woven pixel | Tien Chiu's Blog

August 6, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Designing the liftplans

I’m now about 2/3 done with the threading, and expect to finish threading and sleying on Saturday (I still have lots more cherries to pit!). Then, of course, I will have to debug the warp (I already know that I missed one thread somewhere), so I don’t expect to get down to serious weaving on Sunday morning.

However, I am already designing drafts. I have decided to use the same basic pattern in the liftplan, but different weave structures. This is pretty easy to do using the techniques outlined in The Woven Pixel and The Liftplan Connection (the former by Alice Schlein and Bhakti Ziek, the latter by Alice Schlein).

Here is my base pattern:

base pattern for the network drafted liftplan

And here it is, filled in with the weave structures:

(This is waffle weave against a plain weave background, by the way.)

And, finally, this is what happens after you cut and paste into the liftplan, and combine it with the threading:

basic sampler liftplan waffle vs plainweave — network drafted draft, waffle vs plainweave

The nice thing about doing this using a Photoshop file is that you can use the same basic pattern and just change the pattern fills, thus making it very quick to create more files. Here, for example, is the same pattern in honeycomb vs. a 3/1 twill:

network drafted sampler, honeycomb vs. 3-1 twill

This took me about 10 minutes to generate, including creating the pattern for the honeycomb (which I think is right, but need to check later this morning). Detailed instructions on how to do this are in The Liftplan Connection and The Woven Pixel. (Both of which are well worth buying – and I own both – but if you are designing for a dobby loom (as opposed to a jacquard loom), The Liftplan Connection is a LOT cheaper than The Woven Pixel and is written primarily for dobby loom weavers, so I’d start there.)

This also shows pretty clearly that if you start with the same basic template, you wind up with essentially the same (large-scale) pattern; only the weave structures that fill in the pattern are different. This is important to me because I want to weave up a sampler; using identical patterns will tell me how each weave structure behaves in that pattern.

I have now looked into a couple of structures. Waffle weave works on an 8-end repeat. Honeycomb sort of works, but the cells are so small that I’m dubious whether it will show clearly, especially at 40 epi. M’s and O’s don’t work – too many ends. I’m pretty sure that spider weave will work, so I’ll try that next. Huck works (although it requires some adaptation, since the threading units are 3 or 5 ends), and technically I could manage some overshot, but it really requires more threads to look good, I think. All fodder for experimentation!

Also I think I am starting to understand the power and limits of network drafting. It allows you to create an uber-pattern of one weave structure contrasting with one or more other weave structures, BUT you must use a number of shafts that is substantially less than your “regular” number of shafts, and all the weave structures must be weavable on the same threading. The end result is that each individual pattern is less complex than it might otherwise be, but since you have a larger pattern going, this is probably not such a bad thing.

May 25, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Designing doubleweave

I spent this morning playing with doubleweave design, and rapidly discovered that Fiberworks’ limitation of “only” 64 treadles was a serious limiting factor in what I wanted to do. So I moved into Photoshop, and spent about an hour generating presets for doubleweave (thanks to Pat Stewart for showing me how!). Then I started fiddling around with Photoshop.

(Warning: this is a long and fairly technical post. If you aren’t into Photoshop design in weaving, feel free to skip it.)

Here’s what I did:

First, I took my profile draft and separated it into two layers, one for the white and one for the black. I colored the white layer green for easier visibility:

Original profile draft

profile draft, separated into layers (green layer, left; black layer, right)

Then I made layer 2 (the green layer) invisible, and selected a section in the black layer (figure 1). I filled that section with the chosen preset (figure 2). Then I made the green layer visible and the formerly-black layer invisible, and filled the green parts with the second preset (figures 3, 4). Finally, I made both layers visible again (figure 5) to produce the finished liftplan.

I did it this way because I wanted control over each section of the liftplan. I wanted to be able to fill one section with 1/3 twills on top, one section with 2/2 twills on top, and one section with 3/1 twills on top. Using layers rather than the magic wand enabled me to select each section separately, without a whole lot of fiddling. Here’s a photo of the final result, which has three different patterns done up in sections:

The first section has 1/3 twill, warp A and weft C on top, alternating with warp B and weft D on top. The second section is the same, but with 2/2 twills, and the third section is the same, but with 3/1 twills. Totally different effects, same threading, same warp/weft combination.

