Reading Drafts Part VIII

 

Satin blocks, draft is a draw up showing profile draft, threading draft and tie up

Drawloom draft and why I call the frames that hold heddles shafts.  Drawlooms have two 'harnesses' - the ground harness made up of 2 or more shafts, and the pattern harness which may be 10 to 50 shafts

Drawdown showing two different yarns used in the colour bars to the left and the top of the draw up and the tie up box indicated in the lower right in the greyed square

Draw ups with a colour photo showing the actual cloth

Photos taken from the above books.  Both of the books in Swedish are now available in English translations

So I forgot to sequentially number one of my posts in the 'thread' but did tag it with the 'threading draft' tag.  Realizing that I still had a bunch of books to do, decided to put these four in the same post.

The Cyrus-Zetterstrom has a lot of information packed into a small format and I still reach for it for specific things - like the formulas for metric yarn sizing.

The Damask one I bought in part for the drafts for drawlooms and the great line drawings of looms.  And because I thought that one day I would weave on a drawloom.  (My neck says nope, nope, nope.)

Warp and Weft is one of a series of draft compilations by a group of Swedish weavers.  I was introduced to one of them on a trip to Stockholm when Kerstin and I ran into her by chance.

And the Big Book of Weaving by Laila Lundell is a great introductory book for anyone dealing with a Scandinavian style loom, and just overall introduction to weaving from a Swedish perspective.

Prior to personal computers and weaving software, Swedish weaving drafts were traditionally done in a very specific manner.  Now that is changing as more people turn to the efficiency of using a computer.

The book Warp and Weft has some weave structures that are common in Sweden but less so in North America.  Traditionally Swedes weave on counter balanced looms (up to 16 shafts - yes, really!)  or counter march (also contre marche).  If anyone is interested in multi-shaft counter balanced looms, Lundell's Big Book of Weaving has great diagrams and explanations of how they work.

People tend to exist in their own personal reality bubble.  If they have never seen a multi-shaft counter balanced loom, they don't know that they do, in fact, exist.  I have woven on several.

If they don't know about drawlooms, they don't understand why I choose to use shaft rather than harness for a 'standard' floor loom which has just one 'harness' but may have 4, 8, 16, 32 shafts.

If they have never had a particular experience with a loom or yarn, they assume that it is user error, when it might be equipment or even environment.

Understanding the principles involved in this craft will help determine what is going wrong when it does, and inform decisions on how to fix the problem.

It is one reason why, when I decided to 'retire', I chose to continue to teach the Olds College master weaving class(es).  The program tries to teach the principles of the craft, encourages weavers to analyze their results and work towards figuring out the best approach to fixing any issues.

With the roll out of the vaccines beginning this month, there is now some hope that the classes will be able to happen, although possibly not.  It will depend on people getting a grip on the virus that is running rampant throughout the globe so that travel can happen and people can gather in groups in not very well ventilated rooms.

So - stay home if you can.  Wear a mask if you need to go out.  Maintain physical distance.  Knock this virus down, now.  Christmas is not cancelled, just how we celebrate it.  Let's all pull together and get our world - and our lives - back on track.

Reading Drafts part VII

 

Ars Textrina was a scholarly publication that dealt with the history of textiles and as such was expensive.  I bought every issue until I could no longer afford them, but they stopped publication soon after anyway.  

A few years ago (quite a few now, man, am I ever *old*!) I needed money quite badly, had run out of space on my shelves for my library and realized that there were a bunch of books that I simply wasn't using.  So I started the Great Library Cull.  I knew that these volumes were prized by many people and rare as hen's teeth, so I decided to sell them all - except for these two.

Patricia Hilts had somehow found a couple of old German manuscripts - weaver's pattern books - and translated them, putting them together for Ars Textrina.  She did computer generated diagrams of the weave structures - thumbnails, as it were - and included the threading and tie up drafts.  

The drafts can be woven in a variety of ways, of course.  I have frequently used them as 'fancy' twills, playing with the tie up and treadling to get a variety of different designs all from the same warp (also changing the weft, just to add colour into the mix).  Lately I've been using them as twill blocks.

At any rate, because I have 16 shafts, I have been extending the threading draft into 16 shafts instead of 12.

