My mom is a programmer, raging against the machine
This is my mom Karen. The photo was taken 30+ years ago while she was traveling in Japan on business as a buyer for a textiles company. Not long after, I was born and that career ended, but her work with fabrics continued, even flourished. By the time I was in elementary school, most every holiday season my teachers each received a handmade scarf, compliments of my family. Instead of knitting on the couch, my mom handcrafts scarves, rugs, and towels in a private studio on a foot-treadle floor loom the size of Smart car.
Pretty neat stuff, but when you're a 3rd grade dude playing He-Man and defeating Contra, the absolute coolness of looms and weaving has a tendency to escape you. Until, that is, I realized my mom's basically a homebrew analog improv programmer of sorts. Find out how and why, and see her work, after the jump...
A brief history lesson: Long after the abacus and shortly before Babbage's analytical engine came the precise moment we leaped from manual to automatic computation. In 1725, perforated paper was first integrated with looms to help standardize the patterns woven into fabrics. The punch-card loom, which the Computer History Museum calls the "first data storage mechanism," was a revelation. Of course, technological ingenuity comes in fits and starts like fireworks, not individual cannon blasts. By the time the Industrial Revolution started to pick up steam (har!) in the late 18th Century, Joseph Marie Jacquard was pushing for pattern intricacy and complexity, not just efficiency. He nailed it with the automated loom he built around 1800 (at right).
Professor Paul E. Dunne in the Computer Science Dept. at the University of Liverpool explains:
prior to the development of mechanical looms and weaving machines, lengths of fabric had to be woven slowly by hand, the advent of powered tools for carrying out this task meant that quantities of fabric could be mass-produced at a far quicker rate than previously, thereby reducing its expense. There was one area, however, where the new machines could not compete with skilled manual workers: in the generation of cloth containing anything other than a plain (or at best extremely simple) woven pattern....The key idea behind Jacquard's loom was to control the action of the weaving process by interfacing the behaviour of the loom to an encoding of the pattern to be reproduced. In order to do this Jacquard arranged for the pattern to be depicted as a groups of holes `punched' into a sequence of pasteboard card. Each card contained the same number of rows and columns, the presence or absence of a hole was detected mechanically and used to determine the actions of the loom. By combining a `tape' of cards together the Jacquard loom was able to weave (and reproduce) patterns of great complexity, e.g. a surviving example is a black and white silk portrait of Jacquard woven under the control of a 10,000 card 'program'.
Awesome. But not according to some. By 1812, textile factories in England housing "power looms" were literally being attacked by unemployed, disenchanted handloom weavers (some of the first Luddites).
Fast forward 250 years to New York City and my mother. While studying textile design at FIT, she learned most of her colleagues HATED handweaving, because it wasn't considered an "art." Intrigued by the process and the challenge of mastering a craft no one wanted to do, she dove right in.
Today there are power looms with electric drives and controlling software capable of importing bitmaps from Photoshop. But my mom keeps it old school. To honor her artistic and contrarian nature, I thought I'd find out more about how she goes from this...
A wall of stored yarn in her studio
and this...
Yarn in waiting
to this...
In medias res w/her shuttle and bobbin resting on top
or more often this...
An intricate, original pattern
What about the process of weaving first intrigued you?
MOM: Perhaps I have a bit of spider-blood*, but I love the structure. The interlacing of the threads and the manipulation of the weaves.
When did you buy your first loom?
MOM: 40 years ago; it was a wedding gift from a person I worked for in the textile industry; through the years, I acquired others, but this is still my favorite.
What looms have you owned over the years?
MOM: Macomber 32"-- 8 harness, Macomber 60" -- 12 harness, Leclerc 8-harness table loom, Leclerc 4 Harness table loom, and various tapestry looms. (I still use the Macomber 32", Leclerc 8 harness table and tapestry looms.)
Do you always adhere to carefully-constructed algorithmic patterns?
MOM: Some weavers need "recipes" to follow. They create with little deviation and enjoy that process. Then there are the no-recipes weavers like me who feel the excitement of constantly pushing into untraveled areas. I enjoy setting up my loom to explore and learn.
What goes into creating a pattern, and how/when/why do you choose to deviate?
MOM: Weaving takes many forms, but in this case, we're discussing threads that meet at right angles and in a series/repeats (warp and weft) one has choices as to what fibers, colors, sizes and qualities to select for each threads/fabric desired. The more intriguing the selections, the more novel the resulting fabric.
