Yesterday while surfing I came across this interesting post about designing accidental weaves. Ordinarily I'm not a fan of "throwing the dice" drafts or name drafts, because I find the results not nearly as interesting as those created with more informed schemes. Please hold your flames here—just my personal bias. But the idea of true randomness in the appearance of a cloth is intriguing. Crepe weaves are one example of a cloth with a "random" appearance.
However, I find Eva's woven examples very handsome, especially the ones with no discernible repeat.
I wondered if Photoshop could deliver similar effects for my dobby drafts for a 40-shaft loom. I started with a 40x40 RGB file and applied a noise filter with 300% of monochromatic Gaussian noise...
then applied a threshold adjustment at the default settings...
then added an overlay of 8-end satin (the gray square in the following diagram indicate transparency)...
with the following result:
I copied this to the liftplan in pixeLoom, and here it is with a straight threading, 3 repeats, warpwise & weftwise:
Because of the overlay, there are no floats longer than 7 in either direction. It needs work, as there is an apparent repeat, ruining the truly random look. But it's a start. More to come.