Today marks the unofficial official beginning of sweater weather on the East Coast: Our heat turned on this morning, we’re bundled up, and D.C. broke out the wool hats. And so perhaps we are unreasonably tempted by this Asheville, N.C., based company called Appalatch, which is making the “world’s first 3D-printed sweater to be available on a mass scale,” Treehugger reports.
Here’s the pitch: Normal sweaters don’t fit you right and about 30 percent of the fabric that goes into each sweater ends up on the cutting room floor. Appalatch wants to buy a cool 3D printer for fibers — basically, a knitting machine that talks to a computer — and make sweaters that a) fit you and b) waste a lot less material. The wool’s also sustainably sourced.
This is a long-term commitment: If you pledge $189 now, you’ll get your sweater in September of 2014. But you can dream about it through this long, cold, imperfect-sweater-filled winter.
