[00:00:00.520] – Janet
Okay. Fabulous. Okay. We have launched Learning Path Two, Tantalizing Twills, in which we are going to start talking about structure. And in order to talk about structure, we need to have a sort of common vocabulary, and we need to be able to analyze the structures that we’re looking at.
[00:00:22.700] – Janet
Here she’s back again. Hello. There she went. She’s here now. She’s just in moderator space.
[00:00:31.890] – Janet
Before we can talk about twill, or whatever other structures come our way in the future, we need to know that we’re using the same terms in the same way and that we have a method of communicating the ideas. And that’s what drawdowns are all about. These drawdowns that we’re looking at are structural drawdowns. When you hear the term drawdown, if it’s not qualified by some other adjective, a color drawdown or an interlacement drawdown or this drawdown or that drawdown–I don’t know if they’re–those are the three kinds I use. But if it doesn’t have one of those modifiers, then it means a structural drawdown.
[00:01:18.110] – Janet
Structural drawdowns are little black and white grids–well, grids filled in with little black and white squares, like these.
[00:01:30.690] – Janet
No. No, no. Why suddenly here and see YouTube? You guys don’t know, I don’t think. I’m going to close this window down like that and like that. Okay. So you guys are seeing the course page. Is that right, Tien?
[00:01:47.560] – Tien
That’s right.
[00:01:48.560] – Janet
Okay. Great. These are some drawdowns. They are for a plain weave on the left, a 2/1 twill in the middle, and a 2/2 twill on the right. If you’re wondering what those fractions mean, they look like fractions, they’re not really. They’re ratios, which are also like fractions, except fractions have a numerator and a denominator. They just get the two spots. Whereas a twill ratio or a tie-up ratio can have a whole bunch of spots.
[00:02:17.550] – Janet
If you’re wondering what those mean, you can find all about them in the latest toolbox. I’ll show you that briefly. The idea is this is how they really should be written, as a top and a bottom and a series of numbers starting on the top, ending on the bottom, usually. Although if you’re using artistic license, you could start on the bottom and end on the top.
[00:02:47.350] – Janet
They indicate the number of shafts that are tied up first on–if the number is on the top, tied up to rise and then to sink and then to rise and then to sink and so on. For example, here is a column, a treadle column from a tie-up, where the first three shafts, one, two, three, are tied to rise, and the next one to sink, and the next one to rise, and then last three to sink. That’s assuming this is a rising tie-up. If it was written with Os, circles, as a rising tie-up, it would be circle, circle, circle, blank, circle, blank, blank, blank.
[00:03:28.670] – Janet
If it was written to be a sinking tie-up, it would be written as blank, blank, blank, X, blank, X, X, X because the white ones are sinking. Or if you wanted to be completely clear so that everybody had what they needed and there couldn’t be any questions at all, you could write it as a both rising and sinking tie-up. So it would go circle, circle, circle, X, circle, X, X, X.
[00:03:57.210] – Janet
The point is that pattern happens on every treadle. You have the pattern on the left, say that left treadle, and then on the next treadle to the right, same pattern, but it starts up by one shaft. Then on the next treadle to the right, same pattern, but it starts up by one shaft and so on across all of the treadles.
[00:04:20.600] – Janet
But as you keep moving these things up, the shafts at the top are too high. If you have a pattern for eight shafts that you start on shaft 2, it’s going to go from shaft 2 to 9. Well, we don’t have a shaft 9 in this case. In this example, we have only eight shafts. So this bit that appears to be for shaft 9 wraps around and belongs to shaft 1, like so.
[00:04:48.630] – Janet
So all of these treadles in this tie-up have the same three up, one down, one up, three down. Three, one, one, three. That’s how we write that. Again, that could be O, O, O, X, O, X, X, X. Then the next treadle would be the same, but it’s cycled by one shaft. The next treadle, the same, but cycled by one more shaft and so on.
[00:05:19.220] – Janet
So what we were looking at there is this here, the first one on the left, three, one, one, three. But you can do the same with whatever series of numbers. The numbers altogether have to total the number of shafts in question. So 3 plus 1 is 4 plus 1 is 5 plus 3 is 8. That’s an eight-shaft tie-up. These are all eight-shaft tie-ups.
[00:05:44.860] – Janet
If you add up the numbers on the top layer, like the numerator if it were a fraction, there’s four at the top and four at the bottom in this first one and in the second one and in the third one. That means in all of these tie-ups you have the same number of shafts going up as shafts going down. That’s not necessarily true. If you think of 1/3 twill, there’s only one shaft going up and three going down. 2/2 twill, two up, two down, those are even.
[00:06:23.000] – Janet
If we go back to the class and the drawdown, this second one, it says it’s a 2/1 twill. That means two shafts are going up, one shaft is staying down. In the cloth, because of the way that it’s threaded and treadled, you also see two black squares, then one white square, two black squares, one white square across the first row and the second and the third and the fourth, etc. Same thing in the warp, two and one, two and one, two and one.
[00:06:55.790] – Janet
The one on the right, a 2/2 twill, has a two up, two down pattern, both weft- and warp-wise. We’ll talk about all of that more when we get into twills. But because those apparent “fractions” for the names of the twills come up a lot in this course, I want it to be really clear what those ratios mean.
