English · Polski
A browser-based pattern designer for tablet weaving — the ancient craft of weaving narrow decorative bands on square cards. Design a band, see it woven as you work, and get the turning chart you follow at the loom.
Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for, no server. Open a page and weave.
It started as a present: I play guitar, my wife weaves, and this is her craft laid out the way I read music. More on that below.
Status: engine and app built. See the spec and the interactive board prototype.
A band is woven on small square cards ("tablets"), each threaded with four warp threads through holes at its corners. Turning the cards forward or backward twists those threads into cords; the weft locks each twist in place. The pattern that appears is a function of exactly three things:
- the colours threaded through each card's four holes,
- each card's threading direction — S or Z,
- which way every card turns on every pick.
In Polish the resulting bands are called krajki, which is where this repo got its original name.
The established tool for designing these patterns is GTT — Guntram's Tabletweaving Thingy by Eckhard "Guntram" Gartz. It is genuinely good software with a large community pattern archive, and most people learning tablet weaving are still pointed at it — including by the Polish guide that started this project, WICI's tablet weaving primer.
It is also Windows-only, stuck at version 1.17, and unmaintained for around two decades. You cannot run it on a Mac without Wine, and you certainly cannot open it on the phone sitting next to your loom.
WeaveSmith rebuilds the part that matters most — designing threaded-in patterns and reading the turning sequence — as a web page that runs anywhere, including on the phone propped against the loom.
I play guitar. My wife is learning tablet weaving. WeaveSmith is a gift for her, built out of the only visual language I had to offer — so the band is laid out the way I already know how to read one.
That turned out to be less of a stretch than it sounds.
- Guitar Hero gave the shape: parallel lanes with notes running along them. Cards are the strings, picks are the frets.
- Rocksmith gave the colour language: each string carries its own identity colour across the whole interface, so you always know which one you are looking at.
The analogy holds up because the physics matches. On a fretboard, only certain notes are available at each position. In tablet weaving, a card can only show one of its four hole colours, and only two are reachable from its current rotation. Tapping a note cycles through what is actually possible — you cannot draw an unweavable band.
Two places where weaving is not a guitar, both of which shaped the design:
- Picks depend on the pick before them. A card's rotation carries down the band, so changing one cell changes everything below it. WeaveSmith shows that ripple rather than hiding it — animated after the fact on touch, previewed on hover before you commit on desktop.
- Identity colour encodes threading direction, not string number. A rainbow hue per card reads beautifully at eight cards and becomes mud at forty. Hue is spent on S versus Z instead, which is information a weaver actually needs, and position is carried by landmarks every fifth card — the same inlay convention guitars use.
- Design threaded-in patterns on a board that transposes for phone or desktop.
- Simulate the woven band live, with stitches leaning the way the twist actually falls.
- Solve backwards. Paint the band you want and get the turn sequence that produces it — with the cells the cards cannot deliver marked honestly rather than quietly approximated.
- Print a turning chart, with a threading diagram and warp summary.
- Weave from it: an at-loom mode that walks pick by pick and remembers where you stopped.
- Share designs as plain JSON files or as a link, with no account and no server.
- Read it in Polish or English. The toggle is in the header, it remembers your choice, and a browser set to Polish starts there.
- Work offline. Looms are rarely near wifi.
Out of scope for v1, in likely order of arrival afterwards: importing legacy
.GTT files, double-face, 3/1 broken twill, brocade, and block patterns.
docs/superpowers/specs/ the design spec
docs/superpowers/plans/ implementation plans, core and web
docs/mockups/board.html working prototype of the board — open it in a browser
packages/core/ @weavesmith/core: weaving logic, zero dependencies
apps/web/ the React app
packages/core is the durable part: a dependency-free TypeScript library that
simulates a band and solves turn sequences from a target. The app is a view over
it. If you want to build something else on top of tablet weaving, that package
is the interesting one.
