StitchFlow: Enabling In-Situ Creative Explorations of Crochet Patterns With Stitch Tracking and Process Sharing

DOI

Crochet is a tactile craft that has resisted automation, remaining a manual activity characterized by improvisation and adaptation. While crafting, practitioners enter a state of creative flow, becoming fully immersed in their work. However, tasks like documenting patterns, tracking progress, and backtracking due to mistakes or mid-process changes can disrupt their creativity flow. Drawing on the concept of creative flow, a state of total engagement with clear goals, immediate feedback, effortless attention, and spontaneity, we build StitchFlow. This system enables crocheters to remain immersed in their craft while automatically constructing process documentation and allowing them to edit and share it in multiple ways. StitchFlow supports in situ stitching without distraction or the need to remember previous steps using a motion sensor to track real-time hand gestures and reconstruction of the stitch pattern. The created designs can be viewed, edited, and combined, promoting variation-making and design alternations through a graphical interface. To foster the sharing of the results with others, the system supports composing and exporting the documentation using traditional methods like written patterns and crochet charts or as flows that other users can follow within the system. Through user studies with 8 crocheters, we found that StitchFlow preserved makers' creative flow, enabled spontaneous exploration, and facilitated pattern sharing.