[00:07:23.590] – Janet
Moving on. The idea behind this course and ones that will come in the future is that a drawdown is a drawing on graph paper in black and white showing which threads are up and which threads are down. It does not have to be associated with a draft. You can take a piece of graph paper and draw yourself a little doodle, and then that is a drawdown that you can turn into a draft. You can start from the drawdown and turn it into a draft, rather than starting from a draft and turning that into a drawdown. You can go either direction.
[00:08:07.570] – Janet
A particular draft, given its threading and its shed diagram, whether that’s as a treadling and tie-up or as a lift plan, those two things together define, dictate, whatever the word you want to use is, they specify one particular drawdown. Those things, when woven in that way, will interlace in one specific way. So one draft produces one drawdown. Yes, you can treadle it in different ways and get different drawdowns, but that is not that draft that it’s treadled in a different way, different shed diagram.
[00:08:45.910] – Janet
On the other hand, if you start from the drawdown, you can produce a whole lot of different drafts. That’s what these are about. One draft makes a drawdown, a drawdown makes a draft, but that same drawdown can make lots of other drafts. We’ll come back to that in a–well, no. No, these are not–let’s see. Oh, I had pictures before.
[00:09:11.360] – Janet
Well, if you think about it, how many different ways have you woven plain weave? Maybe you’ve actually threaded your loom one, two, one, two, one, two, and then treadled it one, two, one, two, one, two, and gotten plain weave. Probably, you’ve threaded it at some point for a four-shaft straight-draw threading, like for a 2/2 twill, for instance, and woven plain weave on it. You may have done the same thing, but on eight shafts. If you’ve woven summer and winter, it’s threaded in some way, but you can still weave plain weave on it. You can weave plain weave on a whole lot of different threadings, if you’ve got the right treadling and tie-up or lift plan to go with it.
[00:09:56.730] – Janet
So plain weave, if you start with the drawdown, you can create just a plethora of drafts that will produce it, probably an infinite number. It is a two-way street. But if you think of the drawdown, it’s kind of like the hub at the center of a whole bunch of two-way streets radiating out from it. Whereas each draft only goes to one drawdown.
[00:10:26.930] – Janet
The advantages of looking at a structural drawdown is that you can see what the structure of the cloth is. That’s important because the structure of the cloth dictates how the cloth is going to behave. The drawdowns don’t necessarily represent what the cloth looks like from a distance. And that’s what this example is about. This cloth on the left and the cloth on the right, this is a color drawdown rather than a structural one. On the left looks just like the one on the right.
[00:11:03.210] – Janet
But if you look at the draft, you can see they’re created differently. You might think, though, just looking at these two, that it’s the same fabric. But if you scroll down a little bit, you’ll see it is not the same fabric. If you look at its structure, the one on the left is plain weave. The one on the right is a 1/3 twill. Plain weave has different properties from twill.
[00:11:29.020] – Janet
If you’ve done much weaving at all and you’ve woven plain weave and twill, you know from experience that they don’t behave the same way. Plain weave pushes out, and it has less dimensional loss. Dimensional loss is the way that the fabric gets smaller from many, many different sources, including the way the threads draw in from side to side, which is related in part to how they interlace, which is what we’re talking about in this class. It’s related also to the fiber and the sett, and there’s lots of different variables.
[00:12:12.350] – Janet
So that’s one thing I want to point out early on that in the real world, you can’t isolate the structure of a fabric from the yarn used to create it and the sett at which that yarn is spaced from each other. Those things all work together to produce the final cloth. But in order to talk about how the structure influences the cloth, we’re going to be looking at the structure in isolation.
[00:12:43.980] – Janet
So you kind of have to think, okay, if all the other variables–the yarns, the sett, the this, the that–if all those things stay as constant as they possibly can, then this is the effect that the structure has. But in the real world, that other stuff is going to be having influence on the final fabric, too. So you got to kind of balance that in your mind.
[00:13:08.070] – Janet
Just as an example, I want to show you some actual cloth samples. I was fighting with my document camera earlier, so hopefully this will work. Let’s see. I’m going to stop sharing that and switch to this. All right.
[00:13:30.100] – Janet
Color’s not great, but this is fabric. It’s a 8/4 cotton, warp and weft, threaded straight draw, tied up–I think it probably–it doesn’t matter how it was tied up. Point is that I’ve got–this is a 3/1 twill here at the top, then plain weave, then basket weave, then a 2/2 twill. You can see it’s the same front and back.
[00:14:02.250] – Janet
And if you look at the edges, look how much the plain weave pooches out compared to the things above and below it. It pooches way out. It’s poochy. This is what happens. I looked at Tien, and she was laughing, and now I’m laughing. This is what happens when you put a plain weave hem on a twill, twill here, basket weave, whatever towel.
[00:14:28.770] – Janet
Or when you have plain weave at the edge of–where’s that other piece of fabric? Oh, it was within reach moments ago. There it is. Plain weave–
[00:14:41.170] – Tien
Cat’s fault.
[00:14:43.920] – Janet
What?
[00:14:45.650] – Tien
It’s the cat’s fault that it disappeared, clearly.
[00:14:49.960] – Janet
Oh, yes, even though there’s no cat in the room, and I am right here. Here’s plain weave at the edge of lace. And lace is pulling in because it’s floaty and plain weave is not floaty. If I press this and stretch it out, I can even it out to the same width again, at least temporarily, but it’s going to want to pull back in. The reason it pulls back in is because of the structure of the fabric.
