Saturday, December 19, 2015

Weaving a Pattern Inspired by Minecraft

Maybe I should start playing video games! This one sounds like fun!
The whole idea got started when a customer asked me to weave a strap based on the artwork from the game, Minecraft. So, I looked it up and here is what the Official Minecraft Wiki had to tell me:

"Minecraft is a sandbox construction game created by Mojang AB founder Markus Persson, and inspired by the Infiniminer, Dwarf Fortress and Dungeon Keeper games. Gameplay involves players interacting with the game world by placing and breaking various types of blocks in a three-dimensional environment. In this environment, players can build creative structures, creations, and artwork on multiplayer servers and singleplayer worlds across multiple game modes."  

AND Check this out!
Skills and activities in the game include dyeing!

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Dyeing wool and mobs


A guide to natural and crafting dye.
Players can dye wool by placing white wool and a dye on a crafting table.
IngredientsCrafting recipe












Dyes can be used on sheep to change the color of the wool. After shearing a colored sheep, they will drop the corresponding color of the wool, as well keep the color of their wool when it regenerates. Breeding colored sheep will result the baby sheep's color to be one of the parental sheep's color, or a resulting color of the combination of both parental sheep's color. Note that the color combining follows the same rules that dyes use - red and yellow sheep can produce an orange lamb. However, blue and yellow sheep cannot create a green lamb.[Verify] The unlimited reproduction of colored sheep make dyeing and shearing sheep a far more efficient method to obtain dyed wool than just dyeing a wool directly.
Dye can also be used on tamed wolvesUsing a dye on a tamed wolf will change the color of the wolf's collar (orange by default) to the color of the dye.
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The artwork of the game uses blocks of color in a random pattern. (This is the brown version, but there is also a green one.)  Is this something that I could represent in inkle weaving? 
I decided that it would be a fun challenge. Read on for results. 


First, I looked through my yarn stash and pulled out an assortment of browns and one gray.
Here is the pile which I selected.

Then I warped the loom with pairs of threads in a random order as shown in the diagram below.
(The Inkle Weaving Pattern Generator which I used to represent the pattern didn't have enough variations of brown, but you get the idea, right?) 


Then, as I wove, I dropped pairs at random to further vary the pattern. Here's the result.
(You can click the following photos to enlarge them.) 

A closer look at the front. 

 And a closer look at the back.

I then did a green version. Both turned out well! My customer and I are both happy!


2 comments:

  1. Amazing!! I appreciate the short version of what Minecraft is, since I was unlikely to search for it myself, but curious still. lol

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