The armature and the bloom

Draft in progress.

In the carpets I kept photographing in museums, the geometric pattern was never the whole story. Look closer and every crossing carries a rosette, every stem a leaf, every terminal a bud. The pattern isn't decorated — it's inhabited. The geometry is an armature, and something else lives on it.

This post will trace how that observation became a software feature: generative patterns that expose their crossings, edges, tips, and cells as anchor points, and motifs that adorn them by rule — and how five unrelated traditions (a Victorian design reformer, a SIGGRAPH paper from 1998, embroidery machines, Persian carpet workshops, and Illustrator's brush engine) kept independently arriving at the same answers.

Full draft notes live in the repo under posts/_drafts/.