There are several threading drafts given per page, no doubt to save paper.  To read these, the designs are divided by the long (more or less straight) line with the dot at the top, bottom and the middle.  The squiggle with the dot at the end of the M or W is the end of that particular threading draft.  (or the beginning if reading from left to right)

It took me a while of playing with the progressions in Fiberworks, seeing what happened when, before I got the hang of it.  And then I just got carried away playing with them.

During the Cull, I decided I used these two volumes far too frequently as a resource and kept them, even though I knew I could have gotten quite a lot of money in the eBay auction I was running getting rid of the books I had decided I could live without.

The more I worked with these (and other) drafts, the more I understood how to make the threads do what I wanted, where I wanted, when I wanted.

And I give thanks to Bob Keates and Ingrid Boesel whenever I do a deep dive into a weave structure for designing/developing Fiberworks weaving software (and all the rest of the software designers for developing .wif so that drafts can more easily be shared amongst the various programs).

Reading Drafts part VI

 

Fabric Structure by John. H. Strong was published in 1947 and reflects British terminology - eg honeycomb or Brighton honeycomb is what North Americans would call waffle weave.  (top photo)  Strong shows a variety of tie ups for achieving different effects in the cloth and then rather poor black and white photos show the cloth after wet finishing.   This is one of those weave structures that relies on wet finishing to develop to its final state.

here is a four shaft version showing much the same - areas of plain weave, then diamonds with weft floats, then warp floats.  shown in liftplan because treadles tend to run out, so a direct tie up is more versatile even if it means holding down three treadles at once to get the different options,

In the section on pile weaves (and others) he utilizes cross section drawings so that you can see the actual path through the cloth.

It is small format, very little white space on the page, text crammed in to get as much information in the book as possible.  The language is of its time - 1940s British English - so a bit pedantic.  Not everyone will feel comfortable reading the text, but I find that it's an interesting alternate resource for some fairly obscure and not currently well understood weave structures.

Strong uses the 

x

-------------

            y

diagram for showing various twills so it's a good idea to really understand how this kind of diagram works, and goes quite deeply into double layer fabrics in a lot of detail.  Again cross section diagrams help to understand the path of the threads through the cloth.  He also uses different symbols to indicate the different layer threads in the tie up boxes, so while the text might be dense, it is a good idea to at least read the introduction to each section so you understand the kind of notation he used.

Reading Drafts part V

 

Doris Goerner

charting Bedford Cord

More textbooks, this time contemporary, presented by Doris Goerner.  These books are from the UK so be aware that where Brighton Honeycomb is listed, we would call that waffle weave.  

These books have very little text and large clear illustrations of various weave structures.  I think they were developed as additional/supplemental information for classes Ms Goerner taught.  There are brief explanations, as in this one that says Bedford Cord can be developed without 'cutting ends' but the ribs will be less prominent.  And then shows a draft without the cutting ends to compare how that looks.

I would expect that people who learn best from seeing or doing rather than reading would find these helpful.  Volume one covers the 'simpler' weaves, while Volume two goes into the more complex weave structures, usually with more layers - double weave, pique, etc.  With very little text, I was able to concentrate on what was happening with the threads, and then do some designs of my own using these to jump off from.

I did do Bedford cord in several fabrics and chose to weave them upside down in order to lift the fewest number of shafts.

It was while reading Watson's book (I think) that I learned that Bedford cord was commonly used for durable fabrics for things like riding jodhpurs.  I took that idea of using it for clothing fabric, did a silk warp with a fairly open density, used a fine wool/cashmere for weft and wove the above fabric for a swing coat.  Normally the long floats on the back side make the weave structure not the best choice for clothing, but after fulling the fabric wool/cashmere fulled nicely and the floats on the inside were not an issue.  It was also fine enough threads that the floats were not very long.  My mother wore this jacket in quite cold weather said she was kept warm.

This cloth was woven in a much heavier thread than the swing coat and the floats on the back were much longer.  I didn't have enough shafts to do cutting ends, plus I didn't want really deep ribs because the cloth was turned into placemats for a friend.  The ribs trapped air in the channels and helped to protect her wooden table from hot pots and plates.  The placemats were backed with a commercial fabric and the edges were bound with the same fabric.  

