Contribute to the evolution of the jacquard design process

#Contribute to the evolution of the jacquard design process series#

The detail in the portrait is amazing and could only be achieved with the advances in the loom that Jacquard achieved. The portrait is a piece of pixel art with the design captured in rows of dots on the cards to encode which thread would be visible at each location in the picture.Д¬harles Babbage had one of Jacquard's woven portraits and delighted in getting his guests to try and guess what it was.

These portraits needed 24,000 cards to encode the design. Jacquard's Woven PortraitTo show off his invention Jacquard had portraits of himself woven. What he did do was improve the ideas that others had come up with and make the Jacquard loom work well enough for it to take off. He didn't invent punched cards to program intricate patterns and he didn't come up with the idea of getting a machine to automatically follow them. Like many inventors, Jacquard built on the invention of others. It uses a program instead of punched cards (and has a companion project to scan in designs made in LEGO!) This LEGO Weav3r project shows the concept. This video from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London shows how the process works from creating designs on square paper through to how the holes in the cards control which threads are visible in a pattern:

#Contribute to the evolution of the jacquard design process series#

What is a Jacquard Loom?A Jacquard loom is an automated weaving loom which can create intricate patterns from a series of punched cards which encode which thread should be used where.