Fabdesigns, the California-based knitted textile research and innovation centre, has added a raft of new services and created a series of valuable resources aimed at enhancing knitwear design and making knit manufacturing as cost effective as possible.
Among the new services is Graphics Digitalization, with which Fabdesigns is able to convert sketches, photos, and drawings into clean pixels, ready to import CAD patterns in JPG, TIFF, BMP, for use in many types of textile machinery including circular knits, sock machines, embroidery, warp knitting and weaving.
“Many times, the expectation for both development and production might be far apart. What might be perceived as a simple product, may actually take weeks and significant resources to produce a viable sample and take extra time in production,” explained Connie Huffa, President and Textile Engineer at Fabdesigns. “This knowledge divide is costing time, and effort, as well as causing frustration to both designers and manufacturing.”
The new range of services also includes ‘Ready to import jacquards’ with which Fabdesigns’ Etsy store provides fast on-demand downloads of clean pixels, ready-to-import designs in JPG, TIFF, and BMP, of the jacquards in its books.
Also available is VDU – Sintral programming basics, a manual that focuses on the basic Apple VDU programming technology of direct selection and graphics in the Sintral language of early-generation electronic Stoll flat knitting machinery, many of which are still used in production around the world.
Elsewhere, the CNCA – ANVH Tutorial manual focuses on the basic programming technology of direct selection and graphics in the Sintral language of the CNCA generation of electronic Stoll machines, many of which are also still used in production.
“It is no secret that few educational facilities teach deep-dive technical textiles, while many new people have entered the industry, purchasing textile machinery with excellent intentions of getting right into production, yet lack the industry mentorship that is needed to shorten the steep learning curve of complex machinery into a reasonable amount of time to make a profit,” Huffa added. “Fabdesigns is working to build more industry skill sets in assisting companies and individuals be as sustainable and efficient with their time and effort.”
