flaxforge

Two people in Ghent

Flax has been spun in this city since the fourteenth century, which is half of the name. The other half is for the part of the work that happens at a keyboard. Between us we have made one program, sold a little over 2 400 licences in 29 countries, and taken no money from anyone but the people who use it.

The two of us

Marieke Dussart

Sixteen years at a loom, the last nine of them teaching two evenings a week. She decides what goes in the library and what the window looks like, writes the structure notes, and answers most of the mail because most of the mail is about weaving rather than software. The 24-shaft floor loom in the workshop is hers.

Joris Vandewalle

Nine years writing firmware for industrial controllers before this, which is where the serial code comes from and why peg plan output was the second feature rather than the twentieth. He writes all of the program and none of the structure notes. He owns the 16-shaft table loom and uses it badly, by his own account.

How it started, honestly

In 2019 Marieke kept her drafts in a spreadsheet: one sheet per project, conditional formatting doing the drawdown. It worked up to about twelve shafts and then became unusable, not because the arithmetic was hard but because nothing checked anything. A mistyped shaft in the threading produced a cloth that looked plausible on screen and wrong on the loom, and you only found out after warping.

The first prototype was a weekend's work in 2021 and did one thing: given a threading, a tie-up and a treadling, draw the drawdown. That is still the centre of the program. Everything added since has been in service of the same question — what will actually come off the loom — and we have turned down a dozen features, our own included, for failing to answer it.

We registered the studio in September 2021 and published 1.0 on 14 March 2022, with eight shafts and 46 structures in the library. It took until the following autumn, and a guild workshop where sixty weavers used it on their own drafts for an afternoon, before we believed it was worth charging for.

Dates

WhenWhat
2019Spreadsheet drafts; the twelve-shaft wall
Sep 2021Studio registered in Ghent, two people, no office
14 Mar 2022Version 1.0: eight shafts, 46 structures
Oct 2022First guild workshop, sixty weavers in one room
9 May 2023Version 2.0: 24 shafts, printing, interchange export
Mar 2024Moved into a shared workshop near the north canal
2 Oct 2024Version 3.0 and the flxd/3 file format
Jun 2025Builds for aarch64; teaching licences past 300
24 Sep 2026Version 3.4.2; library at 412 structures

How the studio is run

Two feature releases a year and patches when a defect is reported. No roadmap is published, because for four years ours was wrong within a quarter; what gets built next is whatever the mail has been asking for, and the changelog is the only promise we make about it.

Testing happens on the two looms described above. If a claim on this site cannot be checked on one of them, it is marked as reported rather than tested — the compatibility table on the formats page has a column for exactly that distinction.

We have no investors, no staff and no plans to acquire either. The studio costs us two salaries, a shared workshop and a modest bill for the machine that signs the builds. At the current rate that is covered, which is the only growth target we have.

A fair question is what happens if one of us steps under a tram. The answer is in the licence terms: the final build goes out without a key check, and because the file format is plain text and documented, your drafts outlive us either way.

Writing to us

One of us reads every message, and there is no ticket system to be swallowed by. Expect an answer inside two working days; in practice it tends to be the same evening, Belgian time, unless one of us is at a fair.

Post is possible but slow: we share the workshop address with three other makers and collect letters once a week. For anything urgent, mail is better.