May 13, 2026
Loom with a view to thrill
Exploring 8 Shaft Weaving
Old-school weaving gets a nerdy glow-up and the comments are obsessed with the patterns
TLDR: Alex McLean shared his dive into traditional 8-shaft weaving, swapping total digital control for a more limited old-school loom and finding creativity in the constraints. The community’s loudest reaction was pure amazement at the computer-generated weave designs, turning a craft post into a celebration of unexpectedly gorgeous pattern geekery.
A quietly fascinating post about learning to weave on an old 8-shaft loom somehow turned into a mini fan club for computer-made cloth patterns. The article itself is all about artist and researcher Alex McLean stepping away from a super high-control digital loom and embracing a more limited, more traditional setup: a second-hand wooden loom that groups threads together instead of letting every single thread be controlled one by one. In plain English, he traded total freedom for rules — and found that the rules might be where the fun begins.
But in the comments, readers barely hid what really grabbed them: the patterns. The biggest reaction came from one commenter who basically slammed the big red button on collective curiosity by shouting out the glorious, mathy beauty of computer generated crackle weave patterns. That instantly reframed the whole story from "someone learns a loom" into "wait, weaving patterns can be algorithmic eye candy?"
There wasn’t a huge flame war here, but there was a very online kind of awe: the sort of reaction where people see a niche craft and suddenly act like they’ve discovered a secret level in reality. The vibe was part textile appreciation, part code-nerd delight, part "why is this weirdly cool?" Even the most practical details in the article — thread tension, losing the thread order meaning total disaster, spending a whole day setting up — read like origin-story material once the community latched onto those hypnotic designs. In other words: the loom did not just weave cloth, it spun up a fandom.
Key Points
- •Alex McLean says a visit to the Wearable Senses lab in Eindhoven and experimentation with the TC/2 loom renewed his interest in weaving.
- •The article states that a second-hand 8-shaft table loom was acquired for the Alpaca project, shifting from independently controlled-thread looms to shaft-based weaving.
- •Seiko Kinoshita helped McLean make the warp, transfer it to the loom, and thread it, while the article highlights the importance of preserving the thread cross and maintaining even tension.
- •McLean explains that floor looms differ from table looms primarily because they use foot-operated treddles, which can be tied to multiple shafts through a tie-up to simplify complex patterns.
- •The loom was initially threaded using direct warping, which repeats every eighth warp thread, but McLean decided to change the setup to point threading before weaving.