Kitsch Crochet

For Cogapp’s latest hack day there was a bit of a twist, rather than our usual coding projects we were tasked with making something tangible. The brief was very open, we could make something with any material: thread, clay, paper, wood, etc — the sky (and budget) was the limit.

I’ve always loved making things with my hands so I was very excited about this one. I particularly love knitting and crochet, but I don’t often find the time, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to spend the day making something with yarn. Both knitting and crochet are quite slow, so it was a challenge to think of something I could feasibly make in a day. I knew this from experience as my most ambitious project to date was a knitted jumper, which took me over a year to make!

The jumper was well worth the effort (if I do say so myself), but given the time constraints I had to think smaller this time. I thought it would be fun to make something playful and useless (and most importantly little), so I started hunting for a suitably whimsical pattern. After much deliberation I decided on a poodle wine bottle cover — what every classy home needs! 💅 For a small fee I bought the crochet pattern from Jenny Auckram on Etsy (thanks Jenny) and I was ready to go.

While it may seem that crocheting a poodle wine bottle cover was unrelated to my usual programming work, fibre arts and coding share a rich history. Ada Lovelace famously said of the “Analytical Engine”, one of the first computers in the nineteenth century, “We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”¹

Knitting and crocheting have also been used in the classroom to teach children maths and programming concepts² and ultimately to try to encourage more girls into STEM careers.³

While making my hack day project, I really enjoyed seeing the poodle slowly come to life over the course of the day. Although, I’d forgotten how much concentration crocheting takes as it involves constant counting to follow the pattern, not to mention the finger cramps. But gradually seeing the cute features come together was enough of a reward to keep me going:

Eventually, after much love, sweat and luckily no tears, the full poodle was ready for the 4.30pm demo!

I’d also kept a little something in my back pocket, I had a top secret stretch goal that I waited until the demo to reveal.

I thought it would be interesting to compare a crochet design made my a human to one made by AI, so I’d also asked Chat GPT to generate a crochet pattern for a poodle wine bottle cover.

Here’s the prompt I gave:

And here is the end result:

As you can see it didn’t deliver on the dimensions or the functionality - there’s no way of actually using this as a wine bottle cover.

I particularly like the tongue detail, the instructions for which were:

I also enjoyed the suggestion to optionally “attach pompoms along the body for a playful touch”, but unfortunately I ran out of time and wasn’t able to implement this.

Suffice to say I think crochet pattern designers are safe from the AI-takes-over-the-world impending disaster (for now at least).

[1]: The MIT Press, Celebrating Ada Lovelace, https://mitpress.mit.edu/celebrating-ada-lovelace/

[2]: Ashley Brickeen, Knitting is Coding and More, https://waldorfpeninsula.org/blog/knitting-coding/

[3]: Holly Korbey, Girls Knit Their Way to a Math Career, https://www.uml.edu/news/news-articles/2017/bright-knitting.aspx