Double Weave using WeavePoint

 Recently I ran into a roadblock while trying to convert a 6 block profile to double weave.  6x4 = 24 shafts.  I have the 24 shafts, but something was off when I tried the translation in WeavePoint.  Maybe fuzzy brain - dunno.  Anyway, I explained that I wasn't getting the draft I wanted on a FaceBook group - Weaving Software.  Sometimes, I am disappointed with the responses I get online.  This time, I was not!  A wonderful weaver from Quebec came to my rescue.

First of all, I should indicate that my weaving software of choice is WeavePoint.  It may be because that is the program I have been using for 25+ years and so I've adapted my design work by using the tools it provides.  When I'm working in another weaving software program, everything seems labor intensive and overly involved.  

Back to my problem.  Weave Point has a translate option.  When I click on this, I get this screen.

My problem is that I was clicking the construct double weave box on the right side of the window.  I should have been going to the Library and finding the "double plain weave" option from the list of structures. 

OK - that worked just fine and my profile converted to 24 shaft double weave.  But, I went back to the first screen and the Construct Double Weave.  What was that all about?  My weaving friend from Quebec had the answer.  It allows you to use different structures in your double weave - such as two twills or maybe twill and plain weave, etc.  In the example below, I used a 3/1 twill and a 1/3 twill.  It converts the draft to two faces of turned twill.  Naturally, if I am using a four shaft twill, the resulting conversion will be eight shafts for each block.  My 6 block profile will need 48 shafts for that conversion.  I don't have 48 shafts, but I can convert to one twill and the other plain weave - or maybe two three shaft twills?  Also the "reanalyze threading" option block is checked by default.  Usually this will give you the least amount of shafts necessary to weave your translated profile.  Sometimes, you need to uncheck this block - particularly if you thread your loom from your profile.

To illustrate just how wonderful this feature is, I took a four block profile from Harriet Tidball and converted it to use the two structures below in the tie up.  Notice the Construct Double Weave option above the tie ups.

 

Here is an image of the cloth after converted.  The draft is 24 shafts and uses two alternating colors in the warp and the weft.

Double Weave from "Weaving with Echo and Iris"

 I have loved Marian Stubenitsky's book Weaving with Echo and Iris since I first purchased a copy over 10 years ago.  

 I immediately wanted to start weaving some of the draft in the book but also learn how to create my own drafts.  One of the big hurdles I immediately encountered, was that when using one of the big tie ups for double weave, it was hard going to copy it into my software without making a mistake.  I did some by hand and expanded a few so that I could weave on my 40 shaft loom (this book only goes up to 32 shafts).  

Recently, I picked one of my old 40 shaft drafts from 10 years ago for my *CW 24+- sample exchange.  The draft I picked had never been tested, but it worked just fine.  I confessed in my write up that went with the sample that I didn't understand the tie up, but somewhere in the hazy past, I must have understood something in order to get a tie up that wasn't in the book.

 One of the members in our exchange asked me some questions about how it was designed, and how did I get a draft with 80 treadles?  Well, the 80 treadles is easy because I have WeavePoint and it allows me up to 128 treadles!  How did I design it?  I think I just copied the sequence for a 32 shaft tie up and extended it to 40 shaft, but I can't be sure.

 At any rate, this set me off on a journey of discovery.  The weaver who was interested in the draft pointed out that a method for constructing tie ups for four color double weave had been documented by Bonnie Inouye and Marguerite Gingras.   Marguerite had written an article in CW about the process, as had the member who was now asking me questions about my design process.  I was aware of the articles and wondered what process Marian had used to create her tie ups and how could I utilize this other method by Inouye and Gingras to pull out the tie ups in the Echo and Iris book without the painstaking drawing by hand method.

 I thought about it, read more in the Weaving with Echo and Iris book and then started experimenting.

 It turns out to be pretty simple to get the tie ups into Marian's format and since these big drafts all require a dobby, to turn them into a liftplan.  

Here goes.  On page 104 of Echo and Iris, there are two 16 shaft tie ups.  On the left top is the bare bones tie up and on the right  a tie up with a ratio of 2:6.  The very first treadle is the key to the rest of the tie up.  Working from the bottom to the top, the first 8 shafts are written for plain weave.  The next are the ratio tie ups.  First two shafts are lifted, then 6 are left down.

