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When technology gets warm and fuzzy, it's usually a bad thing — warnings of an exploding laptop or faltering cellphone reception.

But even a Luddite has to love a woolly knitted iPhone or a cuddly Space Invaders quilt. As DIY doyenne Martha Stewart would say, it's a good thing.

Generations X through Z have rediscovered crafts such as knitting, quilting and crocheting, and now they're blending these old-fashioned arts with their love of newfangled technology to create a new genre: nerdcraft.

Thus we have the knitted iPhone, the Super Mario Bros. embroidered pillow, countless iPod cozies, the Q*Bert quilt and Baby's First DNA Model — a stuffed toy complete with GC/TA base pairs represented by orange-green bars.

And then there are the cakes. Several thriving websites are dedicated solely to game-inspired cakes, from Pac-Mans to Guitar Hero confections. There are wedding cakes shaped like PlayStation and Xbox consoles, with his-and-her cookie controllers, for a marriage made in true geek heaven.

"There's definitely a movement," says Carla Sinclair, editor of California-based Craft magazine, which caters to the hip and crafty. "We're seeing more and more of this type of crafting."

Even the aforementioned Ms. Stewart got into the act by creating a Wii console cake for the August cover of Wired magazine. Her efforts were mocked by committed game-cakers, however, because her cake was filled with sticks and lacked baking soda to make it structurally sound, so it tasted "like old Atari cartridges," in Wired's words. Amateur bakers quickly set out to top her, and bragged of their yummy results on the Web.

Reimagining computers and cellphones in yarn and icing makes technology more approachable and personal, Ms. Sinclair says. Also, it's fun.

Kimberly Chapman, a Canadian living in Las Vegas, got the inspiration for her DNA model while she was teaching herself to knit twisted tubes.

"I made some worms and snakes, got bored of that, and then began to think of what else I could make with a twisted tube.

"One evening it dawned on me: Two twisted tubes with joins in between makes a double helix," she wrote in an e-mail. The finished result was so popular, she posted the pattern on her personal website to encourage people to make their own instead of asking her to make more.

Projects inspired by science and technology are a natural fit for crafters who love to experiment, says Ms. Chapman, who calls herself a proud nerd.

"Nerdcrafters are generally bolder in seizing the elements of their craft — or several crafts mashed together — to achieve a desired result rather than just follow someone else's pattern," she writes. And she loves the thrill of discovery: She has more original nerdy knitting ideas, but she's keeping them on the down low because she wants to be the first to make them.

"A significant amount of the joy I derive from my nerdy crafts is to be the first to present these juxtapositions to the world," she says.

She realizes her hobby may seem a bit odd to outsiders, and she's fine with that. Most people, Ms. Chapman notes, "don't watch a puppet show and mentally take apart the stitching to imagine how the puppet was made. … They don't look at a structure and wonder what it would take to make a cake version.

"Nerds do those things. Nerds can't stop asking questions and mentally disassembling the world around them. Nerds wonder, and wonder is at the heart of creativity."