🎄 A Christmas Carol for the Knitting Industry
What Ghosts, Gauge, and Good Engineering Can Teach Us About the Future
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Once Upon a Knit…
If Charles Dickens were wandering through our industry today, he might not be haunted by chains and specters — but by machines, missed opportunities, and a few forgotten notebooks full of brilliant stitch math.
He would meet: The Ghost of Knitting Past, when machines were built to last 30–40 years, engineers knew every stitch by heart, and innovation was thoughtful, deliberate, and quietly revolutionary.
The Ghost of Knitting Present, where we stand today — surrounded by extraordinary technology, yet sometimes unsure how to move forward after decades of consolidation, shortcuts, and disappearing hands-on expertise.
And, The Ghost of Knitting Yet to Come, asking a gentle but persistent question:
What kind of industry do we actually want to build next?
Not a warning — an invitation.
A Familiar Moment of Reckoning (With a Lighter Ending)
This year, parts of our industry have felt a bit like Ebenezer Scrooge’s office before the visitations — drafty, uncertain, and overdue for reflection.
- Legacy companies closing chapters.
- Hard-earned knowledge retiring quietly.
- Designers given powerful tools… but not always the maps to use them well.
- Sustainability discussed often — yet too rarely engineered from the fiber up.
- Innovation didn’t disappear.
It simply outpaced the systems meant to support it.
And yes, many of us felt it — the confusion, the frustration, even a little grief — watching something we love evolve faster than we could process.
We’ve Been There Too — And So Have Many of You
At Fabdesigns, MMM, and Knittivity, this hasn’t been theoretical. We’ve lived it — and we know many of you have as well.
Like Scrooge catching his own reflection, 2025 became a moment of clarity for our industry. Not to shame anyone. Not to dwell on loss. But to wake us up. One truth became impossible to ignore:
The future doesn’t belong to the biggest factory. It belongs to the best-informed hands and the Social media savvy. Our industry has changed.
That realization has reshaped how many companies — not just ours — are moving forward. Most have barely implemented Industry 4.0, the Digital Manufacturing Revolution, and Industry 5.0 is upon us - the AI revolution. Tik Tok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google ads grab attention, but only hold it if the brand can deliver - and their manufacturers can deliver.
There is a lot of noise out there. A lot of claims. People creating products in AI and grabbing attention but unable to turn choceht and hand work into production ready items. So where does our industry go? How much AI is helpful and what is it's role?
Where the Past Meets the Present (and Has a Great Conversation)
In A Christmas Carol, redemption doesn’t come from nostalgia.
It comes from integration, gratitude, and shared purpose.
That’s exactly where our industry is finding its footing again — through cross-pollination between:
- designers pushing stitch language into new territories,
- material innovators redefining fibers and finishes,
- engineers unlocking machines far beyond their original intent.
For Bruce Huffa and me, this meant turning the page and starting a new chapter — not away from the industry, but deeper into what our industry needs.
- Knittivity translates historic stitch techniques — some centuries old — into ready-to-knit M1+ STOLL programs, designed to inspire apparel, home, and technical products today.
Heritage craftsmanship, compiled for the digital age.
- Modern Material Matters operates firmly in the present tense — consulting, engineering, and producing next-generation technical knits for medical, protective, performance, and composite applications.
This is where sustainability becomes structural, not cosmetic.
- Fabdesigns, Inc. holds the long view — stewarding six pattern families and fourteen patents spanning footwear, medical, automotive, aerospace, sports, wellness, wearables, and smart consumer products — so innovation doesn’t vanish when trends shift or companies change course.
Together, they form a living bridge:
Past wisdom. Present capability. Future scalability.
We've been using digital manufacturing techniques for customization and 3D techniques since the 1980's due to the computers on machinery. A great example is Brenda French's Frech Rags, whcih created upscale women's for her DTC trunk shows where orders were customized and individual garments were create for each individual purchaser.
Concetta Bruce took this customization technology to B2B wholesale to 365 top women's boutiques in the US in the 2000's. And Fabdesigns takes it to footwear, medical and aerospace composites in the 2020's.
Knittivity, uses AI and automations B2B to create iterations of stitches to build products for a new generation of apparel, footwear and home goods designers. We create stitch structures ready to knit, mood boards, and silhouettes to help designers imagine new ways to use knitted fabrics and materials. We're a resorce forseasoned designers as well as newbies to the industry, to fast track ideas and products to market that are on trend, mindful and exciting.
So… What Comes Next?
We imagine a better ending than the one often painted.
Like Scrooge on Christmas morning, the industry gets another chance — not to rebuild what was, but to build what should have been all along:
- Machines used to their full potential (many lasting 30+ years and counting)
- Designers supported by real technical fluency, digital manufacturing, and AI to assist rather than replace them
- Products engineered for longevity, repair, and purpose
- Materials and structures created for performance rather than copied from Pinterest
- Innovation scaled responsibly — not recklessly
- Mindful design and slow fashion replacing churn-and-waste systems that send 60%+ of material to landfills
We see extraordinary materials shaping the road ahead: patented Auxetic technologies form AFT in Dallas, magnetic yarns, new smart alloys, and recycled materials such as pineapple, coffee, orange, rice hulls, and of course hemp grown from Louisiana to Montana and processed in Alabama by Bastcore.
Made in the USA, not just from the fiber up — but from the ground we’ve walked on for generations.
This is the work we and others are doing every day — quietly, collaboratively, and with deep respect for both the craft and the future.
The Stitch That Holds It All Together
For knitting, we see a future where knitting knowledge is shared, not siloed and spoon fed to a few big brands.
Legacy machines outlive the companies that built them.
Sustainability is measured in decades, not marketing cycles, and designers, engineers, and manufacturers once again speak the same language.
That future is not theoretical. It’s already being stitched together.
From All of Us
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This holiday season, we’re grateful — for our clients, collaborators, fellow engineers, material innovators, and every curious mind still asking,
“What if?”
Thank you all for another wonderful year of visitors and visiting - creating the future of so many knit projects and doing it sustainably - one stitch at a time. May your holidays be warm, your stitches precise, and your ideas bold enough to shape what comes next.
Like Dickens’ Scrooge, our industry isn’t finished. It’s just waking up. We're bringing you the coffee and now, let's get started! 2026 is here!
Happy Holidays from Fabdesigns, Knittivity, and Modern Material Matters 🎄🧶🎄🧶🎄🧶🎄🧶🎄🧶🎄🧶🎄🧶🎄🧶🎄🧶🎄🧶🎄🧶🎄🧶
“And it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well — if any man alive possessed the knowledge.” - Charles Dickens
— Bruce & Connie Huffa
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