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Help creating draft, use of tabby
I recently had the pleasure of visiting the Timberline Lodge on the slopes of Mount Hood, OR. The Lodge and all its furnishings were created as a WPA project. Among the furnishings was the chair cushion, below right.
After a few inquiries, I was told that the pattern probably came from the Margarita Davison book, A Handweaver’s Pattern Book. I obtained the book and I nominated Threading No. 207 as the likely pattern. The illustration is a photograph of the author’s sample, below center.
I attempted to create this pattern in the draft editor, but my efforts resulted in more of a gingham, below left.
I have three questions:
Have I erred in transcribing the pattern in the book to the Draft Editor?
I’ve only used Tabby once, and it was supposed to be a relatively invisible thread to hold the weft yarn in place. Is this right?
How do I represent tabby weft in the Draft Editor? Davison seems only to cue it in the threading, but not show it.
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6 Replies
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HI Clif. I will let Janet or others who know far more about structure than me answer your question about the pattern, but meanwhile, to get you going in FW – click on the Treadling drop-down menu, you can “fill weft thickness” and choose AB, with A being one thickness and B being a different thickness. OR, probably faster, at the bottom of that drop down there is a “Use tabby”. I think this inserts Tabby if you have not already entered it, but try clicking on that and see what happens.
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There is a difference in your draft from the Davison – where the first block transitions to the 2nd, in Davison the first block ends 1,2,1. You have 1,2,1,2,1. Not a huge difference, but you might want to adjust that.
Is your weft thinner than the pattern weft? The tabby is, in most cases, supposed to just supply structural stability, not be particularly visible. If you used the same tabby as pattern weft, I’d try again with a finer thread.
Lastly, is your web wet finished? It looks like part of the effect relies on the pattern weft ‘distorting’ from the rigid grid. If you haven’t wet finished it, try that?
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Great suggestions. Thanks.
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Generally speaking, even though a fabric with a supplementary pattern weft has a tabby thread, it’s not included in the draft or the drawdown because it confuses matters – muddies the waters, so to speak, making it hard to see what the pattern weft — which is the most highly visible part of the fabric — is doing.
The first pic attached is what the draft in Davison looks like in the Draft Editor without the tabby weft included. I used the colors from the picture of the fabric: the warp is all yellow, the pattern weft is all blue, and the tabby weft is a gold that’s slightly darker than the warp. The second picture is the same draft, now with the darker tabby included. You can see that the pattern looks elongated since the Draft Editor shows all threads at the same width. The third picture is the same draft with tabby, but in “weft struct” so the colors are taken out of the picture and all you see is the structure. Again, it’s hard to see what the pattern weft is really doing since the tabby clutters things up.
The tabby’s role is to create a structurally sound ground cloth (usually plain weave). Like you suggest, it’s often of a size and color that doesn’t call attention to itself so that it more or less disappears. Not necessarily very fine – tabby is often the same size as the warp – but usually finer than the pattern weft at least.
Including the tabby as you did isn’t wrong, just harder to read. You did get the wrong treadle for the repeated pick in the second block, as @laura-fry pointed out. The gingham look you mention is due to the stripes you have in both warp and weft – in the pictured fabric, the warp is all one color, as is the pattern weft, as is the tabby.
A small point that doesn’t really make that much difference here is that Davison’s Pattern Book is written entirely for sinking shed looms. If you enter the draft exactly as written into the Draft Editor, the drawdown will be upside down (i.e. the opposite face of the cloth showing) compared to the pictures in the book unless you look at the “opposite side” by turning on that checkbox — but doing that also reverses the tie-up. To create a draft in the Draft Editor that matches Davison’s in both drawdown and tie-up, I turned on the “opposite side” checkbox first and then created the tie-up. Alas, the “opposite side” setting isn’t visible in the image so it’s not obvious that’s what I did.
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When I replied before, it was by my iPhone, in which I saw none of the graphics. Thank you so much for your work on my behalf. Now that I am at a computer and can see all the information, I am stunned. It would have taken me months to come up with this on my own! What a wonderful forum! I am hooked (so to speak)!
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Yay! That’s what we’re all here for!
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