Embroidery with code, pimp your textiles
Turtlestitch is a free online environment where by playing with code you can draw all kinds of patterns on the screen. What's special is that you can export the result to an embroidery machine to embroider it on textiles of your choice! And such an embroidery action takes 2-10 minutes, you can wait for that. Everyone from about 7 years old can get along with Turtlestitch. Even people of 77 have fun with it. Come take a look to see it, or take half an hour to go home with your own work!
Stichting Scratchweb
Joek van Montfort teaches Computer Science at the Montessori Lyceum Amsterdam. Block-based languages are a popular tool because it means you don't have to worry about syntax. The computer is seen as a tool that can enhance your imagination, provided you find a way to translate to the machine. Snap: The "university" Scratch is very popular, by the way. TurtleStitch, a spin-off of Snap with the unique output capabilities via digital embroidery machines, is the best of both worlds. I was lead organizer of scratch2015ams.org, where TurtleStitch was launched with a day-long master class at the Waag. Recently, I was organizer of the first TurtleStitch conference turtlestitch.org/ten, disguised as a great birthday party at the LocHal in Tilburg. During this event, Hans de Jong tested the open-source hardware hack https://textil-angewandte.at/de/forschung/stitchlab. Hans expects to show the working machine at Makerdays 2025!