About the project
Héloïse Monfourny is a textile designer who graduated from a master’s program at the School of Art (HEAR) in Mulhouse. In 2018, while completing a residency at the Sew&laine Fablab, she began creating Seconde Maille, a textile design studio that produces fashion accessories and textile objects, unique pieces in very small quantities.
Seconde Maille knits yarns and ropes from dormant stocks or collected from French spinning mills. It is from a hack of her knitting machine that she converts pixels into stitches and thus creates patterns and shapes to constitute her collections of bags, accessories and textile objects. The hack is only possible on Brother machines dating from the 1980s, the so-called Electroknit KH900 series. Also called « Tricodeur », this project explores the relationship between two creative practices linked by a common heritage: knitting and computer programming. The knitting machines with the jacquard function are mainly used with punched cards or Mylard sheets. With the hack you can directly connect your computer to the machine module with a usb connection and another power cable. Beforehand, the png files generated on a software are prepared by working on a grid of pixels. The patterns and logos are generated only in pixels because one pixel on the computer is equivalent to one stitch on the knitting machine.
