • Measuring gauge

  • … and whatever else we and you can think of!

We hope other knitters think that’s as cool as we do! If you have ideas or feedback, want to be notified when we launch, or want to help out with betas, just shoot us a note on the Contact page!

Project Roadmap

In terms of timing, we’re hoping to have the tool ready by July 2021:

 
roadmap v2.png
 

Our Mission

  1. Use technology to make knitting (even) more fun

  2. Make knitting more accessible for beginners

  3. Make knitting more inclusive for visually- and manually-impaired knitters