Almost totally off topic, hanging onto relevance by the narrowest of threads.

I've just found my new favourite author.

Cixin Liu (or is that Liu Cixin, I don't know) is an SF write from China, I have just read a free offering of his from Amazon which you can download for free as an E-book. It's a novella describing humanity's travails in escaping the death of the sun with the earth as our spaceship.

To say this this book is epic, majestic and terrifying in it's magnificient concept is a remarkable understatement. But to fail to acknowledge the hope gleaned from finding an author who is willing to conceive of humanity facing up to huge and terrible challenges with stoicism and resourcefulness would be a mistake.

The Wandering Earth

It's simply unlike anything I have ever read.

But what is more remarkable is that it hits the very note that I have been attempting to hit with my last warp

Can you see what I'm trying to do? It's supposed to be like a representation of the galaxy as viewed in transit at high speed, with stars stretched out and long wispy streamers of pink gas flitting by. The other thing you'll notice about this warp is the large number of broken ends I've chosen not to fix. As we know, all things in the universe are subject to entropy, which is the tendency of ordered systems to break down into chaos. The yarn itself accelerates this process as the added fibres clung to each other causing broken ends and many weird lifts and poor shedding. As a careless god weaving my own little universe I have gleefully chosen to let the cloth do as it wishes to do, pausing only to remove broken ends from the back of the shafts. The funny thing is you really can't tell until you look closely. This mirrors the apparent simplicity if large systems when viewed from far away, but when examined up close reveal hidden depths of complexity and numerous exceptions to dearly held natural laws. Somewhere on this warp I have darned in a single grey thread, this represents humanity sailing blindly onwards through the incomprehensible vastness of space, unaware of the dangers that may await us, lurking in the darkness to cut short the thread of our existence

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Tablet Weaving Lesson #1: Backstrap weaving a simple diamond motif

This is the first in a series of video and photo tutorials showing basic to advanced tablet-weaving concepts. These lessons shall each build on the last and hopefully take the viewer from simple diamond patterns up to more complicated double face pattern weaving with finer yarns and eventually onto the heady heights of brocading and other fancy techniques (just as soon as I learn how to do them myself). In this first lesson we'll learn the basic weaving steps involved in weaving a diamond pattern in the backstrap style. This lesson is meant for someone who has purchased a ready-made warp from me. The next lesson shall detail how to design and make this warp oneself. And we begin This is the basic pattern we are making. The woven band is tied to my waist with another strap. I am holding a small stick shuttle in my right hand which contains the weft. In front of me are the cards, each card has 4 warp threads going through it. The gap that you can see is called the

treble-cloth construction

I am currently in the process of designing a triple layered fabric. One layer shall carry conductive warp threads (one out of every three), another layer shall carry conductive weft threads (again, one out of every three) and a third layer shall lay between them and act as an insulator, keeping them apart and preventing unwanted contact between the two conductive layers. Constructing a treble cloth is a compicated process. The way that a treble cloth is woven is that first the face cloth is woven, then the centre cloth is woven, then the back cloth is woven. This is a draft for a treble cloth. The crosses indicate weaving marks for the cloth currently being woven, the dashes are lifts and are used to indicate shafts that are being lifted in the case of layers that are above the layer currently being woven. Blue is back, Red is front, Green is centre (All three layers are plain weave btw) The cloth is constructed like so 1: Back cloth is woven. All red and green marks are lif

Building a jack loom Part 1: Vague plans and messy diagrams

I've been thinking about it for a while to be fair. What I'm thinking about is an 8 shaft folding jack loom. The interesting part comes when I point out that I'm going to build an electric dobby controller into the bottom of it so it operates from one pedal and a computer program. So far I've been thinking and thinking and I'm basically roughly copying the kind of frame you'd find in a Siever's school or Baby wolf loom. Basically it's like an X that folds up on itself with the castle in the middle. Should be able to reduce it's depth from 3 feet to about 1 for storage. I don't think it's really that difficult to design the loom frame, aside from building the beams and making the ratchets and so on, which I may just jigsaw out of thick MDF. I have most of the wood I need asides from some panelling and I need to buy some aluminium sheet to make the shaft dividers with and also to hold the shaft bodies together with. The rising levers w

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