Weaving is a practice that has been around for centuries. It served as a way to create clothing, textiles, tapestries, etc. By hand, two men working for an entire day would produce an inch of woven cloth. That all changed when French weaver and merchant Joseph Marie Jacquard created the first programmable loom, better known as the Jacquard Loom. This loom was created during the 18th century to automate the weaving process and was seen as one of the most advanced pieces of technology for that time. The way Jacquard’s Loom was programmed was through punch cards. For instance, say you wanted to create a star. You would take a blank punch card and punch a series of holes into the punch cards in the shape of a star. You would then feed these punch cards to the machine, and it would weave the design onto cloth.
Funny enough, punch cards, or at least the concept of them, are still used in weaving today. For example, say you want to weave a cloth with say your initials interwoven within it. The first step would be to create your design.
Try it out!
Take a piece of graph paper and shade the boxes that have a design and leave the boxes that don’t. However, it’s important to remember one of the most important rules of weaving, symmetry! So whatever your first box in a row is should match your last.
You should end up with something like this…
Now to actually weave the design, you simply need to follow what you drew. It’s also important to remember, that a shaded box means weave over the line and a blank box means weave under the line. So create your design row by row.
Starting at row one, left to right, we go under one, over five, under three, over seven, and under one.
Next at row two, now right to left, you go under four, over one, under ten, over one, under one.
Next at row three, now back left to right, under one, over one, under ten, over one, under four.
etc.
Keep following this pattern and you should end up with a great design!
You can even switch the shaded and unshaded boxes to get a similar yet different design. Have fun!
Credits
Learn more about the life of Joseph Marie Jacquard!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Marie_Jacquard
Learn how to weave a more complex design!