A pattern for the Lyon Jacquard loom

February 2022: The first considerations for a pattern for the large Jacquard loom naturally arose when the loom was purchased and set up in 2020. If you go to the trouble of acquiring such a loom, it should be put to good use. The first concrete results were seen in early 2022. The laurel tree motif found on the exterior facades of the Vienna Secession building was chosen. With the intention of using it for a new table textile series, it made sense to focus solely on the foliage, which forms an almost square block and is very well suited for a single-colour damask.

In a first step, the contours of the motif were captured and scaled to the dimensions that the motif would later have in the fabric. The choice fell on 900 warp threads in width and 900 weft threads.

February 2023: By February 2023, the technical drawing of the fabric was complete. This means that, in addition to the contours, the binding points of the fabric were also drawn in. Although this was done on screen, all points were set by hand, especially at the contour edges. There are a few rules to follow here that cannot be replaced by any copy-and-paste method. The second image gives an impression of what this looks like in detail.

In a next step in February 2023, the pattern drawing was adapted to the punch card format. The 1320 punch cards are somewhat complicated. There are 84 columns on the punch card. 72 of these columns have 16 holes, but 12 columns in the transport hole area only have 14 holes. In addition, there are two columns with no holes at all. These irregularities would offer a lot of potential for errors when punching cards. That's why I came up with the idea of filling in the incomplete 14-hole columns with regular 16-hole columns. I inserted non-hole boxes in the appropriate places in the cartridge drawing. In the fourth and fifth images, this can be seen in the pink vertical stripes. At the same time, the pattern design was expanded from 900 to 1294 warp threads around the unpatterned edge.

February 2023:From my experience in making the 200 and 400 punch cards, it was also clear that I couldn't transfer a 1320 design from a printout on paper to the punch cards. The cartridge paper would either be very large or the printout very small and difficult to see. So I looked for a way to somehow cut the image lines with 1294 pixels into blocks of 16. I managed to do this by exporting the colour codes of each pixel to a text file. Instead of a white box, I now had the colour code 255, 255, 255 one below the other. This resulted in an endless column of numbers. However, since there are only two colour values in the cartridge drawing, namely black and white, it was clear where a white box and where a black box was originally located. Using search and replace functions, all 255/255/255 combinations were replaced with a white box special character and all 0/0/0 combinations were replaced with a black box special character. This restored the original image information from the cartridge drawing, only now as a text symbol.

So far, so good. The only problem was that I still only wanted 16 characters to be displayed on the screen. Now, there is the option of using the search and replace function to convert any character into a line break. To achieve this, I inserted an additional column in the original cartridge drawing for all 16 pixels and assigned it a colour value that clearly differs from the other two. This can be seen in the image as the dark vertical lines. In the text file, this now appeared as a 26/26/26 combination, and using search and replace, all these combinations were converted into line breaks.

The second image shows how this is displayed on my screen. 16 symbols, 16 buttons. This made it much easier to transfer the information from the cartridge drawing to the cards. The second image shows the first punched card.

August 2023: The first 200 cards were completed in August 2023. Despite the simplification of reading from a screen, each card took between 10 and 15 minutes to complete, so progress was slow. Work on the pattern was suspended until the end of 2025. By October 2025, 290 cards had been completed.

February 2026:From February 2023 to October 2025, only 300 cards were ready for the Secession pattern. But now that the loom was finally ready for use, the pattern should finally be completed. In early 2026, at least 10 punch cards were produced in addition to the regular work. On Saturdays, at least 50 were produced, so that at least 100 cards were now completed each week. By the end of January, 700 had been completed. And by mid-February, all 1080 cards had been punched. In addition to the 900 cards for the actual pattern, 180 cards were needed for the spaces in between. The cards were then checked and sewn together with our new card sewing machine. Sewing the cards by hand would have taken another year.

On 21 February 2026, the pattern was placed on the loom and, after four years, it became visible as fabric for the first time.