Using this information, I started a draft with WeavePoint for 16 shafts and 16 treadles.  I used this information to create a tie up.  I put in the first treadle information and clicked on Utilities - Tie Up Special Effects - create tie up using "Make Twill from Treadle One".  This tie up is the one on the left side of the tie up box in the photo below.

 The next step is to copy that tie up just created and paste it into another section of the tie up making it now 32 treadles.  This tie up is then selected and then click on Edit and option Modify. 

At this point, you can manipulate this second tie up.  Click Invert and then cycle up 8 time using the arrows and click OK.  The reason you cycle up 8 times is that this is 1/2 of the total number of shafts and you are cycling up to create the tie up for the second pick which will be the reverse of the cloth.

 You will notice that both the threading and the treadling are in parallel format - which is explained on page 9 in Marian's book.  You can also see that the first tie up in the photo above weaves the top side of the fabric, and the second pick weaves the other side of the fabric.

 This is as far as you need to go to create a liftplan.  But, we should check what the tie up looks like after I have converted to a liftplan and then reverted back to a tie up mode.

 Yep, it looks like the tie up in the book and it was easier to achieve than copying out of the book.  You can also see that I was able to use the full 32 treadles in my design process and that once I converted back to tie up mode, WeavePoint changed the treadling to conform to this format.

 I made one more conversion.  I turned this draft so that the pattern is vertical rather than horizontal. The new draft requires 32 shafts and is still double weave.

 

Here are a couple of references about using this tie up technique for Four-Color Double Weave. Both of these articles have detailed instructions on creating the two tie ups you will need for face and back of fabric.

Complex Weavers Journal, Oct. 2019 (#121) page 11.  Adventures in Four-Color Double Weave by Jami Johnson

Complex Weaver Journal, Oct. 2011 (#97) page 18  Four-Color Double Twills by Marguerite Gingras from the Computer Aided Design Exchange Study Group.  Marguerite lists the PCW tools she used and the sequence to achieve the two tie ups.

If you join Complex Weavers, you can download copies of both of Journals and read the articles for yourself. 

Also, if you own the Weaving with Echo and Iris book, look on page 111. Marian  describes this process from Bonnie and Marguerite with additional details about altering it for different effects.

 *CW is the common abbreviation for the Complex Weavers group.

 

 

 

 

Experiments with Shadow Weave

 Reno Fiber Guild and friends has been involved in a study group about shadow weave.  I decided to keep my experiment for the group to an 8 shaft draft that is available on the 1000+ Pattern book by Marian Powell.  All of the towels were woven using the 8 shaft profiles from  8-28 on page 235 of the book.  The profile shown is 8-28-1 and is tromp as writ.  In the book there are 12 different treadlings for this design and I used quite a few and incorporated another treadling from another pattern as well.

Since I have enough shafts, I added a basketweave selvedge for simplicity in weaving with two shuttles. After converting the profile to a draft, a portion of the threading is as follows.  The basketweave selvedge threading isn't shown in this draft.

The warp was alternating dark green and pale gray.  Each towel had two color wefts that were different from the warp. 

It was difficult for me to get good photos of the towels that follow, but I hope you can see that many possibilities were available with one threading.  I didn't even come near to exhausting the different patterns.    Also note that since these are actual pieces of cloth, there are some distortions in the photos of the pattern because the cloth was not absolutely flat.    Click on each photo to get an enlarged view.

It would have been fun to see what these patterns would look like in black and white, but it was also fun to play with all sorts of colors to see what I could get by with.  The more value contrast, the better but I didn't find any weft colors that I couldn't make work as long as the value was much different.  Bright yellows and chartreuse were both favorites, along with some very bright orange.  Quite a fun project.

Two block twills with multiple tie up opportunities

I'm a big fan of using a different tie up to alter the look of a design on my current warp.  I'm locked into my threading because I don't ever rethread for another design, but what I can do is change the tie up and the treadling to create a whole new look.

 

I started my experiments with two block twills after watching an episode of JST's School of weaving.  I suspect this episode was all about changing a profile draft into a two block twill and then weaving it on 8 shafts.  I used some of Jane's tie up suggestions and then looked for more.  I came up with many possibilities and will someday soon, weave a whole bunch of variations for towels.

 

In the meantime, since I haven't posted in a very long time, I'm giving readers of this blog some of my ideas.

 

Click on each photo for a larger view of the tie ups. 