[00:15:17.760] – Janet
That’s what this class is all about, really. Let me switch my camera back. It’s looking at the structure of the fabric and how you can analyze what the individual threads are doing and therefore how the fabric is going to behave, whether it’s going to get narrower, whether you need a closer sett or a wider sett, how much it’s going to get shorter versus narrower, where threads are likely to shift around, where they are likely to disappear under their neighbors, and, in particular, how different fabrics, such as that lace and plain weave or the twill and that plain weave, how they will behave if you put them next to each other in a fabric, like in warp-wise stripes or in weft-wise stripes or a plain weave frame around whatever is in the middle.
[00:16:25.370] – Janet
So without further ado, let us look a little further at the next lesson–let me find the next lesson button–where we’re going to talk about how to do that. It all comes down to whether the floats are intersecting with the fabric or floating over it or under it, so whether they float or whether they intersect. And intersecting means where the threads pass through.
[00:16:58.370] – Janet
I’m just going to check the Q&A and see if those–I see there’s a couple of questions. Okay, good. Sonia says, good. I agree, it would be good if everybody had this stuff at the outset, then people would understand what their cloth was doing better. Sorry, I should read what Sonia says, so you know what I’m answering. She said, the explanations are excellent. It would have been nice to have this level of info years ago. Thank you.
[00:17:28.560] – Janet
But a lot of–this technical level of stuff is not interesting to a lot of people when they start to weave. They want to make a project. They want to have quick and fast and pretty results, but they’re not so interested in how that happens. There’s nothing wrong with that. I get in my car. I want my car to get me from point A to point B. I don’t care how the engine works as long as it does work.
[00:17:59.130] – Janet
But at some point, you might want to start understanding, especially if you want to start changing stuff in there in the engine. So you need this information in order to do that. That’s why we’re laying this foundation so that when we go on to twill and other structures down the road, we have the ability to have this conversation.
[00:18:24.900] – Janet
Courtney asked, what do you suggest to use for hem instead of plain weave for twill towels? That is an excellent question, the answer to which is coming up shortly. By the end of the course, you will have what you need to make that decision for yourself in each case.
[00:18:47.840] – Janet
Let’s go back to the course. The next step is, how do you analyze that little black and white checkerboard or diagonal lines or whatever the thing is? All of the examples in the course are quite simple–plain weave, 1/3 twill. They’re things you can do on a straight or point or very simple threading on four shafts. But all of the ideas, all of the logic, all of the explanations apply no matter how many shafts or how complicated and variable your threading and your treadling are.
[00:19:37.550] – Janet
They apply, of course, even if you’re not weaving on a shaft loom. That’s another thing about drawdowns. They are what I call loom agnostic. If you have a picture of plain weave, like that drawdown we saw that looked like a checkerboard, that drawdown, that picture, it does not care if that plain weave was woven on a four-shaft loom and straight draw or a 40-shaft loom and some amazing, complicated threading or a Jacquard loom where every single thread can be manipulated individually or a rigid heddle loom or a back strap loom or a frame loom where there’s no shedding mechanism at all and you just have to go over and under each of the threads by hand.
[00:20:23.820] – Janet
The same thing is true of the 1/3 twill or whatever amazing, complicated drawdowns you see. If you can draw it on a piece of graph paper, you can weave it. In order to create a draft to weave it on a shaft loom, you might have to have 11,000,000,000 shafts and a whole lot of treadles. But you can always put it on a frame loom and needle weave it.
[00:20:54.940] – Janet
Or you could put it on a rigid heddle loom and have the plain weave foundation of it, if it has one, not every fabric does, of course. But if your particular fantastic doodle did, then you could let the loom take care of all the plain weave while you do all the other stuff. If you can draw it, you can weave it. You may not want to. It may be too much effort, but you can.
[00:21:23.640] – Janet
That doesn’t mean even so that the fabric is viable because it may have floats that are much too long, or it may have threads that don’t actually intersect with the fabric at all. We will have another class in the future that talks about how to doodle, how to take a doodle and turn it into a draft, how to make sure your doodles will actually produce fabric that makes sense that you want to weave, and how to limit your doodles so that they are likely to produce drafts that you are able to weave with the equipment you have available, plus the amount of patience you have for hand manipulation.
[00:22:09.800] – Janet
But that’s not what we’re doing in this class. In this class, we’re going the other direction. We’re taking a draft, presumably one that we can weave on the equipment that we have, or with the amount of patience we have available, and determining what the structure of the fabric that that draft produces is, and also what that means for how the fabric will behave and how you can combine the structures together.
[00:22:37.890] – Janet
I just took myself off on a tangent, and I’m not entirely sure where I came from. So I’m just going to go back to the class and talk about how you analyze the black and white grids to decide what those threads are doing. Oh, right. I was defining intersection and float. Let me go back to sharing my screen, which is this one. My Screen Share is loading. I think Zoom takes a little longer to share now than it did, but it shows you what you’re sharing, which is nice, too.
[00:23:18.000] – Janet
Okay. So on the left, plain weave. On the right, a 1/3 twill. Drawdowns are black and white squares. This kind of drawdown, little black and white squares. Where the threads change from black to white or white to black is where they shift from one surface of the fabric to the other.
