Cylindrical Hitomezashi Patterns

Pete discovered a strong combinatorial description of hitomezashi loops via a bijection to pairs of Dyck paths of the same height. Our main theorem provides an analogous description of hitomezashi loops of nonzero homology class on certain cylindrical hitomezashi patterns. In the process, we complete some of Ren and Zhang’s results on the count and possible homology classes of toroidal hitomezashi loops.