Interactive Card Weaving Design and Construction
Yuki Igarashi
Jun Mitani
University of Tsukuba, Japan

F4(a) Editing

F4B4F4B4F2F4B4F2B2(b) Defining the direction of cards(c) Construction Guide(d) Real card weaving

Figure 1: System overview. (a) The user designs a textile pattern using a painting interface. (b) The user defines the direction of the cards.
(c) The system shows the user how each yarn should pass through the card. (d) The user finally weaves the yarns using the cards.

1 Introduction
Weaving is a method of fabric production, consisting of two
distinct sets of yarns (warp and weft). It is popular and similar toother fabric production methods, such as knitting, felting, and lacemaking. In particular, ‘card weaving’ is a very simple and easy
weaving method. The user prepares nothing more than coloredyarns and simple cardboard squares with four holes [Crockett1991]. The user can produce exquisitely patterned woven bands,
such as ribbons, straps, and hair accessories. However, the textile
patterns are typically designed via a laborious manual process. The
final textile design is determined by 1) the color of each warp yarn,2) the direction of four yarns passing through each card, and 3) thedirection and number of rotations of the cards.

holes. The user then paints an arbitrary pattern on the band withthe two colors. The system then automatically derives rotation
direction of each card at each step from the pattern. The system
also visualizes the orientation of the diamond shape at each cell,which is determined by the rotation direction at the cell.

UPClickedon thearrowDOWN

Figure 2: Final orientation of the diamond shape (each cell)depends on how the yarn passes through the hole, up or down.

We therefore propose an interactive system to assist in the designof original weaving patterns and their construction. Coahranm andFiume [2005] presented a sketch-based design system for quilting
arts. In contrast, weaving textile design is more like pixel art (allpixels are the same size). The difference is that each pixel in awoven band is a diamond shape (not a square). The width (thenumber of columns) of a woven band is determined by the numberof cards (n). The number of colors for each column is determinedby the number of holes in a card (4 in our current system). The
Card Weaver [Polak 2002] is a previous design system for cardweaving. However, it only supported the design of patters withsimple repetitions and did not support free painting described in
the next section.

Figure 3: Snapshots of the system. (a) The standard mode. The
user specifies the colors of 4 yarns of each card, as well as therotation direction at each step. (b) The free painting mode. The
user paints an arbitrary pattern and the system automaticallyderives the rotation direction of each card.

2 User Interface

3 Results

Figure 1 shows the overall process. The user first designs the colorof warp yarns in the matrix of 4 × n cells, as shown in Figure 1(a).
The user can increase/decrease the number of cards, and modify
the direction of the four yarns passing through each card byclicking on the corresponding arrow (Fig. 2). The final textile
design is defined by the direction and number of rotations of thecards (Fig. 1b). ‘F4B4’ means that the user first rotates all thecards four times in the forward direction and four times in thebackward direction for this one set. The user repeats the set until
he/she is satisfied with the length of the fabric. The user can checkthe final textile design in the system before real weaving. He/shethen passes the yarn through the hole of each card using a
construction guide (Fig. 1c). Finally, the user creates a real
original weaving using these cards and yarns (Fig. 1d).

We used our system to create textile designs and actual weaving
results, as shown in Figure 4. A design session typically took
about 10 min, and production of the weaving required 1 – 3 hours.
Figure 4 right shows woven bands in the standard mode (top) andin the free paining mode (bottom).

The system also provides a special mode that supports freepainting with binary colors (Fig. 3b). In this mode, the user passes
the yarns with the foreground color in the adjacent two holes in acard and the yarns with the background color in the remaining two(a) Standard mode(b) Free painting mode

Figure 4: Results using our system.

References
CROCKETT, C. 1991. Card Weaving. Interweave Pr.
COAHRANM M. AND FIUME, E. 2005. Sketch-Based Design forBargello Quilts. Eurographics Workshop on Sketch-Based
Interfaces and Modeling 2005, 165–174.
POLAK, G. 2002. Card Weaver. http://www.theloomybin.com