[00:23:43.740] – Janet
For the moment, think of this as the warp threads being black and the weft threads being white. If this thread over here on the left is white, that means the weft is on top of the fabric. And then in the next square, it’s black. If the warp is black, that means the warp is on top of the fabric. If the warp is on top here, that means the weft is underneath. That’s the only way the warp gets to be on top. The weft goes below it. Which means the weft has gone from on top in the left one to underneath in the right one, or the next one to the right. Then it’s come back to the top again in the third square and gone back to the bottom again in the fourth one.
[00:24:29.760] – Janet
So the weft is running over, under, over, under, over, under through the fabric. The only way to get from the top of the fabric to the bottom of the fabric is to go through the middle of the fabric, except, I suppose, if you take the shuttle out and wrap it all the way around the fabric, but that would be a bad idea, so don’t do that.
[00:24:49.700] – Janet
That is what these little cross-sections are about. In these cross-sections, the yellow is the warp and the blue is the weft. So even when we turn and look at things going the other direction, yellow is warp, blue is weft. These little yellow dots are like we’re looking right down the length of the warp, and so the weft is waving past horizontally, like if you scrunched down and looked right along the fabric at the breast beam towards the shafts or the heddle. Excuse me.
[00:25:28.520] – Janet
So where the square in the bit of the drawdown is white–let me have arrows here. I’m just talking about things in the air. Where the square is white, the weft is on top of the yellow warp thread. Where the square is black, the weft is on the bottom and the warp itself is on top. See that?
[00:26:01.060] – Janet
So in this particular example, the way we are thinking about it, black means warp on top and white means weft on top. Or you can think of it as black means warp on top and white means warp on the bottom. Those two sentences are equivalent. This little diagram, in theory, shows you why that is, why those two sentences are equivalent.
[00:26:30.540] – Janet
If you look at this cross-section, every time you switch from black to white or white to black, black to white, white or black, the thread is going through the cloth. We call that an intersection. If you have read the Ashenhurst course recently, you may remember that his formula for figuring out the sett depends on intersections. He’s got one simple little formula for figuring out what the maximum sett is that’s based on the diameter of the thread. That basically measures how many of those little diameters you can fit into your inch or your centimeter, whatever your measurement unit is. How many of them can go side by side, like my fingers, just with no space between them. That’s maximum.
[00:27:24.700] – Janet
But then depending on how many times the other thread has to intersect and go between these threads, you need space between them. Right? And you need space between some of them more than you need space between others, depending on how the threads go through. Can I do Spock fingers? If I had 2/2 twill, I’d need space between fingers like that, as opposed to plain weave where you need space everywhere.
[00:28:03.170] – Janet
The way you determine how much space you need is by looking at how much the thread going the other way intersects with the fabric, and it intersects where it goes through the fabric. Wherever those little blue threads, weft threads, blue in this picture, not always obviously, push through the fabric, they need space between the yellow ones. They’re pushing on the yellow ones to make that space. Hey, move over, move over. Let me through. Coming through, coming through. You can think of them as having their little elbows out and saying, all right, here I come–da, da, da, da, da.
[00:28:39.620] – Janet
And the threads to either side are likely to move away from that action because nobody wants to be jammed with a pointy elbow. So they’ll move away. Except if there’s somebody on their other side doing the same thing, they can’t go over there either. So they’re just going to get in the middle and like, okay, fine. Go by. Do what you need. Let me give you space so you can go through without bashing me with your elbows.
[00:29:07.020] – Janet
That’s what these little pink arrows are meant to be. They are the blue weft thread pushing on the–let me see if I can zoom in so you can see them better–pushing on the yellow warp thread saying, hey, these are my elbows. I am coming through. Wham, wham, wham. This is showing you that the next pick of plain weave does exactly the opposite.
[00:29:32.920] – Janet
Same thing is happening warp-wise. So now we have turned 90 degrees. Now we are looking down the edge of the fabric as if we’ve gotten off the bench of the loom and we are looking down the weft threads, I guess with our heads tipped 90 degrees so that it’s vertical instead. I wanted to keep the warp running vertically, so it was more obvious which was which.
[00:29:59.880] – Janet
So the same thing is happening. Those warp threads are pushing–they’re interlacing through the fabric and pushing around on the weft threads. Everybody’s got their elbows out. In plain weave, everybody’s got their elbows out. If you think about it, if everybody’s walking around with their elbows out like this and trying to get as much space from each other as possible, no wonder plain weave is so much wider than other things. Because every thread in there has its elbows out all the time. I didn’t know how to draw a little elbow, so you got pink arrows.
[00:30:45.620] – Janet
Next, [inaudible 00:30:46] the same. Now here’s an example of 3/1 twill, which is, remember, that one right next to the plain weave in this fabric, this one here, which is different on both sides because the numbers on the top and the bottom of the ratio don’t add up to the same number.
[00:31:10.640] – Janet
Now there’s only intersections. The blue yarn only intersects with the fabric twice in a repeat rather than four times in a repeat. I think those numbers are right. 1, 2, 3, 4. Yes. But half as much anyway because it’s not going under half of the threads it used to be going under. Now the elbows are only out in certain places.
[00:31:38.300] – Janet
Let me find–where’s my arrows again? Drawing. In this spot, the threads are going to try to push away. This blue thread has its elbows out, and so this yellow thread is going to try to get away from it and go that way. This blue thread has its elbows out, so that yellow thread is going to try to get away from its neighbor, elbow-y neighbor on that side, and move up to the yellow thread next to it, who does not have its elbows out. It’s not intersected in this spot. And that’s going to happen all the way across.
