I enjoyed this article on NY Times about the current fever for reverse engineering knits. Knitting was the one are of textiles that I didn’t venture into, already have several worlds to explore within the other areas of the craft, but I’ve always enjoyed seeing the fervor that knitters have to understanding and appreciating each other’s work.
For me, bring primarily a print designer, it’s interesting to look at a craft where one can’t simply “copy” another person’s work, either by directly stealing a motif from an image or mimicking it by hand. With knitting, one must transform the raw materials into the finished product using instructions that read more like code, and each person trying to reverse engineer it then has to also learn to be a bit of code breaker to make it.
The challenge of that and the natural differences that can arise from slightly different colors, yarn types, or other variables in the process, and the puzzle-like challenge of the work seem to invite a community for reverse engineering that is really unique from anything in print and really fun to see.