<p>This article rethinks the history of the grid through the physical importance of tension in textile production. I argue that with the emergence of the printed grid in sixteenth-century textile pattern books, textiles began to be conceived as universalized materials, disconnected from the specific bodies, hands, and cultures that produced them. By contrast, I consider how the grid produced in weaving offers an alternative form of surface, control, and spatial organization that depends upon embodied knowledge, intergenerational relationships, and also resistance to the models of grids that have typically guided their understanding in scholarship on print cultures and colonialism.</p>