Rhythms of Winding (Take 15)

Check out this other blog post to see a write up for the microgrant I received from the Frank Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry.

Rhythms of Winding is an experiment in procedural and CAD animated machine embroidery. It incorporates a few different projects I created in Processing for manually digitizing thread paths, creating organically winding paths to reproduce bitmap images, and even a simple physics simulation to produce the movement of the unwinding patch.

In this gif, I’ve used an existing rectangle fill stitch file in the applet I made for thread physics, and programmed a few inputs so that I could drag the end of the thread as an elastic band. Each stitch stays fixed in place until the stitch ahead of it moves beyond a certain distance from it’s starting position. This allows the pattern be pulled loose one stitch at a time. The very last stitch is pulled around that circle, and it winds by rotating that end stitch, which pulls the rest of the stitches, and then deleting stitches as they come in contact with the circle. This way the thread doesn’t continually wind around the circle, and you are left with this trailing line that has the gesture of being fed onto a spool. Once the mechanical framework was in place, achieving this animation became a matter of adjusting the drag and elasticity in the chain and things like the circle’s “rotation speed”, or how easy it is for stitches to become “unfixed”.

This gif shows the sort of meandering path algorithm I used for creating the more organic fills. This is used in the figure and the “liquid” material coming out of the end. You can read more about this program in some of the other embroidery projects I’ve posted.

Check out this other blog post to see a write up for the microgrant I received from the Frank Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry. – This includes more conceptual thoughts on the project as well as a closer look at the frame arrangement and registration techniques I developed.