The sad thing about the amount of time us netheads spend in the virtual world is that all the flurry and flutter and friend-finding of our online relationships are lost into the virtual darkness as soon as we switch off.
There'll be no bundle of ribbon-wrapped Twitter tweets to be unearthed in an old box in the attic in 100 years time. A sad state of affairs that has been inspiringly addressed by Distance Lab's Social Knitworking project.
The idea of the project is that text-based interactions online, such as that disturbing conversation about knitted straight jackets you and your yarn cronies had on Ravelry or the tweetfest you had discussing last night's episode of Glee, can be turned into a knitting pattern by a clever little computer programme.
The programme seeks out patterns in conversations, phrases or sentiments, characteristics and other features and spits them out as a unique knitting pattern. Once created the pattern is downloaded to the knitting machine and knitting begins.
Hey presto: your online happenings in artful form. The resulting items are rather lovely and, on the more sneaky side of it, you could be wearing a conversation about the merits Brad Pitt's derrière and only you would ever know.