[00:32:16.140] – Janet
So when a thread has somebody next to it to one side with its elbows out, but not to the other side, it’s going to move away from the elbows and go over to the person who’s not being stab-y. That makes sense. But we’re supposed to be looking at intersections and floats.
[00:32:38.660] – Janet
So intersections are where the threads actually pass through the fabric. They go from one surface to the other. It doesn’t matter if they’re going from bottom to top or top to bottom. They’re going through the fabric, which means it doesn’t matter really for our purposes, for this conversation, for this determination whether the squares are changing from white to black or black to white. It’s just the fact that they are changing. They’re going from one to the other. The switch has been flipped. That’s the important thing. Where the switch flips, there’s an intersection.
[00:33:14.420] – Janet
So that’s what these pictures are about now, showing the places where the switch flips, rather than the elbows jamming at their neighbors. Lots less flipping here in the 1/3 twill than there was up here in the plain weave. Therefore, there are a lot fewer intersections in this fabric. Well, I guess it’s not really causal. It goes both ways. It’s just a fact. Fewer intersections in this fabric. Saying the same thing both ways. Lots of intersections in plain weave.
[00:33:47.730] – Janet
In fact, plain weave has the absolute maximum number of intersections. Every single time two threads meet, they cross, and they cross on the other side. Every weft thread intersects between every pair of warp threads, always going up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down. And the warp is doing exactly the same thing. So plain weave makes a great baseline. You cannot have a fabric that intersects more than plain weave.
[00:34:18.640] – Janet
We don’t really have a fabric for the other end of the spectrum because that would be warp and weft never intersecting, and then you would just have a pile of string. That’s not fabric. But we do have sort of a bookend at this end of the spectrum. Plain weave interlaces more than anything else, which means whatever–sorry, has more intersections than anything else. Whatever properties intersections convey to a fabric, plain weave has it in spades. It has it more than any other fabric can.
[00:35:00.190] – Janet
The properties that intersections convey, that’s what this section is about, is that those little elbows require space, which means that you will have less–I’m going to stop sharing for a minute–you will have less dimensional loss. You will need a wider sett because space. That’s how we accomplish space in weaving, how we accomplish space between threads. That’s how we sett them.
[00:35:33.080] – Janet
So plain weave needs a wider sett than other things to achieve the same–remember, we’re thinking of structure in isolation of anything else like, well, do we want more warp to show than weft in a rug. You might have less space between plain weave warp threads because you want things to show or behave differently. But structurally, if all the other variables stay the same, plain weave needs more space, needs a wider sett.
[00:36:11.140] – Janet
It’s going to be thinner too, because remember that picture where the elbows were not always out, and so the yellow warp threads got to bunch together. Where they bunch together, they’re going to act a little bit, at least for a short distance, at least, like a big, thicker thread. That’s going to make the fabric feel a little thicker.
[00:36:31.640] – Janet
Also, a float just rises up above the fabric or below the fabric. You can press it flat with a steam press, depending on your fiber and all that. But we call it a float because it floats above. It bumps up a little bit. If you have individual little floats here and there in a fabric, you can feel them. They rise.
[00:36:55.340] – Janet
Related to that, if you have a whole bunch of those little floats all over your fabric on both sides, the whole thing gets thicker. So plain weave, which is our baseline, is the thinnest fabric because it doesn’t have any of those little bumps.
[00:37:11.540] – Janet
I can’t show you that in this fabric, I don’t think, but plain weave and the twill, it looks a little thicker, but that’s partly because the edge is curling some. But this plain weave fabric is definitely thinner physically than this twill fabric. It isn’t necessarily more flexible because twill’s got properties that makes it bendy, but it is thinner. And that means when they are sort of equally dense that the plain weave fabric will be cooler and the twill one will be warmer because it traps more air. All of these things are fall out of intersections.
[00:38:03.160] – Janet
Floats are the inverse of intersections, so you get the opposite effect. Plus, floats can slide over other things, so they can hide their neighbors some, too. Intersections can’t do that. They’re interlacing. They lock everything into place. But floats can hide other things.
[00:38:26.620] – Janet
Okay. Running out of time here. So I am going to go on to the next lesson, which is what we can do with this information. Why is it useful to us?
[00:38:45.750] – Janet
The last couple of lessons in the class are how to make the drawdowns, and they are very clearly spelled out. So I’m not going to go over them in this lecture. There are lots of examples and exercises there for you to do to make sure that you’re understanding. And in a whole lot of software, if you put your draft in, you could just click a button and get the drawdown. It is still useful to know how to make them on your own. You make them for yourself, however. But we’re not going to belabor the instructions for doing that in this lecture. We can talk about them again in the next lecture if people have questions. For now, we’re just going to talk about why you care. Why would you do this?
[00:39:33.520] – Janet
Let’s look at this. The idea is think about threads pulling up, drawing in, shrinking, whatever you want to call it, that the fabric is going to get narrower where there is more float and be wider where there is less float. Here’s plain weave. It’s very speckily. It’s the smallest little checkerboard you can get on a grid.
[00:40:04.020] – Janet
Wherever you see that in your drawdowns, you can think to yourself, oh, elbows are out. That fabric is going to spread out. Wherever you see the lack of that, so larger areas of all black or all white, that’s where threads are going to bunch together.
