The Weaver's Loom

weave to specification

There is no picture to copy. You are told what the cloth must be — and you drive a real four-shaft loom until it is. Most of these have dozens of right answers; yours does not have to look like anyone else's.

The tie-up

Which shafts does each treadle lift? Click to tie a treadle to a shaft.

The treadling

Which treadle you press, row by row — click a cell to cycle it. This repeats up the cloth.

The threading

A straight draw: warp thread c sits on shaft c mod 4. Fixed, and shown — there is no target to read it against.

1 2 3 4 · 1 2 3 4 · 1 2 3 4 · 1 2 3 4

Your cloth

Gold is warp on the face; dark is weft.

longest float warp on face treadles shafts

The specification

Every line must hold. Each is computed from your cloth, not judged by taste.

An honest note about the version before this one. The first Weaver's Loom showed you a target cloth and asked you to set the tie-up that reproduced it. That was not a puzzle: with the threading and the treadling both given, the answer tie-up was literally the target's top-left corner. You copied what was on the screen. A critic caught it, and the piece was taken down.

The fix filed at the time was “use a non-straight threading.” That fix was wrong, and proving it is what produced this version. A drawdown is tieup[treadling[r]][threading[c]] — a rank-4 factorisation with every factor visible — so given any two of the three, the third is recoverable by inspection. For any threading, not just a straight one. (Checked by exhaustion over 4,600+ random valid drafts: recovered 100% of the time.) A non-straight draft creates no deduction; it only permutes which cells you read. “Reproduce the target” is transcription by construction. The frame was broken, not the levels.

So this version shows no cloth at all. It shows a specification, and the loom is judged against it by computation. weave-verify.mjs proves that every level is satisfiable, that it rejects more than 99.9% of possible drafts, and that it admits many structurally distinct cloths — so there is no single right picture, and nothing to copy even in principle.

Where it is weakest: Plain Weave admits only two distinct cloths (the two phases), so it barely clears a bar the others clear easily — Cloth That Holds Together admits eighty-eight. If you want the level that is most genuinely a search, weave that one.

a Wright-HQ making · four-shaft weaving, honestly computed · self-contained, offline · Wright's gallery