Why can’t machines crochet?
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With knitting you almost always work from “live” stitches and once a stitch is completed you can forget about it.
With crochet you only have one “live” stitch at a time which makes it sound simpler… but you can use any previous stitch – or no stitch at all – to create your next live stitch. That means you can’t just focus on what you are currently doing but you need to keep essentially the whole piece of work “active” at the same time.
So the machine needs to either physically or programmatically hold all of the potential stitch locations “open” in order to direct the hook into the correct next location.
With knitting that is trivial because even when a person is knitting with needles the needle physically holds the stitches that are next in line to be used.
I think that a machine which created very simple crochet patterns would probably be possible to create. Something with a tooth-like pattern holding the stitches for the whole row at once so that the machine could crochet into each one… but the thing is that any crochet piece which was simple enough for a machine to replicate could be much much much easier to create with knitting so you might as well just use a knitting machine.
I’ve always thought fiber arts are under-credited for the amount and complexity of math and engineering they can require
Every old knit loop has a stick through it, and you use another stick to make the new loop. You can feel where the two sticks bump as they do this.
Every old crochet loop is just a loop, looped around other loops. You have to look where to stick the new one.
Loops with sticks stay put.
Loops without sticks are wiggly.
Machines are good at feeling where two sticks are.
Machines are bad at looking at something wiggly.
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