The world of The Crafting Coop

Kitchen

How to clean up kitchen (particularly the sink, burnt pots and small aplliances)

How to take care of kitchen stuff so that it lives longer

10 commandments of a clutter-free kitchen

Organizing kitchen mini masterpost

5 things to do in the kitchen before you go to bed

What is soapy bowl and why it’s awesome

How to organize your fridge (also here, here and here)

Thins you should know about your fridge

Adding more storage space in a tiny kitchen

Cleaning

Lots of cleaning tutorials and tips. And some more

How to clean up pantry

How to make your house look cleaner than it really is

How to wash pillows

Cleaning the bathroom

How to clean the nastiest places (and get rid of bad smells, etc.)

Floor-to-celling guide to spring cleaning

Recaulking your bathtub

Cleaning grout

How to dispose of toxic waste

Cleaning the medicine cabinet

How to make chores more fun

You mustn’t skip these chores, but you can delay these if you’re busy

Easily forgotten things that you should clean/replace

Why you need a catch-up day

Small cleaning tasks to do in under 15 minutes (also here)

Looking for a flat/moving

First apartment checklist

Where too look during an apartment hunt (and some more tips)

Negotiate these things with your landlord

What to do first in a new place

What do clean before moving out

How not to get crazy during moving flats

How to downgrade to a smaller place

Organisation, storage

10 habits for better home organisation

How to store off-season items

10 storage ideas for small spaces (more here)

Storage secret weapons

How to organise your closet

Things to do before twice-yearly closet switchout

How to store and maintain your sweaters

Decluttering

Why it feels great

How to get rid of clutter

How to declutter (not only a flat)

What needs to be thrown away from your flat

How to let go of the things you no longer need

Things you own too many of; you can throw away these too

Decuttering the bathroom

Decluterring masterpost

Decorating

Projects for every room in your home/flat

Add style to your home

DIY decorating ideas

How to use negative space

4 common decorating mistakes and how to avoid them

Questions to ask yourself before buying something new

How to choose furniture that’ll be easier to clean

Season-specific tips

Things to do before the cold season

Household hacks for winter

Preparing for Christmas

Green thumb 101

How to take care of succulents

Never kill a plant again

Living alone / Sharing a flat

How not to be lonely when living alone

12 things you can only do when home alone

What you learn by living alone

Things you learn while sharing a flat

What to pack when leaving for a dorm

How to seamlessly share a kitchen (or a flat in general)

Safety issues to discuss with flatmates

Benefits of living with strangers

Iridescent clouds, looking like a rainbow in the clouds.

Was not expecting that

She says that people who from a young age were made to feel like they kept doing things wrong - people who’s parents had impossibly high standards for them, people who were bullied, people who have special needs, people who didn’t develop crushes on the “right” people, people who didn’t act like the “right” gender - basically ended up being made to feel guilty so much that guilt became their default response to everything. Guilt became the emotional response to anything which the person didn’t already have a set emotion for.

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:

Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.

This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer. 

But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine. 

Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:

But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!

Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,

and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.

Wires going through magnets.  This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily.  Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1.  Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:

You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is.  But these are also extreme close-ups.  Here’s the scale of the individual cores:

The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers.  Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.

With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY. 

ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon. 

And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC. 

Here are the punch cards:

Some of these looms take up to 1600 spools. That is necessary to make their many different patterns.  Here are some patterns:

How many punchcards per pattern?

 This many: