After collaborating with experimental weaver, design researcher and technologist Laura Devendorf on many on-line events (including the algorithmic pattern salon and the alpaca festival conference), and contributing to her AdaCAD software for parametric design of weaves, it was amazing to meet her in person! She dropped by our Sheffield Pattern Club studio while on tour towards the textile intersections conference, leading an evening workshop on weaving.
In preparation for the workshop she sent me over a new threading for my 8-shaft loom, using the crackleweave-inspired “motif to path” operation that I contributed to AdaCAD. You can see how the threading was constructed in Laura’s AdaCAD file. It had been a while since I made a new warp and I wasn’t sure if I could remember the careful sequence of steps needed, luckily Seiko Kinoshita was happy to drop by and again help me through that process! With the warp on the loom, it didn’t take too long to do the threading and I got that part more or less right first time.
The workshop itself was a lot of fun, with around ten people and the usual Pattern Club intergenerational mix of textile artists, musicians and other pattern-curious people, unsurprisingly leaning towards the textile side. We started out with an intro to weaving structures from Laura, before getting a feel for it by plotting out a drawdown from tie-up, treadling and threading on graph paper, using the threading above that was also now also on my loom. You can find the worksheets we used here, in spreadsheet form (spreadsheets can work very well for exploring weaving drafts!).
We then switched to experimenting with the same threading in AdaCAD, finding an interesting lift plan to transfer to graph paper and then try out on the loom. We took turns on this, one person weaving their pattern, while another person called out the pattern for them (we’d labelled up the loom’s levers with numbers to make this easier), with people who’d already woven their pattern on hand with advice.
I’ve tried to run AdaCAD-oriented workshops before and really struggled to get people on the same page with understanding drafts, so it was really great to learn from how Laura got people there! The weaving took a while, but everyone managed to weave their pattern, and enjoy and puzzle over the material difference between the pattern on screen and on grid paper, and the lively, three dimensional real-world outcome.
