As we all know, Knitwear is an anagram of IT wanker. But a friend of mine, of the former rather than the latter persuasion, has made it her mission to master industrial knitting. The appeal of this seems to be that it is equal parts art, programming, production engineering, and swearing at machinery that contains tiny moving parts which require regular maintenance. This is all eerily familiar. I am about to showcase two of her masterworks.
The first is a head tracker. It’s 20:1 scale (about 5 inches wide, and four metres long) and is based on Supperware’s flex-rigid printed circuit board.
It’s a scarf!
It’s a banner for the support group we put together to keep the product in production!
It’s a perfect centrepiece for a very specific seasonal feast!
If you want a head tracker scarf, we’ll sell them. Really! (If you want one that isn’t a scarf, go to our other site.)
The second thing that needs a special mention, although it gets one in a soon-to-be-published ADC21 talk for which I wore it with pride, is T-shirt with a pocket. The pocket encapsulates my golden rule about starting a hardware business, and subverts an omnipresent brand in the process.
Here at Supperware Ltd, we embrace the hypocrisy of embedding a warning not to manufacture objects into a manufactured object. It’s our thing. Our daily exercise — mine, yours, and all healthy people — is to shrug and contemplate the absurdity of the human condition.