 

 

 

  7/25/2024 I'm updating this post because something else occurred to me while talking about block twills at a weaver's meeting.  You don't have to abide by the four quadrant tie up approach I suggest in the drafts above.  Why not use an 8 shaft twill tie up?  Weave tromp as writ or change the treadling to a point.  For that matter, try other treadling sequences to see if any work!

This approach means you can put on a very long warp and weave many different designs - or if you don't mind changing tie ups during a piece, you could create a spectacular textile using several tie ups! 

 

 

Designing with Blocks Using Mathematical Sequences

Using mathematics to design weaving profiles or sequences is a theme that I return to over and over.  I have relied on writings about this subject because my mathematical knowledge is relatively rudimentary.  I was very lucky to have found this document in the Ralph Griswold collection of weaving documents stored at the University of Arizona website.  "Algebraic Expression in Handwoven Textiles" by Ada K. Dietz  

This is my journey into designing a profile and weaving drafts based on the mathematical expression of the cube of a binomial  (a + b) ³  My interpretation of this expression is aaa + aabaabaab + abbabbabb + bbb. I regrouped this into aaaaa b aa b aa b a bb a bb a bbbbb  Below is the two block profile created from my interpretation.

 

The next steps are to convert this into weaving draft using block substitution. With four thread blocks, the draft uses 8 shafts. With 5 thread blocks, the draft uses 10 shafts - and so forth. The most common substitutions are with 3/1 and 1/3 twill blocks, but I’ve found that more interesting designs can be had
when you think outside the box.  The following draft interprets the profile using 3/1 and 1/3 twills. But  this tie up could be altered in one or two quadrants to a broken, 4 thread twill. What fun that might be.
 

 The block conversion below uses a 3/2 twill and an altered 5 thread twill, (which doesn’t have a regular twill line). See the little squares in the design where the altered twill is weaving in block B

This conversion uses a regular 5 thread satin and an altered satin tie up

 

The following draft uses two altered 5 thread twill blocks. I discovered this option in Handweaving.net. To me, the lines look wavey. The surprise is that my weaving software (WeavePoint) analyzed the threading and found it could be woven on 8 shafts.  In checking further, I also found that Handweaving.net will compact this draft to 8 shafts as well. How great is that!

Below Block A uses an altered satin tie up and Block B uses a 5 thread altered twill tie up. Busy, but the profile is still visible.

The next draft uses 5 thread satin blocks. The dark block is flipped horizontally and reversed so that dark now becomes light. The draft doesn’t have clean cut edges where the two blocks meet.

There are, of course, many more options to interpret this profile.  Feel free to experiment and enjoy the results!

Shadow Weave and Weaving Software

It's been an interesting few days spent exploring weaving software and how to convert a profile draft to a shadow weave draft.  I thought I would share what I learned in a post.

 The conventional ways to convert profiles into shadow weave involve having a profile draft with a tie up that lifts 1/2 of the shafts such as a 2/2 twill or a 4/4 twill tie up.  Most weaving software programs don't give you a block substitution for conversion, but I found three that do.  WeavePoint, Proweave & Windows Weaveit Pro.  

It all started with  a profile draft on Handweaving.net  (#32432) that I liked and wanted to see how it would look in shadow weave. 

Because my weaving software of choice is WeavePoint, I tried translating it to shadow weave using the Translate Profile option.  WeavePoint gave me what I was looking for.  A four shaft, shadow weave design.  Great!

I had my draft and could have stopped there.  But, I didn't.  I wanted to see what other software programs would do and this is where it got interesting.  I found that Fiberworks didn't give me any options to convert profiles to shadow weave.  I did find that there were tutorials to help you do this - but with one caveat, that the tie up be in the format of 2/2, 4/4, 6/6 etc.   I didn't have this in my original profile and if I put a tie up like that into my profile the whole design would be different.  

Then, I tried Proweave.  I don't use this software very much, but it does have a lot of translation options to different weave structures.   I found a bunch of different options, so I took the one for four blocks and no incidentals.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Great - but this is an 8 shaft draft and the block lengths have been expanded.  I could work on the draft to downsize the length of the blocks, but it didn't seem like a better choice than WeavePoint gave me.