MOM: For each project, I determine what fiber(s) color(s) and look I'd like to achieve. If making kitchen towels (above), I'd like mine to be different from what can be store purchased. I might start with an original design for a stripe pattern add in color in a combination that might not normally be used for kitchens, but maintain a fiber blend that will withstand wash and drying as needed for this end result. If weaving a scarf, I must consider the drape/hand and how this fabric feels next to skin. No itchy wools or fiber blends that will give a too stiff fabric. I would take into consideration color selection, if it were to be a gift for some one specifically.
Therefore in weaving, generally the end cloth dictates what you might use in the process of selection. The excitement for me is to figure how to make these selections more novel/creative.
What the heck is going on in the above photo?
MOM: These are tie-ins, which are used when you have an existing warp on your loom and want to either replace "some" of the warps (for color or other design concepts) OR you make an entirely new warp and tie each new warp end to an existing old end therefore saving time in drawing the warps through the heddles (eyes) and reed (dents). The stretch just means that before you roll the new warp on to the warp beam, you straighten them out.
[ed. note: I'd liken this to adding a little script to some pre-existing software.]
What is your shortlist for the best resources on learning how to weave?
MOM: WeaveZine and the WeaveCast podcast, the HGA, ATA, and the WeaveTech and Tapestry2005 Yahoo lists. In fact, there is an LOL -- list of lists. There are also workshops held by various guilds. This is not my guild but one whose members are my friends. They are very talented.
Here's my mom today, in front of two mantle panels, wearing a garment she wove for herself...
Many thanks and much love to you, ma!
*If only that were true. It'd obviously make a rad backstory to the comic book version of my life.
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WOW. I love that her sunglasses and purse could be easily mistaken for something sold in 2009.
I think you meant to link this as the comic book version of your life: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhHhXukovMU
So much more awesome.
Your mom was a total fox in the 70s, Leckart.
I am a programmer and I love weaving! As soon as I learned a little bit about how to use my (small) floor loom, I immediately thought it was like writing a little computer script. I even started writing some code to automatically devise patterns for me :)
MILF!
It won't let me log in, but I won't let that stop me from repeating a pun I'm fond of.
Weave got it!
Absolutely gorgeous.
I am sorry to say when my nephew was in the 4th grade he took up weaving and loved it. Sadly, his male peers thought it was "gay" and he gave it up. :(
A really wonderfully written piece, Steven, and a fitting tribute to your mother!
My aunt does textile work with looms. Amazing stuff indeed.
Do/did deer stalk Japanese streets begging for biscuits/cookies?
Love the long hair.
#10: They do in a temple in Nara.
The Fabric Workshop and in Philadelphia made a giant computer loom copy of the Ed Ruscha painting "Industrial Strength Sleep" that was totally huge and totally awesome.
In the beginning was the loom...
Let me add to the general consensus that your mother was a total babe (and presumably still is). Let me also add that the location where she was standing when this picture was taken:
34°41'11.34"N
135°50'23.31"E
Go ahead and Google Earth it. It looks different now (the mon in the background is fancier and the trees are bigger). The deer are as ruthless as ever though. She is feeding them a packet of Shika-senbei, a local deer only snack that some mean Japanese persuade foreign tourists to try (much to their amusement). It doesn't taste bad though.
Now, I dare anyone in Nara to do a Mrs. Lockart cosplay photo reenactment! Find the props, the location and the deer!
#10: in the streets of Nara, yes.
Anywhere else, no.
FYI - The founder of the CS department at the University of Arizona was interested in weaving, and the patterns produced by weaving so much that he had intended to study that, before Computer Science came along..
There is a website there which contains a On-Line Digital Archive of Documents on Weaving..
http://www.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/index.html
(They really need a website update, but) weavers who are interested in advanced patterns might like to read more here:
http://www.complex-weavers.org/index.htm
What a wonderful Mother's Day tribute! As a weaver mom with a young son, I hope one day he looks back on all my adventures in fiber with such a kind eye.
I love the computer/weaving connection (since I am also a programmer) and often point this out to boys when I'm teaching or demoing weaving.
Great post!
Syne Mitchell
Editor of WeaveZine
weavezine.com
My grandmother had a loom like that! And my grandfather had a larger jacquard loom, hole-cards and all. I remember the strung-together hole-card programs, and the large drafting tables covered with graph paper as he worked out the coding. He was a mechanical engineer - slide rules a plenty. A paleo-geek, to be sure.