I've been on a costuming kick lately, and Dennis gave me a rather extravagant present in the form of an inkle loom. My original intent had been to try tablet-weaving, until I realized that inkle weaving would involve fewer moving parts. This--in my case, at least--is a certified Very Good Thing. (Mind you that, over the years, I've managed to learn to embroider, hand-sew, crochet, tat, use a lucet and even fumble my way through netting. But in all those cases, I only have to think about one needle, shuttle or what-have-you. Ambidextrous I am not.)
Sad to report, my first attempt at warping it--meaning stretching the long threads around the pegs--didn't exactly go swimmingly. Guess who missed a key point in the (illustrated) instructions? Why, yes: That would be the former tech. writer. (Got it in one, Gentle Reader, got it in one...)
I made some jest about it on Facebook to the effect that my infinitely-more-competent-with-textiles foremothers would be disgraced. But my old Forensics Team "mentor" (and fellow geek) added a few comments involving Jacquard Looms (arguably the world's first "programmable" machines) and the Luddite rebellion (which involved looms), noting that King Ludd himself would be smiling upon me for my manual methods.
Booyah for FT Mentor, finding the nerdy dimension! I could just hug him.
A few weeks on--otherwise known as "last night"--I gave it another shot. This time I managed not to screw up the shed. But I did biff the pattern-planning, forgetting that there must always be an odd number of warp threads--which means that patterns are typically calculated from a center point (the middle thread). Thus, the second attempt is basically lop-sided by one thread. Then, too, it took me something short of a foot of weave before I started pulling the weft in tight enough to form the intended pattern.
Which is when it really hit me that, hey, this has math! Granted, not as much math as card-weaving has, but math nevertheless. Which, in this case, is not so much a matter of "knowability"--in other words, responding to fixed rules deduced from First Principles--so much as feedback: "I know this is correct when I see it like this." See, when you block the pattern out on graph paper, you're accounting for all the threads, and that's grossly misleading because, at any given time, about half will be forced to the "top" of the weave and the other half or so will be pushed down out of sight.
Which, in essence, means I could write a simple little web application that would allow the user to specify colors for all threads and then programatically generate the pattern. With a little modification, it would work for tablet-weaving as well. Personally, I like to think that Lady Ada* would smile upon such efforts.
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* "The distinctive characteristic of the Analytical Engine, and that which has rendered it possible to endow mechanism with such extensive faculties as bid fair to make this engine the executive right-hand of abstract algebra, is the introduction into it of the principle which Jacquard devised for regulating, by means of punched cards, the most complicated patterns in the fabrication of brocaded stuffs. It is in this that the distinction between the two engines lies. Nothing of the sort exists in the Difference Engine. We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves."
- from Ada Lovelace's notes, appended to her translation of Luigi Menebrea's article on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, circa 1843
