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.

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.