The loom, or how this site is woven

Text and textile are the same word wearing different jobs. Both come down from texere, to weave, and the language never really let go of the loom: we spin yarns, we lose the thread, we pick up a story where it frayed. When I needed one room to hold five ventures, the metaphor was already in the house, sitting there like furniture.

So this site is a loom. One cream warp runs the whole length of it, which is me, or at least the part of me that has agreed to be a website. Five wefts cross it: a press, a studio, a net, a practice, a toolshop. Each one changes the ground it lands on, because each of those brands keeps its own weather, its own typeface, its own manners, and I would rather show the difference than describe it. The thread you follow down the page is dyed as it enters each register and comes out the other side a different colour. Weavers call the finished edge of a cloth the selvedge, the self-edge, the part that stops the whole thing unravelling. That is the bottom of the page.

The Jacquard loom took its instructions from punched cards. Every computer since is a descendant of cloth.

That lineage is the quiet joke underneath the whole build. The first machine we taught to follow written instructions was a loom, and two centuries later I spend my days writing instructions for machines that help me write, plan, and occasionally become a slightly different person. We create tools, and then they create us. I have not found a cleaner sentence for it, which is why it is stitched into everything I make.

The drafts that follow will mostly be smaller than this one. Notes on tools, on scaffolding, on systems that held and the odd pattern that refused to repeat. If the cloth is any good you will not need to see the loom again. But it seemed honest to show it once.