Drafting conventions: is the liftplan read top down or bottom up?

A key group of decisions I had to make for Designing and Weaving Double Cloth concerned the presentation of drafts. This is a topic I am always thinking about in relation to the classes I teach, the handouts I create, the posts I write. In fact, some of my first posts on this blog were about the conventions we use when we read and write weaving drafts. One of the complicating factors in drafting – and in any kind of discussion or documentation of weaves – is that conventions vary from place to place and across different types of weaving practice. While this can be confusing, I have learned to enjoy the variety, even relish it, as a sign of how many different textile cultures contribute to our understanding of weave.

My book is not a book for complete beginners, so I am expecting that most people will come to it with some experience of weaving drafts. This can be a mixed blessing, because our experience sets our expectations, and those expectations may not be justified! Can I just take a moment to make a general plea to all readers and writers of weaving books? Use a key.

If you are publishing a draft, include a key.

If you are reading a draft, look for the key.

The key will likely be at the very front or the very back of the book, and it is invaluable. A good key will tell you whether the writer is presenting you with liftplans, for instance, rather than tie-ups and treadlings. It will tell you what symbols are used, and what they signify. It will tell you whether you are expected to read the treadling from the bottom up or from the top down. And it is this last point which I want to home in on.

In the UK it is more common to write a liftplan or a treadling from the bottom up, but we aren’t scrupulous about it, in part because we are often influenced by North American publications which usually record treadlings in a top down format. In many circumstances the treadling direction doesn’t particularly matter. A plain weave will still be a plain weave whichever pick comes first. And as double cloth is very often plain weave, the same principle applies here. Some weaves, however, are more obviously affected, and the effect can be confusing if you are inexperienced.

Micro and macro levels of design

In general, I think it is easiest to visualise the potential issues at the level of a design rather than the level of the structure. Because the cloth builds up on the loom from the weaver towards the beater, if we want to create a specific layout of blocks, for instance, then we need to plan the sequence of design elements in the order that we will weave them, i.e. from the bottom up.

Here’s an example of one of my 8-shaft Pantiles and Gables table mats from Chapter 2. There’s no draft detail here, because it would be huge, but the drawdown area shows a plan of the overall design.

I want to document these L-shaped motifs in the liftplan and treadling, and to do that I need to show the whole design as it will be built up, i.e. from the bottom, where the weaver is sitting. I can then break the design up into sections: each change in the design will be achieved by changing the lifting sequence or the weft colours, or perhaps both at the same time.

The annotated plan below shows how the weave would start: the first section has alternating areas of solid blue and areas of blue/white; the second section has areas of blue, white, and white/red; and so on all the way up the design. Again, I am not going to worry here about the detail of achieving these combinations.

Let’s suppose, though, that I mapped out this design from the top down. Instead of the plan presented above, I would have the following plan:

It seems straightforward enough. Each design element in turn matches the design elements in the previous version of the plan: (1) is the same as the previous (1), (2) is the same as the previous (2), and so on. But if I wove the design as written from the top down, the result wouldn’t look like the corresponding sketch, it would look like the original design given in the previous sketch. Are they very different? No, not very. But they aren’t the same either.

As you can see when we place them side by side, so that the wide blue base of the first set of Ls is on the bottom for both designs, what we’ve woven from the top down is actually the mirror image of the design in the top down draft. And no, the Ls aren’t the right way round on the back, because there are no blue Ls on the back of either piece!

In practice it’s your choice

Does it matter? In this case, perhaps not. But whether it matters or not to the finished piece, it may well matter to the weaver who wonders what they have done wrong when the result does not match the image they are looking at. (I’m assuming, of course, that we have all used the same threading, but that’s another story for another blog post.)

In my online classes, I encourage people to build up their own designs in this way, by stacking up different elements of their growing double cloth repertoire. When we are composing a design at the ‘macro’ level ourselves, then the ‘micro’ level of the individual liftplans/treadlings can be written either way, and I usually write them top down as that is the most familiar format to people in the class.

However, in the context of a book, wherever I wanted to represent the macro level accurately – whether for a complete design or just for a couple of elements in relation to each other – then I had to commit to ‘bottom up’ drafting at this scale at least. And to do this consistently, it makes a lot more sense if the detail of the draft is recorded from the bottom up as well, so that was my decision. Also, I’m in the UK 🙂

It is my hope that if (or when!) you read Designing and Weaving Double Cloth, you’ll want to use the liftplans and/or treadlings to create your own designs, and of course you can weave them in any direction you please. But I hope this gives you a little bit of insight into the decisions that lie behind the drafts.

First posted on weavingspace.co.uk © Cally Booker