This is the report on my Laidlaw internship at EPFL's CREATE Lab, supervised by Juliette Hars and Dr Sergio Picella. It tells the story of building something from nothing rather than of finished results: when I started, there was no rig to stretch a knitted fabric, no pipeline to measure the light passing through it, and no data; so most of what follows is an account of building and validating both, before asking what they could tell us.

The report follows what it took to trust that first data: a motorized setup that could apply and measure strain repeatably, an imaging pipeline that could turn raw photographs into actual blob statistics, and an experimental protocol rigorous enough to tell a real effect from noise. It's also honest about what didn't work and enthusiastic about how much is still ahead: the forward and inverse models this project is ultimately aiming for, predicting and eventually designing shading patterns from a knit's properties, are still a future step, not a present result.

If you are interested in the bio-inspiration part of the project and the main results, you can take a look at my poster.