Requires Node 22+ and pnpm 9+.
make install
make check # typecheck + the whole test suite, what CI runs
make dev # the app on a local dev servermake on its own lists every target. It is a thin wrapper over pnpm — drop to
pnpm --filter @weavesmith/web … whenever you need a flag it does not expose.
Implementation is test-driven: the weaving conventions are pinned by fixtures transcribed from published historical bands, because they cannot be derived with confidence. If a fixture and the code disagree, the code is wrong.
This project stands on work other people did first.
Shelagh Lewins
— her documented historical patterns are what WeaveSmith's weaving conventions
are tested against. The
Narrow Oseberg Band
instruction sheet, reconstructing a band from the Oseberg ship burial
(c. 834 AD), is transcribed as a test fixture in
packages/core/test/fixtures/oseberg-narrow.json. Her threading chart is the
reason we know our simulation matches real weaving rather than merely being
self-consistent.
Eckhard "Guntram" Gartz — for GTT and its pattern archive, which have served this craft for two decades and set the standard WeaveSmith is trying to meet.
WICI — whose Polish tablet weaving guide is where this project started.
Every fixture in packages/core/test/fixtures/ records its origin in a source
field. If you contribute one drawn from someone else's published work, credit
them here too.
- WICI's guide, part 3 — Polish, and a good index of free learning material
- Shelagh Lewins' tablet weaving pages — historical patterns with woven photographs
- GTT's pattern archive — decades of community patterns
- Tablet weaving on Wikipedia
WeaveSmith is free, has no accounts and no server, and is not trying to become a business — it started as a present and stays one. Hosting costs nothing, so there is nothing to recover. If it saved you an evening at the loom and you feel like saying thanks, there is a coffee link. That is the whole ask.
MIT. Use it, fork it, build something else on
@weavesmith/core — commercially or otherwise. Keep the copyright notice
and you are fine.
Two things the licence does not stretch to, because they are not mine to give away:
- The test fixtures in
packages/core/test/fixtures/are transcribed from published patterns by the people named in Credits, and each records its origin in asourcefield. The licence covers this project's code; those patterns belong to their authors, and anything you do with them is between you and them. - Third-party marks — the buycoffee.to logo and QR code in
apps/web/public/are their trademarks, used with their own share material. Trademarks travel on permission, not on this licence.
WeaveSmith to przeglądarkowy projektant wzorów do tkactwa tabliczkowego — krajek tkanych na tabliczkach. Działa w przeglądarce, także bez internetu, więc można go otworzyć przy krośnie.
Powstał jako prezent: moja żona uczy się tkactwa tabliczkowego, a ja gram na gitarze — dlatego interfejs wygląda jak gryf gitary. Dotychczasowe narzędzie, GTT, działa tylko na Windowsie i nie jest rozwijane od około 20 lat.
Projekt wyrósł z polskiego przewodnika, który wart jest przeczytania niezależnie od tego, czy skorzystasz z tego programu:
📖 WICI — Tkactwo tabliczkowe: przewodnik, cz. 3 (darmowe materiały do nauki) — najlepszy polski punkt wyjścia i indeks darmowych materiałów.
- Projektowanie wzoru tabliczka po tabliczce: przewleczenie S/Z, kolory czterech otworów, kierunek obrotu w każdym przeplocie.
- Malowanie wzorca i automatyczne wyliczenie obrotów, które go dają — wraz z uczciwą informacją o komórkach, których nie da się osiągnąć.
- Tryb tkania: licznik przeplotów przy krośnie, który pamięta, gdzie skończyłaś.
- Schemat do druku (tabela obrotów, przewleczenie, podsumowanie osnowy), zapis do pliku, eksport SVG/PNG i link do udostępnienia.
- Polski i angielski interfejs — przełącznik języka jest w nagłówku.
Zakres wersji 1 to wzory threaded-in. Double-face, 3/1 broken twill, brokat i wzory blokowe to inne struktury splotu i celowo ich tu nie ma.
Polecenia są takie same jak w angielskiej części — patrz
Development. W skrócie: make install, a potem make dev.