The Beginning: A Psychiatric Ward and a Dreamcatcher on a Backpack, Eight Years Ago

The seed of Tela Aurea Lab was planted eight years ago. At the time, I was an occupational therapy intern working in a psychiatric ward, supporting a client living with schizophrenia. After a period of treatment, his condition had stabilized, and he was preparing to leave the hospital — bravely setting out to take a civil service exam and begin a new chapter of his life.

To send him off, I chose dreamcatcher-making as his craft activity. The goal wasn't only to train his fine motor skills, but also to draw on the dreamcatcher's symbolism — filtering out bad dreams and holding onto good ones — as a kind of blessing for the road ahead.

That session ended smoothly, but for me, the journey was only beginning. The experience left me deeply drawn to this craft, and I began seeking out different weaving techniques on my own. As my fingers moved between thread and frame, I found an unexpected sense of calm — a kind of flow. From then on, whenever I felt stressed or needed to reset, weaving a dreamcatcher for myself became my own quiet ritual.

Breaking It Down: From 70 Handmade Pieces to the Mathematics of Pattern

After leaving the ward, the craft stayed with me. At the time, craft stores and stationery shops in Taiwan only carried the most basic material kits — nowhere near enough for the kind of exploration I wanted. So I turned to the internet and YouTube, gathering tutorials until I had distilled around 12 common base patterns. Building on these techniques, I started creating my own designs — and to date, I've documented more than 70 unique dreamcatcher designs on Instagram (@brown.yeh).

Along the way, I discovered something fascinating: behind these grids — which feel so intuitive and artistic — lie remarkably precise mathematical structures. The intersecting threads echo the physical tension of an envelope curve. The sizing of certain mesh openings reflects the golden ratio. And the progression of nodes in certain patterns is, essentially, a visualization of arithmetic and geometric sequences.

But when I tried to design more intricate patterns, I hit a wall. Finding symmetrical, evenly distributed anchor points on a circular frame took an enormous amount of time and care — and the weaving that followed had to strictly follow these underlying rules. A single misplaced node could throw off the balance of the entire piece. This tension, between the limits of handcraft and the precision of geometry, led me to a question: was there a better way to bring the designs in my head into reality?

Transformation: From a Grad School Python Project to a Digital Design Tool

The turning point came when I entered graduate school for occupational therapy, where I needed to learn programming for research data analysis. Partway through, it clicked: weren't functions, loops, and conditionals exactly the tools needed to handle arithmetic sequences and geometric symmetry?

So, as a personal challenge while learning Python, I took on "drawing dreamcatchers with code" — and successfully wrote functions that could calculate and render base patterns automatically from just a few input parameters. Later, while building several research apps during grad school, a bigger idea began to take shape: if code could help me draw with precision, why not build an intuitive tool that could help makers and creators everywhere do the same?

The project sat on the shelf for a while. But this year, riding the wave of AI and "vibe coding," I revived the logic I'd written years earlier. Working together with an AI agent, I brought these algorithms to life step by step — and Tela Aurea Lab was born. It's no longer just code on my laptop, but a real, working design tool that turns ideas into SVG vector files.

Returning to the Roots: Honoring Tradition, and an Invitation Across the Pacific

Even while I was absorbed in unpacking the mathematics and geometry of dreamcatchers, I always knew that this craft carries deep cultural meaning rooted in Ojibwe/Anishinaabe tradition, and that it has since traveled — and been shared, adapted, and sometimes taken — far beyond its origins. Early on, I tried to understand its history and traditional techniques through Cath Oberholtzer's book Dream Catchers: Legend, Lore and Artifacts. But here in Taiwan, I struggled to find a community that could speak to this history on a deeper level.

The real turning point came just as Tela Aurea Lab was taking shape. When I shared this new tool online, I received a comment from Gretel Palmerin, an educator in California. Gently but firmly, she reminded me: invite the Indigenous communities for whom dreamcatchers are part of their own culture to the table.

Her words struck a chord, and they became the quiet hope behind this site. That small act of kindness opened an unexpected door. Through this exchange, I came to know Maggie Peters, an educator in Humboldt County, California, who works to advance Native American Studies curricula — and who is also using the UN Sustainable Development Goals to build cross-cultural educational connections between Indigenous communities in California and Taiwan. This gave me a glimpse of what Tela Aurea Lab could become.

This is a sincere, open invitation. Tela Aurea Lab hopes to build real connections with Indigenous communities and educational institutions in North America, and with dreamcatcher artists around the world. We hope this tool can be more than a design aid — that it can become a small part of preserving and sharing this beautiful culture, so that everyone who draws a line here can come to understand and respect the history behind it. If you'd be willing to share your guidance, or to discuss how this platform's work might give something back to cultural preservation, this table is always open. We're ready to listen and learn.