Name Drafts Aren't Just for Overshot....

 

Above is a name draft using -- why not? -- the name Michelangelo, employing an Echo threading and a twill tieup and treading. A name draft is a fun and fairly easy way to design a weaving pattern, encoding the name of a friend or loved one or, in the case of Michelangelo, an icon, as a sort of coded message in your weaving. You can achieve this either by hand using graph paper or using weaving software.

(A bit of self-promotion here: I will be teaching a one-day workshop on this subject, called "Name Drafts, 8 Shafts, and Parallel Threadings," at Convergence 2026 at the Sheraton New Orleans in New Orleans, LA, next August 12-16. Registration will begin soon, but the schedule hasn't come out yet, so keep checking back on the link above for updated information. The subject of this post is NOT how to create name drafts with Echo threadings because I wouldn't want to give away the gist of the workshop. However, if you keep reading, I will walk you step-by-step in creating a name draft using deflected-double-weave techniques.)

As for name drafting itself, let's define our terms. We'll start with an impeccable source, Madelyn van der Hoogt, who wrote in Handwoven magazine on January 22, 2018, "A name draft is an arbitrary way to create a threading draft (usually threading, though it can be used for blocks or for treadling orders, too). There are many ways to do name drafting, but one is to assign a letter to each shaft: A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, D = 4, E = 1, F = 2, etc., for four shafts, for example. Then you just thread the number corresponding to the letters from words or phrases. Naturally, this doesn't necessarily give you a threading that can be used, so then you adjust. Most often name drafting is used for overshot."

But not just for overshot, as you can see from my Echo example above. As Marg Coe points out in the introduction to her online course, "What's in a NameDraft?", "Traveling outside name-drafting with traditional overshot we will design shadow weave, deflected double weave, double weave, rep, Corris effects...." All these designs are possible using name-draft techniques.

Sneak preview: In the upcoming issue of Handwoven magazine, I have used a name draft to create a deflected-double-weave design based on the name of my beloved grandfather, George Relyea. (I won't give away any more of the story, which is the "Yarn Lab" project in the next issue -- and it brings some exciting news! 'Nuf said.)

Here's how Grandpa George weaves up in deflected double weave on 8 shafts. I really like the design!

So how do you do this? I work with Fiberworks (the Mac version, which varies slightly from the PC version, but these instructions should get you there on either system.)

Step 1) Pick a name. (Please note that some names do work better than others, so, as Madelyn writes, you have to make adjustments.)

Step 2) In the "Tools" drop-down menu, (found at the top right side of the drawdown page as you begin), click on "Namedraft" and then type the name in the box provided. No spaces, no initial caps. The name-draft window gives you all sorts of choices, but for the purposes of this tutorial, just leave it as is. (You can experiment to your heart's content after you've learned the basics.)

Step 3) Click on "Accept" (making sure you have one color in the warp and another in the weft), and there you have it! An overshot-looking design (more like turned overshot, but anyway) that's built on the name you chose. 

Here's what the beginning of my name draft looks like on my computer screen.

Step 4) On the "Tools" menu, click on "Block Substitution." Then click on "Classic Weaves," and  "Overshot, Multishaft." Then click "Accept." My draft now looks like this.

Step 5) Using the shaft-shuffling tool at the top of the Fiberworks window (the one that has a single arrow pointing both up and down with a horizontal line going through it), use the cursor to change shaft 3 to become 5 and shaft 4 (which is now on shaft 3) to become shaft 6. This means that your threading blocks always alternate between shafts 1 or 2 and shafts 3 or 4. This is based on the Stubenitsky method of drafting deflected double weave.

Step 6) On the "Tieup" dropdown menu, click on "Shafts and Treadles," change the number of treadles to 8, and then click "Set."

Step 7) Again on the "Treadling" drop-down menu, click on "Weave as drawn in," making sure that you unclick the box for "colors." Then click "Copy Exactly as Drawn." 

Step 8) At this point, your draft will look like a mess, but that's because you need to change the tieup to a deflected-double-weave tieup. These tieups are always boxes of 2 shafts and 2 treadles that are either 1) all black, meaning two adjacent shafts will be lifted together twice in the treadling, 2) all white, meaning that two adjacent shafts will stay down together twice in the treadling, or 3) weaving plain weave.

My tieup looks like this: (Note: To repeat, I'm following the Stubenitsky method in the tieup, in which the four shafts and treadles on the bottom left and the four shafts and treadles on the top right are tied up to weave plain weave, while the four shafts and treadles on the top left and the four shafts and treadles on the bottom right weave the pattern, comprising four-unit squares of two shafts and two treadles which are either all black to lift the warp or all white to lower the warp. The plain-weave portions of the tieup are always stationary, while the blocks of 4 black or 4 white can be moved about to alter the pattern.) Here's what my tieup looks like.

Step 9) To see your design as deflected double weave, you need to change the warp colors so that every other block of four warp ends is one color and the adjacent blocks are another color.  And you need once again to click on the "Treadling" dropdown menu, click on "Weave as drawn in," and click on "Copy Exactly as Drawn" so that the colors in your weft alternate block by block as well.

And this is what you get with my name draft.

Not bad for an hour's work, don't you think? And this technique allows you to encode something special, unique, and meaningful to you. Again, if you're interested in learning the full spectrum of possibilities for name drafting, I urge you to check out Marg Coe's free, live course (click here).

Thanks for reading!

My "George Relyea" name draft again, this time with a different tieup.