If you thought normal [balaclavas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balaclava_%28clothing%29
) (aka ski masks) were creepy headgear, wait until you get a load of this bitmapped oddity. Artist Andrew Salamone has created a custom balaclava that features a bitmap of his face using an electric knitting machine to stitch the image. The mask builds upon his original Identity Preserving Balaclava Project, which used actual photorealistic images of the designer’s face printed on fabric to construct the face mask. Although the original project purported to defy the taboo of covering your face entirely, it was a bit too Leatherface-y for our tastes. The bitmap version, though still quite odd and unsettling (it reminds us of silk stocking-capped bank robbers), is at least more palatable thanks to a slight abstraction caused by the pixelation.While we never expected bitmap technology to meet knitting in quite this way, we suppose that the project is, if nothing else, an interesting convergence of analogue and digital design. (But we’re pretty sure we won’t be wearing one in public nonetheless.)[via Craftzine.com]
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