Drafts are just maps to a location.  It might be where we want to go, or close to it.  Or it may spark our interest and lead us to completely new and unexpected places.

The more we understand about how threads can go together to create a cloth, the better able we are to figure out what it is we want, and how to get there.  I would not recommend these books to a very new weaver because they work 'best' (imho) for someone who already has a general understanding of the various 'common' weave structures.  OTOH, some people visualize things very well from graphic representation so I don't discourage anyone from acquiring any resource that they feel might be useful.

Many of the books in my library rarely see the light of day.  For example, I haven't pulled the Goerner books off the shelf in years.  However, I know they are there and when I need to look at them, they are literally at my fingertips.  And you can probably tell from the post-it notes poking out the edges that yes, I can and do use them.  Sometimes it's just to refresh my memory, sometimes it's to look more deeply into a weave structure that I may not have used before but am contemplating now.  Sometimes it's just plain curiosity.

Acquiring knowledge is never a waste of time because you never know when it might come in handy.

Reading Drafts

Two textbooks - title pages

page about double weave from Advanced Textile Designing

I don't remember how I managed to acquire photocopies of these two textbooks, prepared for the textile industry by the International Textbook Company of Scranton, PA, but I remember they were done with permission.  It was most likely through WeaveTech.  The books were no longer in print, and someone with connections was able to contact someone who gave permission for photocopies to be made.  All I had to do was pay for the copying charge and the shipping.

The draft above shows some of the ways that textiles get shown in order to see the path the yarns are taking through the structure.  

The 'usual' drawdown is all well and good - until you are trying to show what is happening with multiple layers.  At that point a cross section gives a better picture.

I got these books about the time I was playing with stitched weaves such as pique and double weave and they helped me visualize what the threads were doing, how to select the stitchers - where they should go, how frequent they should be, whether I wanted them hidden or part of the overall appearance of the cloth.

Doing this kind of designing made my brain hurt - but in a good way!  

Unfortunately they were enormously time consuming to work out.  I would spend an hour or two every day, trying to work out how to make them work, then let the draft 'sit' until the next evening when I would open the file again and see that it wasn't quite 'right' and edit.  Sometimes it was just easier to begin over again.

During this time I designed coat fabrics, which I've shared before but will do again here:

Two layers, cotton exterior, cotton/wool blend lining, fulled to 'shrink' the lining and create air pockets between the two layers for added insulation

Wool base with cotton stripes woven for design effect.  When the wool shrank, the cotton puckered on the surface creating texture

The top fabric took many hours to get to the point I was happy enough to weave it.  The bottom layer took less time because it was less complex.

Being able to chart the cross section of the cloth helped me see how to make the threads do what I wanted them to do, then I had to figure out how to transfer that passage into a 'traditional' weaving draft.

Weaving software helped by showing me instantly what was happening or it would have taken even longer than it did, if I had to do drawdowns by hand.  Especially the top cloth, with a 1:4 ratio of surface to lining (if I remember correctly - I would have to dig out my GCW files - it might have been 1:2).  The surface was 2/8 cotton woven in plain weave, the lining a 4:4 twill.  The first four shafts were used to weave the surface, the other 12 shafts wove the lining.  The two layers were stitched together in an irregular fashion so that there were not obvious twill lines.  The stitchers were hidden, not part of the surface cloth on view.

I don't have copyright information on these books, but from the style of the diagrams and the text, I am guessing early 20th century.

They are text dense, and the language is of its time, but filled with really interesting information, written for students of textile design.

(PS - these fabrics were woven with a non-computer assisted loom - I had to peg the dobby bars by hand, not just punch in the numbers then let the computer take over the treadling.)

 

Reading Drafts part IV

 

pink post-it notes poking out the side

an explanation of pique by breaking it down into its parts

First published in 1912 (according to the info in the book) Watson's Textile Design and Colour has been updated frequently throughout the 20th century.

I discovered the book in the 1980s I think and immediately bought a copy.  If I remember correctly there are two volumes, this one addressing 'elementary and figured fabrics'.  I might even have the other book, but my hand fell on this one this morning.  (I have quite a few old time books and sometimes I forget exactly what I have until I go rooting about on the shelves!)

