Weaverly

The Deep Waters of Randomness

Yesterday's quest of a method to simulate a repeating random selection from a group of five warp yarns led me to some interesting stuff. I wanted a quick and easy way of visualizing a random warp without actually making one. I mean–flipping colored playing cards is fun, but after 15 flips one looks for a better way. Once upon a time I had written a simple spreadsheet to generate a group of random numbers, but this didn't quite do it - I really needed to generate random combinations of the same five colors, with no individual colors repeating in any one group. My math and programming skills are decidedly not up to this task! So I Googled random number generator and came up with a mindboggling amount of content, enough for weeks and months of study. I learned some wonderful new acronyms, like PRNG (pseudorandom number generator) and found a delightful title attributed to Robert R. Coveyou of Oak Ridge National Laboratory,

The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

I also found dozens of sites for generating random numbers on the web. Fascinating. So where does this leave me, a weaver? Certainly no further. If any of you know of a way to simulate my random warp with five ends together at a time, I'd love to hear about it. My own conclusion: the quickest way to simulate a random warp is to get up off my butt and visit the warping board.

But having said that, I couldn't resist trying a few more simple threadings with yesterday's warp. I continued the plan of having every fourth and fifth warp end work together. The first example is straight twill, the second rosepath with 2/2 twill tieup and a straight treadling, and the third is rosepath threading and reverse twill treadling. It is the third one I find most interesting.

Deliberate Randomness

Browsing through a stack of old weaving magazines, I came across an article in the Nov./Dec. 2007 Handwoven which I had overlooked before. It's called "Anything but Plain; twelve placemants on one warp!" by Janet Dawson of Sydney, Nova Scotia. It's easy to see why I might have overlooked it, as my weaving passion is loom-controlled structure, the more the merrier. But on closer inspection, the article contains an ingenious scheme for imparting a complex, random look to a multicolored warp with minimum warping effort, and I suggest you take a look at it. Janet warps from five differently colored cones at a time, holding all five yarns in her hand without separating them, and crossing 5x5 in the lease. At threading time she selects the yarns randomly, one at a time within each group of five. Additionally, every fourth and fifth warp threads work together, imparting an additional randomness of size. It's important to note that back-to-front warping is required for this method.

I've tried to simulate Janet's scheme by first choosing five colored cards (red, blue, orange, green, and black) from a deck of a children's cardgame, drawing cards one at a time from my group of five. Then after all 5 were chosen, I reshuffled my group of 5 and drew again. And so on, over and over, until I had a "warp" of 50 ends.

Then I used this warp with the following draft, which is plain weave on four shafts with every fourth and fifth warps working together. In actual practice, I would thread the partnered warps in their own heddles but group them together in the reed.

I tried three different color-and-weave drawdowns with the same warp but with three different weft colors. What a wonderful discovery! And here's the bonus…they're all one-shuttle weaving.