Drafting Narratives: Weaving, Sequence, and Story in the Folger Library Archive

I came to the Folger Shakespeare Library to research the intersection of textiles and storytelling in the early modern era. Just as theater and early cinematic forms rely on visual spectacle unfolding over time, textiles also convey narratives through sequences of images, symbols, and patterns. I am interested in the overlap between these traditions and how stories take shape through both structure and time.

I set out to explore how cloth operates as a framework for constructing narratives. Rather than focusing only on finished objects, I became interested in the underlying systems that generate them: the structures, diagrams, and processes that organize how patterns are built. I also wanted to understand how the labor of textile production can be understood as a form of storytelling, where the act of making, which is repeated, structured, and often collaborative, shapes how patterns emerge and are carried forward.

I initially found myself drawn to embroidery pattern books, where modular motifs are selected and recombined to generate larger compositions, an approach that mirrors narrative construction. I also spent time with embroidered book bindings and texts on Tudor-era textiles before encountering a family receipt book dating from 1708–1710.  It was in this 4 x 3-inch vellum-bound book that my ideas took shape.

Receipt books like this recorded spiritual practices and practical knowledge used in daily life. This particular manuscript belonged to someone named Thomas Bathings, and includes birth records for members of the Bathings family, an anti-marriage poem, a printed almanac pasted into its pages, and remedies for ailments like colic and canker sores.

About halfway through, the book shifts from text to diagrams with the last 60 pages filled with over 80 hand drawn weave drafts. The drafts include designs with names like “star dimont,” “a satin net,” “duch huckerback,” and “a small barley corn”.

A weave draft is essentially a blueprint for weaving. It tells the weaver how to set up the loom to weave a specific pattern. While weave drafts have long followed established conventions, the examples in this book are handwritten and sometimes incomplete. Some drafts feel more like notes than finished instructions with key components of the draft left blank. In all cases, the drawdown, the part of the draft that shows what the final pattern should look like, is missing and without it there is no clear picture of the intended fabric.

Given the large number of weave drafts found in the book, it suggests that weaving in this household was likely connected to the putting-out system. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, textile merchants distributed yarn to households, where cloth was produced in domestic settings and later collected for sale through broader commercial networks. 

This context shaped how I read the pages. The drafts register not just as technical instructions, but as traces of labor. As the patterns accumulate, they begin to resemble a kind of visual sequencing that reveals how repetition, variation, and duration can generate meaning. Together they offer a form of storytelling in which gestures of making and systems of labor are encoded in pattern.

I decided to work directly from these weave drafts by translating them into woven cloth and, eventually, an animated film. I begin by transcribing the drafts into WeavePoint software to visualize the intended fabric, then weave samples on a TC2 jacquard loom. In some cases, the woven fabric aligns with notes on the page, like the drawn diamond motifs highlighted on this draft. 

When a pattern is ambiguous, I create multiple versions, testing different interpretations of the diagram. Each sample becomes a way of working through what the original weaver might have intended. For example, in this draft, the treadling sequence – the order in which the loom’s pedals are pressed to lift warp threads – is unclear, so I wove a few variations. In one version, the weaver alternates between left and right feet with each pick. In another, the right foot is pressed multiple times before shifting to the left. These small differences produce entirely different patterns.

After weaving samples, I scan the fabric into digital format, using each variation as a frame in the animation. As the patterns shift on screen, the slippages, adjustments, and decisions become visible. What emerges is not a single correct pattern, but a range of possibilities.

So far, I have translated, woven, and animated roughly one-fourth of the drafts in the book. Ultimately, I hope to produce a series of weavings, an animated film, and possibly an artist book. Rather than recovering an original form, this process extends it, carrying forward a set of decisions that began under different conditions and continues to unfold.