Plain weave in twill ?

A straight twill threading will give plain weave by tieing up the odd shafts on one treadle and the even shafts on another treadle.  If you have 8 shafts and only 8 treadles, you will have to re-tie a couple of treadles to weave plain weave.  If you don't want to do that, just treadle straight twill to separate the different twill treadlings.

That would be my preference anyway because twill and plain weave will draw in at different rates.

Cheers,

Laura

Ellen the drafts on page 28 are written in liftplan format.  Each of the sections shown would require a new tie-up. In this case, they could be woven with 8 treadles but you would need to change the tie-up each time. A liftplan is perfect for a table loom because it shows you which shafts to lift for each pick. It is also great for a mechanical dobby loom or a computer-assisted loom like Flavian Geis uses. He's the author of this article.

It looks like there is a mistake in the 4th liftplan down. This is a very simple threading and you could use lots of different treadlings and/or tie-ups. The idea is to weave a bunch of small designs.

Most 8-shaft floor looms have 10 treadles and a big reason is to have two for plain weave. Your loom with only 8 treadles is unusual.

Some of the other articles show liftplan drafts, too. Many, but not all, can be expressed with tie-ups.  Bonnie

Hi Ellen,

The reason that the tie-up draft is written that way is that this is what a weaver with a computer operated loom would do.  If you tie up this draft, you can try each of these weaves. It looks as though you need a lot of feet to do the treadling, but of course, the computer is doing that and there is only one or two treadles to use. 

You would need to change the tie-up draft to weave the specific weave that you choose.  Then you can treadle it on your loom.  And if you wanted to weave one of the other weaves, you would need to change the treadle tie-up.  This is obviously not written for someone with an ordinary loom and who is in need of an ordinary tie-up draft.

Joanne

Is this what you are looking for?     if you have 8 shafts you can make a multiple tieup (in dutch :meervoudige aanbinding)using 6 shafts for twill and 2 for plainweave;I am not familiar with this because i have only 4 shafts but this is how I think it could work .

All (or at least most) of the more-than-4-shafts Scandinavian looms I have met have the same number of shafts and treadles. To us, this is the "usual" configuration.

Thank you to all of you. I feel enlightened :-)

There are obviously some of these things I would not want to do with my simple 8 or 10 shaft/treadle floor looms!

But I am glad that I was correct in my assumption that unless you tie up another two treadles you can't do a plain weave in a twill. I'll do a straight twill, as Laura suggests.

So far I have only got to enjoy reading this lovely book. It makes excellent accompaniment to my evening coffee, - and is less fattening than cookies :-)

Only 8 treadles on an 8-shaft loom would be a challenge for me. Kerstin, when I taught in England I saw mostly table looms in workshops but there were floor looms in homes with the two additional treadles.

f you have a draft that requires 10 treadles, you can look for a way to do this using both feet if your loom allows you to use two treadles at the same time. One example is shown below.  Alternatively you could create a 6-shaft version which would then be easy to weave with 8 treadles, as Jeannine suggests.

I looked again at page 28 in Twill Thrills.  Counting from the tie-up going down, the second and fourth segments only need 4 treadles and could be woven on 4 shafts. The first one has a fancy tie-up that begins with the first 3 treadles shown below. If you start with the one below and add a bit to the 4 treadles not in use for tabby, you can get a fancy design and also have tabby if you want it.

Table looms are used for sampling because it is so easy to change the tie-up. It does not require a computer-assisted loom to weave the drafts shown in liftplan format. In my opinion, magazines should include tie-up drafts when possible, but here it would occupy much more space on the page. The articles in this book were written for Weaver's Magazine.

Perhaps our tradition of having the same # of treadles as of shafts can be explained by our weaving tradition... Disregarding the Ekenmark books (The Ekenmark family tried to introduce "foreign techniques" (their own words) in the early 1800s, and advocated countermarche and shaft draw looms), all (again, of course, "most") weaving instruction books from the 1850s -> that I have seen do not even mention the possibility of "use tabby". 
When going up from 4 shafts, most weaves were written for dräll pulleys (which means they were constructed with an "opposite" tieup). Dräll could be woven in twill (usually 1/3 against 3/1 - very occasionally 1/2 against 2/1) or satin (1/5 against 5/1), and was considered the most fancy. Looms were described as having 8 or 10 shafts.
There are pictures of 16 shaft looms with horses (if that is the correct word - I mean it as opposed to countermarche), but to weave on such looms was considered very difficult. (And I can believe that... imagine trying to balance such a tieup, with tree levels of horses...)
In all of my older Swedish weaving books, I have never come across any mention of table looms - not counting the band looms with a narrow rigid heddle.

So... looking at tradition, we (Swedes) do not need extra treadles for tabby. If you look at our two well-known loom makers (GAV-Glimåkra and "Öxabäck"), you can see that both of them still stay with this tradition.
(The 4-shaft models usually have 6 treadles, however.)

I don't know how many treadles the finnish Toika usually has nowadays - but the older Toikas I have seen were also made in this tradition.

Being perfectly happy with my old loom, I have not even tried to look at British loom configurations...

The original question was about twills, I know. But it is fun to learn more about looms in other places.

Kerstin, I want two additional treadles because I like turned taquete. Also there are some double weave techniques requiring more treadles.

And I like those treadles very much for tied weaves.  You have a Swedish tradition for weaving a tied threading on opposites, as taquete, but there are many other nice ways to weave on a tied threading.  There are also some designs that are easier with more treadles... but that is one reason we like computer-assisted looms.

Although it is common to have  a Swedish loom with 8 shafts and 8 treadles, or 10 shafts and 10 treadles, you can always add treadles to Swedish loom, at least one can for Glimakra looms.  You can even have 16 treadles if you want to purchase them.

As Kerstin mentioned, there is a cultural difference in the weaves chosen and the looms purchased.

In Scandinavia many weavers are very content with four shafts and they can weave very beautiful things on these four shafts. They know that they can add shafts and treadles to their looms.  Here in the US, weavers will jump into multishaft looms and weaves before they really know much at all about weaving.  Most weavers here are not content with four shafts.  They are advised to purchase looms with at least eight shafts, as many four shaft looms are not expandable, as they are in Scandinavia.

The two block twill and the two block satin are very popular in Sweden and they do not need any more treadles than there are shafts.  Tied weaves, called Kuvikas or Summer and Winter do take more treadles, but often two more is not enough and one then uses two feet to treadle the pattern sheds.

When a Scandinavian weaver wants to expand their pattern capabilities, they have drawlooms to use.  They are readily available there and are much less expensive than computer operated looms.  Taquete can be woven on a drawloom with just four treadles.

There are other differences, but these do affect loom choices.

Joanne