page fourteen

The Loom

Thirteen rooms in and this site had never made anything you could hold. Today's number has been handed to a loom instead. It threads the warp, ties the treadles to the shafts, works out the order to press them in, dyes the yarn, and then weaves — one pick at a time, on screen. Everything you can see is decided by three small grids, and all three of them are yours to edit.

Click or drag along the threading, the tie-up or the treadling and the cloth re-weaves under your hand. Click the cloth itself to be told why that square is the colour it is.

  • threading, along the top — and treadling, down the right
  • tie-up, in the corner
  • where a repeat starts again
Weave
Colour
Seed — Structure — Cloth —

Nobody chose any of that. Tomorrow the warp is cut off and a different cloth goes on.

How the date becomes a cloth

  1. 01

    Thread the warp

    A loom has shafts — frames that lift groups of warp threads. The threading says which shaft each thread passes through, and it is the first thing the day's number decides: a straight run up the shafts, a point that climbs and comes back down, a run that advances a shaft every repeat, or a sequence of blocks that each rock between two shafts. The strip along the top of the draft is that decision, one mark per thread.

  2. 02

    Tie the treadles

    The small grid in the corner is the tie-up: which shafts each treadle lifts. Step the lifted group along by one shaft a treadle and you have a twill. Lift all but one shaft, counting round by a number that shares no factor with the shaft count, and you have a satin. Lift alternate shafts and you have plain weave, the oldest cloth there is.

  3. 03

    Work the order

    The column down the right is the treadling: which treadle is pressed for each pick of weft. Press them in order and a twill leans. Press them out and back and it becomes a herringbone without a single thread being rethreaded. Weavers call following the threading with your feet tromping as writ, and on an overshot draft it is what turns a row of blocks into a star.

  4. 04

    Weave it

    The cloth is then the answer to one question, asked once per square: is this thread's shaft among the ones this treadle lifts? If it is, the warp passes over and you see the warp colour. If it is not, the weft passes over and you see the weft. Every check, tartan, houndstooth and damask that has ever existed is that question and nothing else. Runs of the same answer are drawn here as single floats, which is why the surface has a grain.

Same number, different trade: the Engine cuts the gears for the mill that would drive this loom, the Folly puts up the building it stands in, the Chronicle gives the country round it eight hundred years to invent the pattern, the Atlas raises the ground the sheep are on, the Menagerie breeds them, the Codex letters the label, the Orrery hangs a family of worlds round a new star, the Observatory scatters the night sky, the Almanac files the day's news and the Chimes keep time with the shuttle.