Knitting Clock Makes You A Scarf For Next Year

A white clock with a house profile sits on a variegated grey background. A yellow skein of yarn sits on the top left side of the clock feeding into a circular loom that takes up the bulk of the center. A yellow scarf extends out the back of the clock and out of frame below the image.

Time got a little wibbly wobbly during these pandemic years. Perhaps we would’ve had a more tangible connection to it if [Siren Elise Wilhelmsen]’s knitting clock had been in our living rooms.

Over the course of a year, [Wilhelmsen]’s clock can stitch a two meter scarf by performing a stitch every half hour. She says, “Time is an ever forward-moving force and I wanted to make a clock based on times true nature, more than the numbers we have attached to it.” Making the invisible visible isn’t always an easy feat, but seeing a clock grow a scarf is reminiscent of cartoon characters growing a beard to organically communicate the passage of time.

We’d love some more details about the knitting machine itself, but that seems like it wasn’t the focus of the project. A very small run of these along with a couple prototypes were built, with a knitting grandfather clock now occupying the lobby of The Thief hotel in Oslo.

If you’re looking for more knitting machines, checkout this Knitting Machine Rebuild or Knitting 3D Models Into Stuffies.

17 thoughts on “Knitting Clock Makes You A Scarf For Next Year

    1. Well, a motor driven by an SBC and a cronjob at least – obviously you can make you own tubular scarves, but not a loop every 30sec I imagine, so I think there’s still a little creativity here?

  1. neat idea! i just wish there was a way to tell time with it. it’d require a different mechanism but i imagine every midnight it does one stitch of the second color yarn. offset it by one stitch from the previous row so it doesn’t fall apart. or, really, you could simplify it just a little bit by including the second color *in addition* to the first, so the midnight stitch is double-thick.

    i feel like it would introduce a lot of different complications. i’m not sure but i think you’d want to keep the second color on the rotating part, so it doesn’t tend to twist up with the first color yarn. otoh, maybe you don’t want to, because having the second color stretching across to the midnight stitch might make a kind of “hand” indicator, and depending on the details, that one twist per row might not matter (might be valuable).

    anyways, then i’d call it a “clock” :)

    1. Maybe set up a mechanism to ink or dye the yarn different colors as it comes off the spool. Shouldn’t be too hard to schedule it so that a color appears at a particular place in the scarf.

    2. You *CAN* tell time with it!

      To the nearest 30 minutes anyhow!

      The machine they used has 48 needles, and originally 47 ‘needles’ were pink and one white, to indicate start position.

      Effectively it is a 24 hour clock with an inner rotating clock face. You could paint every, say 6th needle a different colour for a less minimalistic look.

      A colour changing yarn would also help give a sense of time, or if you wanted it to change *exactly* on the month, you could blend in a new colour on the day manually, or even automate it!

      you can join them by kinda rubbing the ends together I think.

    1. Like flammable and inflammable, with the second often used for stuff that will light on fire extremely easily and/or combust extra fast.

      One more oddity of English where the prefix in means not or the opposite of the root word (inside vs outside), except for when it doesn’t or when nobody uses the root word on its own, except in Star Wars Sith names.

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