About Handweaving.net
Policies, Acknowledgements, and Links
Our acknowledgements page has information about assistance we have gratefully received from others.
Our policies page has information about copyright matters and privacy.
Our weaving software page has information about weaving software that supports the WIF format.
Our links page has links to other useful sites for weavers.
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I am Kris Bruland, a software engineer in northwest Washington State, U.S.A. I created this site
in early 2004 to make an easy way for handweavers everywhere to find and exchange
weaving drafts and have been expanding it since then. In late 2005, Handweaving.net became home to Ralph Griswold's
Digital Archive on Weaving, Textiles, Lace, and Related Topics in addition to the draft archive.
One of my personal interests is
handweaving, especially using multishaft and historic patterns. I became fascinated with historic drafts after weaving
some from a Germanic manuscript more than 200 years old and seeing the fabric come to life from the threads, just as it must have for the
original author in another time and place.
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The draft for blanket in the photo to the left is a 16-shaft pattern from Fressinet, draft #21939 on this site.
It is made of very heavy 14-ply Wool Pak yarn from New Zealand, 620 yards/lb, sett at 6 epi. The warp color is "Plum" and the weft "Heather". The finished size is 90" by 60" and this project turned out
beautifully.
My wife Patty, a handspinner and knitter,
helps with this project. We have three small sons, Benjamin, Noah, and Micah--future weavers!
We have two looms,
an 8-shaft Schacht Baby Wolf, and a 60 inch, 16-shaft AVL Production Dobby Loom with a CompuDobby.
Many others have offered assistance with Handweaving.net too. Please visit our acknowledgements page.
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Draft Creation
The quantity and quality of drafts found here would not be possible without some very special technology. Most of the drafts found on this site have
been produced with custom software that I have been developing for creating drafts quickly and accurately from original sources.
This works by capturing patterns (drawdowns) directly from scanned pages of
original works using technology that is very similar to OCR (Optical Character Recognition). This software instantly produces corrected drafts with
partial repeats removed and can repeat the pattern in one or both directions to get a square drawdown for web presentation. Often when I digitize a new
collection for the website I enhance the software to add some capability required by the work's notational style. For example, I recently added
the ability to draft block patterns from tieups and threadings for works such as those by Kirschbaum, Frickinger, Ziegler, and others.
Most of the scanned originals have come from Ralph Griswold's Digital Archive on Weaving, Textiles, Lace, and Related Topics,
which itself became part of Handweaving.net in late 2005.
Sources
We have been fortunate to receive some large contributions of drafts from others.
Our acknowledgements page has more information about this. We have also developed specialized software for
producing drafts for scanned images of pattern books, and many of the drafts on the site have been created using this. You can easily upload computer
WIF files to the site to share your own drafts with other weavers. If you
do not have weaving software, you can your mail drafts to us and we will input them. We are continually adding new drafts from books in the public domain,
and from copyrighted sources when we can get permission. Our site can use WIF 1.0 and 1.1 versions. See our policies page for
information about acceptable drafts.
Online Draft Book Publishing
We can present groups of drafts as online books. Please see our publishing information page.
There is no cost for this and it is easy. Each draft's listing can contain a link to another website. This is a great way to increase
sales of your weaving publications or awareness of your organization at no cost. In return for permission for us to publish some or all drafts
from your publication, users viewing these have a link to purchase the printed version directly from you!
PocketWeave
If you own a computerized
AVL, Louët, or Leclerc loom, you could be weaving using PocketWeave, a weaving software package that I
wrote for the handheld PocketPC!
See http://www.avlusa.com/software/PocketWeave.htm
for more information. More looms from other manufacturers will be supported soon.
Technical
This website is implemented as a Microsoft ASP.Net 2.0 web application using the C# programming language. The design of
the entire application is object-oriented. There is a proper middle tier of of business objects written in C#. All of the data on the site is
stored in a SQL 2005 database, with data access provided solely through stored procedures.
The site delivers content conforming to W3C standards, and has been designed to work with any current W3C compliant web browser on any type of computer.
The images used for drafts are in PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format. This format is superior to others I could have chosen for the purpose of presenting drafts.
I used PNG here because it gives far better compression for typical drafts than any other format without a loss of quality. This makes the
site much more usable by people who have slower Internet connections such as dial-up.
PNG also has the added benefits of unlimited colors and royalty-free distribution. This format does have one drawback: some older browsers cannot
draw this type of image correctly. This seemed acceptable because most browsers that are four years old or less handle it just fine, and
upgrades to browsers are typically free and easy to download.
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