Take a Chance on Me

Reference 

One of my favorite classes in college was Non-deterministic Systems, which could have been simplified to the name: Probability. Or even Statistics. Yes, I know. Geek.

Anyway, the guild had done some presentations and work on stripes, and I wondered whether I could get a pleasing distribution of warp stripes by getting a random warp order from an Excel spreadsheet. I don’t know how reliable the system is (as far as getting a sequence that will be pleasing to the eye, but I know that I got something once that I felt ok about. Here it is:

First, the number crunching. Those familiar with probably may want to skip down to the actual towels that came of this.

1. Select colors to be used. Anything can be your inspiration. For the towels, for which these samples came from, I used a painting that I saw in an art gallery.
2. Select the proportions that you want to see these colors in the warp. What you base these proportions on is entirely up to you. For the towel, I used values from the Fibonacci series as a guide.
3. Now you need to form your cummulative values for your colors to determine the number range for each bin. I know this sounds kind of complicated, but it is pretty simple. Example:
   

   Color	Proportion	The Cumulative value for the first color is its proportion. For every color after that, it is the previous cumulative value plus its proportion.	Cumulative value
   Blue	23		23
   Green	54		23 + 54 = 77
   Red	12		77 + 12 = 89
   Yellow	73		89 + 73 = 162

4. Now, form your test for values that are going to come out of your random number generator. In the example above, any value less than 23 will be blue. Any value between 23 and 77 will be green, and so on. These types of comparisons will be your test.
5. Generate your random numbers. In general, random number generators that are provided with various software packages will generate a number that is less than 1 and greater than or equal to 0; and each value in this range has an equal probability of being generated. Because of this, each value coming out of the random generator will be multiplied by the greatest cumulative value. In the example above, this would be 162.
6. For each warp thread that you need, generate the random number in step 5 and determine what color it should be based on the test that you made in step 4. You probably won’t hit the proportions that you wanted exactly, but you will be very close, in all likelihood.

Ok, we are back from math land! So here are the towels that came from this spreadsheet:

As you can see, I played around with the color of the weft, which is one of the great things about making dish towels (for me at least,) being able to try something different out on the same warp with each towel. The thread used is a 10/2 mercerized cotton sett an e.p.i. that is closer than what is normal for plain weave with this thread because I like a dense towel.

I would like to try this out again, but when that will happen, I will never know.