Fun with modular patterns - making a camera strap

Labyrinthine Camera strap

April 2023

Materials: Maysville Carpet Warp (8/4 Cotton)

Tools: 22 weaving cards

Length: ~ 163 cm (64 in)

Width: 26 mm (1 in)

 

This is the point at which I started to really get comfortable with pattern drafting. My roommate was needing a new camera strap and his birthday was coming up, so I decided to weave one. After choosing colors and determining how many cards to use to get the right width, I set to messing around in Tablet Weaving Draft Designer. I ended up with a nice geometric design that put me in mind of a labyrinth.

 

After I started weaving, however, I found that the pattern felt a bit too boring and regular, so I came up with a number of modifications to the base pattern unit, and then mixed and matched those as I wove, more or less improvising a varied but consistent design. This was a lot of fun! If you're curious about the specifics (or are me from the future trying to remember what you did), I'll elaborate on all the boring details at the end of this post.

 

Because a camera strap needs to be pretty long, my usual approach (described here) of measuring threads by wrapping them around the spinning base of my desk chair would not be sufficient. That approach usually yields a final length of around 42-50 inches, and I wanted at least 5 feet, so I ended up making creative use of a coffee table, as you can see in the video below.

 

 

Of all the pieces I've woven to date, this one has seen the most wear and tear, so I've been very pleased to see how well it has held up - yet another testament to the sturdiness of tablet weaving.

Pattern Details

 

Here's the basic pattern unit. Along the edges is a repeating pattern of triangles (which remains constant through all the variations), and in the middle is a simple diamond pattern. The triangles are offset from the diamond pattern, resulting in a "labyrinth" thing with a central "chamber" and "arms" snaking out to the northeast and southwest.

One variation is to make one or both of those arms keep snaking around for longer, accomplished by simply extending the basic unit from both the top and/or bottom.

The rest of the variations only affect the central 4 cards, and alter the appearance of the "central chamber". Here are a few of them:

 

 

Some of those variations (such as the heart shapes above) aren't vertically symmetrical, so I would always follow them up with their mirror versions, both for aesthetics and to keep the whole pattern twist-neutral. Likewise, whenever I used a "long arm", I'd make sure that it was eventually balanced by another long arm going the other direction.

 

The key to this sort of modular pattern drafting, I think, is coming up with a fairly tight set of constraints and then improvising within them. In this case,  I'd describe the constraints as follows:

• Cards 1-5 and 18-22 are unaffected by variations, forming a consistent border of little triangles.
  
• Cards 6-9 and cards 14-17 always turn together, and are only allowed to change direction every 8 picks. 
• Cards 10-13 always turn together, and are allowed to change direction every other pick.

Thus, most of the improvisation consists of changing what cards 10-13 are doing, with occasional changes to the length of the "arms" by changing how often cards 6-9 and 14-17 switch directions.

Here are the weaving drafts for all of the variations depicted above:

• Basic unit: (Image) (TDD file)
• Basic unit with long arms: (Image) (TDD file)
• "Eyes" variation: (Image) (TDD file)
• "X" variation: (Image) (TDD file)
• "Heart" variation followed by its mirror: (Image) (TDD file)
• Alternate "heart" variation followed by its mirror: (Image) (TDD file)
  

References

1. Tablet Weaving Draft Designer software: https://jamespbarrett.github.io/tabletweave/