[00:40:25.280] – Janet
If you compare side by side here plain weave and 2/1 twill, say, and 2/2 twill, plain weave’s got all the elbows. It’s going to spread out as much as it possibly can. 2/1 twill has a little bit less switching back and forth from black to white, so it’s going to pull in a little bit more than plain weave. Not a lot, but a little bit more. Always modified by sett, fiber, yarns, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But in the absence of all those things, in isolation, in the structure itself, 2/1 twill is going to pull in a little bit more.
[00:41:03.570] – Janet
2/2 twill has got even fewer intersections, and it has even more floats than 2/1 twill, so it’s going to pull in even more. So if you had stripes, say, of these three structures warp-wise in your fabric or weft-wise, let’s talk about weft-wise, the plain weave one is going to spread out, and the 2/1 twill is not going to spread out as much, and the 2/2 twill is going to spread out even less. That’s what’s happening in this fabric.
[00:41:38.310] – Janet
As I mentioned before, if you put plain weave next to 2/2 twill in a towel, the plain weave will spread out. The 2/2 twill will pull in a little bit. And you’ll wind up with ruffle-y hems.
[00:41:52.660] – Janet
This is a brief example of 4/4 twill. It will pull in a whole lot. Okay. Come down here.
[00:41:57.090] – Janet
Now we have plain weave and half basket and basket weave. So basket weave is a category of weave, sort of like twill is a category of weaves. There are more than one basket weave, but this is a very, very common one, which is two up and two down, just like 2/2 twill, except it’s the same two up and two down twice in a row, and then it’s the opposite one. So there isn’t that staggered stair step you get from twill. It’s just a checkerboard just like plain weave, only it’s a two-by-two square rather than a one-by-one square.
[00:42:30.340] – Janet
Half basket is all of the picks from basket weave but alternating every time instead of every two times, if that makes sense. If you look at–where’s my little–the edges of these two things, say, vertically, plain weave and half basket–and vertically means warp-wise–they’re doing the same thing. They’re alternating at the same rate. They are likely to have the same take up, which is warp-wise dimensional loss due to the threads bending or pushing due to elbows and floats. So those two are likely to do the same thing warp-wise.
[00:43:17.160] – Janet
Whereas over here, basket weave, it’s doing something different warp-wise. It’s going to pull in more warp-wise than the other two.
[00:43:28.340] – Janet
On the other hand, if you compare them weft-wise, half basket and basket are doing the same thing. They’re doing the same thing as 2/2 twill, as well. Whereas plain weave’s got more elbows. If you had a twill towel, for instance, Courtney, and you put a plain weave hem on it, you’ll have more elbows in the plain weave, so it’ll spread out. You can counteract that by changing sett, fiber, yarn size, all those things. But if you don’t change anything, your plain weave will flare.
[00:44:04.800] – Janet
On the other hand, if you put a basket weave hem on your twill towel, it’s not going to flare out because they do the same thing going across. On the other hand–how many other hands are we on now? We’re on, I don’t know, the fourth or fifth other hand now. But basket weave’s kind of a pain to weave because the two picks are the same. There and back again in the same shed, so you have to have a floating selvedge, or you have to mess around with two shuttles, or you have to do whatever, whatever.
[00:44:34.860] – Janet
Half basket gives you the same interlacement weft-wise going across as twill or as basket weave or as other things that have that path over two under two going across. But every shed is different, like plain weave, so it’s easy to weave.
[00:44:55.800] – Janet
So my answer for what hem to put on a twill towel is, honestly, it’s usually not to do anything different. I just weave it in twill. And I weave the fabric as one long, continuous piece, and I don’t worry about where the hems are going to be. Because then if I screwed something up and have a threading–or not threading, but a treadling mistake, I could just cut at that point and say, there’s a hem.
[00:45:19.710] – Janet
But if I was putting hems in because I have a pretty weft stripe or something, and so the hems need to be in a certain space or location, certain distance apart, I would use half basket, or the closest I can get to it with the threading that I have, because it’s as fast and easy to weave as plain weave. It’s just too treadles, bu, bu, bu, bu, bu, bu, bu. But it’s going to interlace across the fabric the same way as my twill, so it won’t flair out or pull in. That right there is the answer to some of the–oops, I need to delete those boxes before I move on–one of the questions, the ask yourself questions in this lesson.
[00:46:09.520] – Janet
For example, here on the left, we have half basket flanking plain weave warp-wise. They interlace at the same rate warp-wise. So warp-wise these two will get along well. Weft-wise, as long as they go from top to bottom, it’ll be fine, too. Then we have half basket mixed with basket weave weft-wise on the right.
[00:46:33.240] – Janet
Here’s an example, though, of plain weave mixed with basket weave on the left and in the center, and plain weave mixed with half basket on the right. And you can see that on the left and in the middle, the plain weave is a whole lot more speckily than the basket weave. So it’s going to be pushing out more elbows, and those areas are going to flair out and be wider and longer than the basket weave parts. Or maybe the other way around–the basket weave is going to pull in and therefore be shorter and narrower than the plain weave parts.
[00:47:10.490] – Janet
That is not a bad thing. It’s just a thing. If you wove a scarf like this, you would wind up with kind of ruffle-y stripes, and that might be very cool. So this is a fact that you can harness for your benefit. It doesn’t have to always be a negative.
[00:47:33.160] – Janet
So now a comparison of basket weave to 2/2 twill versus plain weave, etc. Then one last little example I wanted to show because we’re nearly out of time, and I want to see if there are questions. On the left is a color drawdown. On the right, same thing as an actual structural drawdown. So you can see how the threads are going to behave.
[00:48:00.560] – Janet
On the left, everything looks peachy. It’s a pretty little pattern. You’ve got a twill stripe in pink, and then you’ve got some warp rib in blue. But on the right, you can see there’s this funny little-it looks like a check mark there. The twill comes down in the diagonal, and then it links up into the rib. There isn’t a clean break or a clean cut. That’s called a cut line or a cut where one warp thread and its neighbor interlace exactly the opposite way, or one weft line and its neighbor interlace exactly the opposite way.
[00:48:37.340] – Janet
Where that happens, the fabric tends to separate a little bit in either direction. And that’s where a lot of lace comes from. That happens all the time in plain weave. Everything is separating and elbows.
[00:48:50.400] – Janet
But here, we have the cut line on the right side of the twill, and we don’t have it on the left. It is not so obvious in the blue and the pink picture, but maybe more obvious in the black and white picture, which is the whole point of doing a black and white drawdown, that there are three-pick floats here–sorry, three-end floats in all of these picks.
[00:49:18.180] – Janet
Remember, we said where there’s a float, it will bump up a little bit. These are three-end floats. They’ll bump up more than the two-end floats next to them. And there are no other three-end floats anywhere else in this fabric, assuming that this is the whole thing. It’s a very narrow warp. But even if you repeated this little widget over and over and over, there would be this one sort of off-center stripe where there was a three-end float and it made a little bump.
[00:49:45.950] – Janet
You would notice that, probably. I would notice that. You could feel it. You could mash it flat with a good hard press, but if you didn’t press it, you would feel it. The equivalent is, let’s see, the points on a point twill. They have the same thing going on. And the points feel a little different, and they look a little different.
[00:50:16.260] – Janet
To avoid that–clear and scroll–you can just add one more thread of the twill. So you still have the same width blue stripes on either side, but the pink is now ever so slightly wider. This should be reversed, but whatever. Now you have a clean break on both sides, and you won’t have that extra little blip.
[00:50:43.820] – Janet
Looking at the original in color, it wasn’t clear to see an issue. Looking at it in black and white in the structure, more of an issue. Okay. That is more than enough for this lecture.
[00:51:03.590] – Dawn
We have one question.
[00:51:06.260] – Janet
Okay.
[00:51:07.500] – Dawn
Miriam Lebby says, such a great explanation. How is this different with eight-shaft twills?
[00:51:14.220] – Janet
Aha. Well, preview of coming attractions, Miriam. Let me just fire something up quickly in Fiberworks so that I can explain. Quick, somebody else say something interesting for a bit while I make a little draft.
[00:51:35.740] – Tien
It’s just so much more fun keeping everyone in suspense, Janet.
[00:51:39.380] – Janet
If you say so.
[00:51:41.720] – Dawn
We like watching you type. No pressure.
[00:51:44.790] – Janet
Well, all right. Then I’ll turn on my Fiberworks, and you can watch me type. Here we go. Here is an eight-shaft twill. You know what? Well, okay, I’ll do an eight-shaft, but I can show you the same–it’ll be even more dramatic in a different twill, like 16 or 12 or whatever.
[00:52:09.260] – Janet
So here’s the thing you can do with Fiberworks. Remember we were talking about the twill ratios and the tie-up ratios. If I put, what did I say, 3/1/1/3/3, so plus, plus, plus, minus, plus, minus, minus, minus. There’s my first treadle. Now I can tell Fiberworks to say Twill Repeat, which, incidentally, in the Mac version says Diagonal Repeat, I think, instead of Twill Repeat. Because this is not really necessarily a twill tie-up. It is a tie-up that can be used to weave a regular twill, but it can also be used in many other ways. So to call it a twill tie-up is a bit of a misnomer. So that’s why it’s called something different in the Mac version, but he hasn’t changed it in the Windows one yet.
[00:52:56.960] – Janet
I’m going to say Step Up by One Step, Apply, and it fills in that same pattern on the diagonal like that toolbox showed. Okay. Close. Go away.
[00:53:11.940] – Janet
Now here in our twill–let me zoom in, and how can I–let’s see. Annotate. And a picture. There we go. Here, that’s all solid black. Right? That’s all floaty. Here is a stretch of solid white, floaty also. But here is a diagonal row of speckly bits. What are alternating single one-by-one squares? That’s plain weave.
[00:53:48.160] – Janet
So this twill has got a little bit of plain weave in there in addition to its floaty parts. It’s got elbows out on the diagonal. But the other guys are saying, come, come visit. Come see me because that guy over there is very elbow-y.
[00:54:08.110] – Janet
If you have even more shafts–that is not the right button. I get into trouble when I have Fiberworks and Zoom going at the same time because they have the same key strokes. So now I’m apparently going to mute all of the panelists instead of add more shafts. Sorry. Sorry, panelists. Did not mean to mute you. Close that. Go away Zoom controls.
[00:54:37.440] – Janet
Now, tie-up 16 shafts for instance, and delete all of this. And Warp Fill with Straight Draw. Let’s go with four. That didn’t work. Warp Fill with–oh, it added to the end. Okay, 10. Replace All. There we go. And do the same thing in the weft. I did it again. My screen sharing got paused. That’s another thing that I keep doing. Resume Share. Some key stroke in Fiberworks equals don’t share my screen anymore. It’s very annoying. Weave As Drawn In. Exactly As Drawn.
