Selvedge

Overview

Selvedge is built on one idea: a mill does not describe its cloth with a picture, it describes it with a draft. Every fabric in this theme stores the three things a weaver actually writes down — a threading (which shaft carries each warp end), a tie-up (which shafts each treadle lifts) and a treadling (which treadle is pressed for each pick) — and the theme derives the interlacement from them.

The drawdown is never stored, because it is derivable. One line of arithmetic produces it, and everything visual follows: the swatch on every product card, the notation chip in its corner, the plate on a fabric page and the cloth hanging in the hero are all the same calculation at different sizes. Re-colour a warp in the editor and all of them change together — there is no photograph to re-shoot and no upload to replace, and a swatch can never drift out of step with its own specification.

It also means pattern emerges rather than being drawn. Choose a 2/2 twill, band the warp and the weft four dark and four light, and houndstooth appears; nothing in the code knows the word. Six real named structures ship with the theme — plain weave, 2/2 twill, 3/1 warp-faced twill, herringbone, basket and 5-end satin.

The draft is the common notation of the entire textile trade, which is what makes the theme portable. A weaving mill, a handweaving studio, a rug or tapestry workshop, an upholstery house, a shirting merchant and a textile design consultancy all specify goods this way. Swapping the drafts and the copy re-points the whole site without touching a template.

The page itself is laid out as a draft sheet: ruled at the same pitch as a draft grid, with a threading-block ornament on each section head and the notation set beside the cloth it produces. The hero is a genuine verlet cloth simulation on Three.js — structural, shear and bend constraints, gathered pinning so it falls in folds rather than hanging flat — textured by the live draft and pushed around by the pointer. Where it will not run well it is not run, and a 2D swatch computed from the same draft takes its place, so the hero is never an empty box.