Meet the designer who knits with wind power

Most people knit with needles. Merel Karhof knits with the wind.

The Dutch designer, who teaches at the London College of Fashion, has been on a quest to make wind power tangible for more than a decade. In October, she displayed her “Wind Knitting Factory” at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, where she transformed the wind sweeping through the city into an engine of creation, and made scarves out of it. “By making these scarves with the wind, people can see that we do not only need to harvest the wind from big wind turbines, but we can already produce something with small amounts of wind,” she later told me. “There is a free energy source around us which can create things for us.”

Karhof’s fascination for the wind began somewhat serendipitously, during an assignment. While she was studying at the Royal College of Art in London, Karhof set out to walk in the straightest possible line from the Royal College of Art to the nearest underground station at Kensington Olympia. Her experiment quickly failed when she got trapped in a cul-de-sac, but as she stood in the middle of the street, she felt a gust of wind on her face, and a little light went off in her head.

The designer spent the following years trying to understand wind—how it behaves around the body, how it whooshes past a building. Once, she even covered herself in miniature windmills akin to pinwheels and walked around London to get a feel for how the wind behaves when she opens a door or dives into the subway. Later, she covered part of a building facade with similar pinwheels, and even lit up an LED business sign outside a hairdresser salon using wind power she had harvested from these tiny pinwheels.

Eventually, she shifted her focus toward a project that could help her translate wind into a tangible product—one that could only exist if the wind exists. She experimented with apple peelers and drawing machines, but eventually landed on a children’s knitting machine, and—as one does upon seeing a knitting machine—started building her first windmill.

Her first few attempts were underwhelming until she upgraded her knitting machine to a 1900s sock-knitting machine donated by the Audax Textile Museum in the Netherlands. A regular sock-knitting machine works by manually cranking a lever and rotating a cylinder that is outfitted with needles. These needles then catch and loop yarn through their hooks, knitting it into a seamless tube of fabric. In Karhof’s version, which she developed with an engineer from Imperial College, the hand (which does the cranking) is replaced by a mechanism that connects to a windmill that harvests the wind, then activates the crank.

For now, she has built two wind-knitting machines. Both are 10 centimeters in diameter, which means the designer can only knit items that are 10 centimeters wide, but both machines are portable, allowing her to follow the wind and knit just outside her studio or at the top of a lookout tower. Depending on the weather conditions, she says it could take anywhere between 40 minutes to a full day to knit one scarf—a mesmerizing process she likened to watching a campfire. (Each scarf’s label relays the time it took to knit it, for example: “knitted in 185 minutes.”)

But it’s not just scarves. For Swedish gallery Fiberspace, Karhof made a long tube-shaped pillow that she tangled into a knot. (I suspect it works better as a decorative accessory than as lumbar support.) And back in The Netherlands, she has made stools, chairs, and benches that she upholstered with various wind-knitted pillows of Kvadrat fabric, each of them 10 centimeters wide.

Interestingly, this entirety of this furniture collection, aptly titled Windworks, was created using windpower. For the occasion, Karhof joined hands with Zaanse Schans, a Dutch mill village known for its centuries-old windmills. The base of each chair, for example, was sawed in a wind-powered sawmill (Het Jonge Schaap). The yarn for the upholstery was then dyed in a windmill that was outfitted to grind pigments (De Kat), and the tinted yarn was finally knitted into using Karhof’s wind-knitting machine.

Karhof’s entire operation will be difficult to scale unless she raids all vintage stores and repurposes every sock-knitting machine in the world. But it serves as a poetic testament to human ingenuity.