Tuesday, June 20, 2023

Coding unit weaving in paper cutting

A digital cutting machine such as Cricut is a practical way to make unit-weavers (such as twogs) in all different lengths, allowing more customized shapes to be woven. There is then the problem of how to keep the different lengths sorted and properly sequenced in the weaving process. I find that narrow paper bridges (the J-shapes) in the model above, can keep twogs sequenced in a way that also codes the weaving moves. For example, reading the model above from top to bottom, the pattern is natural seen as open-left, open-right, close-left, close-right, (knowing that the last move closes up the weaving, 'close-right' is deduced as the only possibility) a weaving pattern that builds a tetrahedron. In fact, the short paper bridges would hardly allow any other pattern to be woven.

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