Off to Windows Weaveit Pro.  This program gave me three options for converting my profile.  Atwater method, Powell method and Lang and Voolich method.  This was interesting because I hadn't heard of Lang and Voolich before - something new to me.  My first tries were with Atwater and Powell.  Both of the translations gave me a draft - but not for the original profile.  Instead, the software had evidently changed the tie up to a 2/2 twill because when I changed my profile tie up and looked at the pattern, the translated pattern looked identical to the thread by thread draft.  Next I tried the Lang and Voolich option.  Yeah - it gave me a correct draft, but again, one for 8 shafts.

I could have stopped there, but I really wondered why WeavePoint would give me a 4 shaft draft and the other two programs gave me an 8 shaft draft.

As I looked at the WeavePoint version, I realized that actually the profile was three blocks and Weave Point had analyzed this before it translated my profile.  And, where there was a transition from Block A to Block B, there was a double thread inserted so that the color sequence of dark and light wouldn't be interrupted (examine the first draft in this post).

So, I went back to the three programs to see how they would deal with my new, three block profile.  WeavePoint was happy.  It translated  exactly as it had the first time.  Proweave, translated it to a 6 shaft draft and Windows Weaveit Pro wouldn't give me an option to translate it at all.

 I think if you examine the profile and the solution that WeavePoint gives you, you could probably figure out other profiles.  I also tried to find Lang and Voolich's monograph, Parallel Shadow Weave  but couldn't find any current source for it.  Even Complex Weavers didn't have a copy in their library.  It would be interesting to see how their solution worked - even though it wasn't as elegant a solution as WeavePoint gave me.    

 Yeah for the WeavePoint programmer, Bjorn Myhre.

Anatomy of this year's Christmas towels

 Quite a few years ago, I read a paper called "Designing with Farey Fractions" by Ralph Griswold.  Ralph was a computer scientist with a penchant for weaving drafts and weaving design.   I did some designing using a Farey sequence as the threading for an 8 shaft draft and wrote about the process here in this blog. https://bannermountaintextiles.blogspot.com/2013/07/farey-fraction-towels.html    The results were interesting (to me) but recently I began to think about other things that might be done with this Farey sequence used as a profile draft. 

I digress a bit here to tell you that I don't understand the mathematics involved.  Yes, I've looked at the papers and most of it is just out of my league.  However, using mathematical sequences in weaving design is very much something that I understand and can use.

I started thinking about how I might weave green and red towels for Christmas sales without the problems of green and red crossing one another and blending into brown.  The solution appeared to be to use blocks of weave structure so that the colors of red and green would appear more or less solid against one another.  Which comes back to using a profile draft and translating it to satin and block twills to weave my towels.    I selected the Farey sequence above for my threading profile and converted it into a series of drafts using 5 thread satins and 5 thread twill blocks. 8 blocks times 5 thread structures translates to 40 shafts.  How lucky for me that I have a loom that will weave these designs!

In preparing the ideas for my warp color, I used stripes of red and green which used portions of the profile that would give a different design for the two color stripes.  Red and green yarns were another problem.  I didn't have any of the specific value in my stash that I wanted for the warp, so I wound off 2800 yards for the green warp stripe and 2800 yards for the red warp stripe. I dyed each of the 2800 yards in the same pot so that I would get exactly the same colors - although, a variation in the warp color stripes could have been interesting too.

 1/5 and 5/1 twill blocks

 This towel was woven with 5 thread satin blocks making it a damask cloth.  And all without a Jacquard Loom!

Accidental Christmas trees appeared in this variation.  Again, the structure is 5 thread satin.

I was able to weave 11 different towels on this 12 yard warp and still had designs left that I could have woven.  This last towel was woven with a dark green weft which almost changed colors once it was planted on the lighter green and the red warp stripes.  I'm always amazed at the differences you can get from variations in weave design and weft colors and must say that I didn't tire of what kept emerging as I wove.

I guess the final question is whether or not I'm done with Farey Fraction sequence weaving.  Probably not.  I expect that the next warp will expand the sequence into a larger design - but who knows, it may take me years to come around to the next iteration in my fascination.

Postscript!

For more about Farey and his fractions, here is a Wikapedia article  and a photo of the Farey Fraction sequence up to 8.  Use the denominators for your own sequence work.

If you are interested in satin weaves and  their various counters, here are a couple of resources that help to explain how they are formed. The documents contain almost identical information but in somewhat different format.  If you eyes aren't glazed over when you finish with these documents, I don't know what it will take☺

http://www2.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/webdocs/mo/D/SatinCounters.pdf

https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/webdocs/gre_satn.pdf