Once again, you really need to read through the text to discover how the author is representing the information being conveyed.

The above draft shows pique, which has at least two layers, sometimes a third stuffing warp or weft.

combo of pique and stuffed double weave. white layer wool, blue layer hand dyed silk

This draft breaks down the various weave structures that go into creating the cloth - a two dimensional representation of something that is actually three dimensional, and therefore very difficult to sort out what goes where and how it will actually look once woven.  Notice that there no tie up box - instead what is shown is a liftplan.

Again, this book is text dense, but it also has lots of diagrams and covers a lot of ground in terms of the possibilities of what is called 'elementary'.

The book was published in England, so some of the terms are British English weaving terms.  It is also dated in its language being first published in 1912.  This is one of those books where the extensive index comes in handy so that I can look a topic up and then just read (chew) through that bit of information.  Then I go to the weaving software and see if I can work the structure into something personal.  I won't say unique because someone, somewhere, has likely done it before.  I follow the Elizabeth Zimmerman path of never claiming something is new, never-been-done-before, but that I have simply re-discovered or 'unvented' it.

A weaving draft is just a set of possibilities - of potential.  It is what the weaver does with that potential - the density, colours used, the arrangement of the threads, expanding or contracting the size of the blocks (if there are blocks), that insertion of the weaver/designer's personality and vision, that makes something different.

More shafts mean more complex cloth can be woven more efficiently.  But before there was technology, there was a weaver with a sword or pick up stick, making the threads go where they wanted them to go.  Understanding the path of the threads through the cloth is the key.  How one physically gets them there is just a matter of mechanical assistance.  To this day there are weavers who use a backstrap loom and pick up every shed with a stick and - using what some people consider to be very simple equipment - 

create textiles of great complexity and sophistication.  It is not the tools but what the weaver does with them.

Reading Drafts part III

 

G. H. Oelsner first published 1915, then reprinted by Dover in 1952.  It says it was translated, and I am assuming from German but don't know for sure.

threading below, draw up above, tie up notated in the top left corner - draft was turned 90 degrees to fit on the page - two drafts shown one on each page

draw down with the tie up noted by the tiny hash marks, which I have made more obvious by drawing in the vertical red line.  Threading is point progression.

Oelsner's book is one that you really need to read the text to find out how to understand the various notations used in the book.

Sometimes threading drafts are given, sometimes tie ups are, or sometimes, like with the last draft, the tie up is indicated within the fabric structure.

As the weave structures change, sometimes the notation changes because sometimes the information is not as transparent and needs to be indicated in some way.

So the upper draft gives the threading and how the cloth will look when woven in a twill and the twill tie up used is in that tiny little line at the top left.  It is one way to show how a twill should be executed.

For four shafts a twill can be indicated thus:

1

---------

       3

or 

2

---------------

             2

or 

3

--------

         1

You read it by noting that in the top graphic there will be 1 warp thread up and three left down to form the shed and the weft will pass between them.

The tie up then becomes

shaft 1 is tied to treadle one

shaft 2 is tied to treadle two

shaft 3 is tied to treadle three

shaft 4 is tied to treadle four

The characteristic of twill is that each pick will move up and over by one thread.

The middle one would be our 'standard' two-two twill, shown above, and the bottom one would have three shafts tied to each treadle to lift three and leave one shaft down.  (all for rising/jack type looms - reverse would be true for sinking/counter balanced looms.  For countre marche or counter march looms, the notation tells you which shafts are to be raised, which to be lowered.)

This is another dense book that requires some study to fully understand what is contained in it.  Many people assume it's just twills, but it goes beyond 'just' twills and into some other areas that can be quite fascinating.  It has weave structures for many different numbers of shafts and some are not well known.  Maybe one of these days I'll take a dive into the back pages and see what wonders they hold.

In the meantime I browse through it looking for interesting things like the scallops in the third draft, based on satin and which I have woven in a number of different yarns and densities.

A number of years ago I culled my library (I wasn't using some of them and I needed the money so I sold them) but I kept some of the books that I use routinely for inspiration.  While I may not use this one frequently, I do use it often enough that I would miss it if I couldn't find it.