[00:55:20.280] – Janet
Now let’s put in some–there’s four. And then let’s put in some plain weave, and then a little bit of 2/2 twill. There. There’s a thing. That works. Now the Repeat. Close.
[00:55:36.560] – Janet
If we look at this twill now, it’s got even more plain weave in there on that diagonal. That means this area is going to push out. And these more solid areas that happen to be white here are going to pull in. They’re going to make some ridge-y parts because that’s where the floats will be.
[00:56:02.220] – Janet
On balance, those things might balance each other out. Pushing out here and pulling in there might equal this twill pulls in about like a regular 2/2 or a 1/3, 3/1 or whatever. To analyze it, you would need to actually count the intersections and then use Ashenhurst’s formula or just count the intersections and compare that to a baseline, like whatever twill or plain weave, and see are there more intersections or fewer within a space.
[00:56:40.590] – Janet
Another thing this tells us, because the tie-up, if you look at the tie-up–let me bigify a bit–it’s got more–let’s see, what am I looking at here? That’s what’s going on. It’s got more black in the tie-up than white. The fabric also has more black in the fabric now than white. If I look at the other side, it’s more white than black.
[00:57:06.850] – Janet
That means this is not an even twill, more warp showing on one side, more weft showing on the other. So the two sides of the fabric won’t look the same. You’ll see the weft everywhere because it’ll be going back and forth, but you’ll see more of it in one place than the other. Oh, now there are more questions.
[00:57:29.230] – Dawn
Just one more.
[00:57:32.410] – Janet
Okay.
[00:57:32.780] – Dawn
Well, it’s not even a question. Bobby Hayward says, great session. I think I’m becoming a weaver. These explanations are making sense to my brain. Well done, Janet.
[00:57:43.510] – Janet
Yay.
[00:57:44.260] – Dawn
Hooray.
[00:57:46.040] – Janet
Hooray. Goal achieved for one person. Now everybody else. There. Whoosh.
[00:58:01.620] – Janet
Courtney Mitchell says, the tea towel I posted on What’s on My Loom for May perfectly illustrates the bulging brown plain weave next to the golden green twill section.
[00:58:09.270] – Janet
I saw somebody’s scarf, too, I think, from the Weave-Along that had stripes of twill and plain weave. The same thing going on. I meant to ask her if I could use that picture as a sample, as an example. It’s not bad. It’s not wrong. It can be very cool. You can use that to make really neat effects.
[00:58:33.590] – Janet
But if you don’t know it’s going to happen and you don’t want it to happen, then it can be frustrating, like anything else in life, if you don’t know it’s going to happen, and you don’t want it to happen. When you get a flat tire, it’s irritating. Can’t really think of an example where flat tire is a good thing, but the unexpected.
[00:58:52.940] – Janet
Okay. I have nothing nearby to light on fire, so, Tien, you’re going to need to get a cat.
[00:58:58.760] – Tien
Oh, right. Of course, the cat.
[00:59:00.430] – Dawn
A couple of closing comments. Miriam says, thank you for explaining this. I’ve been confused using my eight-shaft loom. Bobby says now she has shaft envy. Joy does too. Courtney says, use her towel as an example anytime.
[00:59:15.580] – Janet
Bobby and Joy, if you have the patience, you can weave the fabrics on fewer shafts. It just means finger manipulation. I personally do not have that much patience, but people out there do. In fact, the latest blog post, Carly wrote a blog post on slow weaving, and it’s a really good one. There, oh, my God, the eyes.
[00:59:41.830] – Tien
The eyes.
[00:59:42.820] – Dawn
Hi, Mr. Oh.
[00:59:45.380] – Tien
I’ve had quite enough of this.
[00:59:47.180] – Janet
The eyes on that cat. Okay.
[00:59:51.490] – Dawn
Let’s see. Did something just pop up?
[00:59:54.830] – Janet
Good point, Eda Lee. She’s looking how to turn the flat tire to her advantage. Could meet a hunky person to help you unflatten it.
[01:00:05.570] – Dawn
That’s glass half full, Eda Lee. Well done.
[01:00:09.360] – Janet
Yes, indeed. Okay, I think we’re done. Have you copied the things?
[01:00:17.060] – Dawn
Yep. Ready to go.
[01:00:18.380] – Janet
I hate to just hit the big End button while Tien–oh, there, good, she’s back. [crosstalk 01:00:22] It was like hanging up on somebody. You ever notice in TV shows, nobody ever says goodbye? They just hang up.
[01:00:30.080] – Dawn
They do.
[01:00:31.120] – Janet
Every time. Ron and I look at each other, like, how rude. Okay, we’ll call you back. We can say goodbye.
[01:00:42.450] – Tien
Bye, bye.
[01:00:43.502] – Dawn
Bye.
[01:00:43.700] – Janet
Bye, everybody. What do we have next webinar-wise? I think it’s Office Hours, but it’s not on Sunday because Sunday is Mother’s Day, so it’s Monday afterwards.
[01:00:57.040] – Tien
Right.
[01:00:58.070] – Dawn
Weaving Help Peer Support is Saturday.
[01:01:00.880] – Janet
Okay. Yeah. Good.
[01:01:04.720] – Tien
Okay.
[01:01:06.590] – Janet
Okay.
[01:01:07.230] – Tien
Bye-bye.
[01:01:07.930] – Janet
Bye, all.