Our goal for this project was to create a sustainable, functional and aesthetic piece of clothing in order to offer an alternative to cheap fast fashion.

At first, we tried creating a custom pattern with a this website. It generates very good, detailed but complicated patterns, which wasn't the most suitable for us because we wanted to focus more on experimenting with the yarn instead of creating a perfect, detailed sweater. Additionally, these patterns use the whole width of the machine, which we couldn't do because of the bend in our machine.

Furthermore, most patterns you can find online still require a lot of manual work, you have to decrease a lot of stitches and sew more parts together at the end, which is why we wanted to create something simpler that can be done using mostly the machine.

That's why we started out with a simple top with a V neckline.

We struggled a bit with creating the neckline (which is partly because we didn't do any research on how to do necklines and just figured it out on our own). At first our plan was to do one side of the chest area first and then the other, but at this point we didn't know about the hold setting, and just planned to re-hang the left side of the top later, which proved to be inefficient.

Then, still not knowing about the hold setting, we tried doing both sides at the same time, which of course caused the neckline to have threads going from one side to the other. At first we planned to just cut and knot those but that would have been a lot of unnecessary manual work and also caused the top from the thin recycling yarn to be very unstable.

After looking in the manual of the machine we luckily figured out how to actually make a neckline with the correct setting. So we were able to create our first wearable prototype.

On this piece, the shoulder straps were too long because we measured incorrectly but other than that it worked.