Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Color Coding


Here, interlocked, are the first six weavers for "Olivier's Fingertip." The weavers are thin sheet metal with their paper templates still glued on top. I started at the same place I had in the maquette-- though after that I got a little lost, and the weaving didn't go as smoothly as the first time. My starting point is the crossing of weavers that are rather arbitrarily numbered 37, 38, and 00.

In my numbering system palindromes are not allowed, i.e., because 01 is used, 10 must be skipped. Similarly, because 12 is used, 21 must be skipped. This allows a color-coding that is based purely on color combinations, not color order. Up to 55 weavers can be coded with two color stripes in this way. The association between colors and numerals is the same as in the standard resistor color code used in electronics:

0 = BLACK

1 = BROWN

2 = RED

3 = ORANGE

4 = YELLOW

5 = GREEN

6 = BLUE

7 = VIOLET

8 = GRAY

9 = WHITE

I substituted pale lavender for white in order for the stripes to show up on the white paper. The first crossing (38, 37, 00) becomes (orange/gray, orange/violet, black/black.) While weaving you are only matching color pairs, not thinking about their numerical equivalents, but the numerical equivalents are useful in keeping piles of loose weavers organized.

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