Why
Working diagrams for bobbin lace designs are not just collections of unrelated dots and lines. General purpose graphical tools don't understand the relations between the dots and lines, so you have to do a lot of thinking to create and maintain the relationships, if possible at all. These tools thus have limited added value over pencil and paper. Graphical tools adapted to lace makers simplify the creational phase of some of the tasks, but don't solve the fundamental cohesion problem. Thus adjusting a design is still a tedious task.
What
The BobbinWork approach closely follows how a lace maker learns and applies the stitches in working order and thus creates and maintains the cohesion missed elsewhere. A single design can have various presentations, just create one to get them all at your finger tips:
- descriptive instructions (presented as a folding tree for as much or little detail as desired)
- thread diagrams
- pair diagrams
- prickings with conventions that can vary per lace style (not yet implemented)
- animation (not unlike a voodoo board)
- by walking through the descriptive instructions which highlights the corresponding part in the diagram,
- or by generating a sequence of screen shots of the diagrams. Other tools can turn these screen shots in animated gifs or interactive slide shows.
In practice the current prototype is limited to design grounds, explore their variations or play with other complex stitches. Teaching a human lace making techniques is one thing. Replace the human with software and it appears to have a different learning curve. So far it can:
- construct basic and complex stitches from cross and twist and apply these stitches
- use pairs as threads
- apply threads with different colors and widths
- add pairs nor throw them out again
- make picots, knots nor sewings
Who
Any bobbin lace making (and other) Java developers, Java Webstart wizzards, or Bezier wizzards: please help
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