There’s a lot of computations going on behind a simple woven pattern with a bewildering set of variables: the width of the would-be cloth, the length of the warp, the count of the cloth, the thickness of the yarn, the sequencing of the pattern and the variations in the patterns…
It can all be calculated, graphed, mapped out, color-coded, all with the assistance of computers or good old brain power.
And what about those of use who just don’t get along with numbers? Who hate calculations? Who prefer to dive in and see what happens?
It can work for us, too. There’s Math, and then there’s Math, the second being less reliant on exact numbers and more on an intuitive understanding of quantities and proportions.
It wouldn’t work in engineering, or in building, or in electricity work, where tiny deviations could spell catastrophe.
But in traditional tasks? There’s kitchen math (and chemistry), where a pinch is an exact measure… for any given day and any given cook. Where “adjusting” is not accounting for specific variables but relying on senses to refine the result.
The same can work in weaving. While the loom itself, as a rigid object, determines maximum width and sometimes length of the cloth you can produce, you can choose to be mathematically precise in your project planning, and say, make stripes of exactly such or such a number of threads, having made sure that the total of threads per stripes and stripes per cloth match the desired final width…
Or you can just eyeball it. Or round up. Or down.
Who’s to say that you’re wrong? So the original is perfectly symmetrical and yours is not. What in nature is perfectly symmetrical?