I don’t think I’ll use this particular drawdown for my shawls since the changes are so dramatic (I was hoping for a subtler effect), but I think the method is interesting, which is why I’ve shared it here.

We have now received all the RSVPs for the wedding – it’s looking like it will be smaller than expected, about 57 people rather than 75. We’re a bit disappointed that so many people can’t make it, especially the older relatives suffering from health problems, but on the plus side, we’ll get to spend more time with the people who are coming! (And I have fewer bookmarks to make!)

December 31, 2008 by Tien Chiu

Japanese crests in Photoshop

Following the double-happiness draft, I started thinking of other things that could be done with Asian symbols. I remembered that I have a book full of Japanese heraldic crests, which are typically round in shape, stylized, and quite beautiful. Just the sort of thing that would work well in weaving!

Since I didn’t have the book with me (we fly home tomorrow), I went looking on the Internet, and found a site with lots of Japanese crests. (They are not copyrighted, so can be used freely.) I picked out this one:

It’s symmetric, so I could weave half of it on 24 shafts and use a point threading to create the second half.

Reserving four shafts to fill in spaces between the motifs, I shrank the image down to 40 pixels wide (twice times 20 shafts), and cut it in half:

Crest cut in half and reduced to red-and-white

Then I experimented with fills. I realized quickly that any pattern fill would be reversed when I used the point threading. I tried diagonal lines of twill, but the reversal in the middle of the symbol was very distracting. Satin would produce very long floats where the pattern reversed. So I finally settled on broken twills:

Finished image with 1-3 broken twill in background and 3-1 broken twill in foreground

Because there are no strong diagonals, it could be reversed without calling too much attention to the reversals; because the max float length in a broken twill is 3, reversing it would produce only 5-thread floats, which at my usual sett is only about 1/8″.

So I saved the file as a .bmp, opened it as a sketchpad file in Fiberworks PCW, and cut and pasted from the sketchpad to the liftplan, producing this finished draft:

It’s a pretty draft, I hope to weave it up someday. Especially since it’s on a fairly simple threading, I could thread up with a point threading and try doing many different crests. I’d make them as Christmas gifts for the relatives, but I’m not sure how Chinese relatives would feel about getting Japanese crests, given the long history between China and Japan!

So far I haven’t done anything particularly advanced with the Woven Pixel techniques, but I hope to delve into the chapters on doubleweave someday. Perhaps once I get back!

December 30, 2008 by Tien Chiu

Woven Chinese calligraphy

I couldn’t sleep this morning (my body wakes me up at 5-6am regardless of when I went to sleep) so I decided to play around with drafts while waiting for everyone else to get up. I started playing with a very blocky double-happiness symbol, thinking that would be easier to manage:

It’s a symmetric design, which means that instead of using 24 shafts for the whole symbol, I could use 24 shafts for half the symbol and just repeat it, enabling me to make the symbol larger, about 48 threads wide. At my typical sett (40-45 epi) that would be just over an inch wide, easily large enough to read.

However, I quickly decided I didn’t like the blocky look. It didn’t have any of the organic flow that I associate with Chinese calligraphy, and I thought it was just plain ugly.

So I grabbed a prettier version from the Internet:

I chose this image in part because I liked the calligraphy, but primarily because it would cut in half gracefully. To capture the calligraphic image in an attractive manner, I needed as many shafts as I could get, and cutting it in half would effectively double the number of shafts I could use.

Then (following Alice Schlein’s Woven Pixel techniques) I reduced the cut-in-half version to an image about 30 pixels wide and 60-odd pixels tall, figuring I could fiddle with the long horizontal stroke to reduce the number of shafts later:

Double happiness symbol, reduced to 30 pixels wide (shown magnified)

Following Bonnie’s advice, I decided to fill in the foreground with long floats (to accentuate the symbol, since long floats catch the eye) and the background with short floats. So, following Alice’s techniques, I used Photoshop to fill in the character with an eight-shaft satin pattern and the background with a four-shaft broken twill.

I made some other adjustments (mostly removing long floats and “cleaning up” the image) and finally arrived at this:

Double happiness symbol as a weaving draft

Notice how I crammed the two images together in the threading to produce the double-happiness symbol, and repeated the plain broken twill to space the double-happiness symbols apart.

I’m very pleased with the resulting draft. Thank you, Alice, for writing The Woven Pixel! It’s a really powerful technique that’s allowing me to do some very interesting things with imagery.