How to 'Downsize' a 14-Shaft Pattern for 8 Shafts... and even 4 Shafts

Let's start with just one draft, because -- while these principles can apply to many designs -- I recently had to downsize a point-twill design, which happens to be one of my favorite weaving patterns.

It's a historic 14-shaft draft, fondly known as "The Earl," derived from a tablecloth that was used as the canvas for a 1626 painting of the Earl of Mar in Scotland. (To read the original 2020 post about "The Earl," click here.)

Above is the original Gebrochene pattern (in German that means "broken," while in English we call it Ms and Ws). Marjie Thompson, master weaver and lover of historical patterns, shared the WIF with me some time ago. Thank you, Marjie!

But not everyone has 14 shafts, right?

"Shaft envy" is what weavers call it. What can you do if you love this design but you have just 8 shafts? The answer is to "downsize" the threading, tieup, and treadling, following the shapes of the original 14-shaft threading but systematically reducing the peaks and valleys as best we can by using a ratio for each twill line (or block, depending on how you want to define your terms). And that ratio may have to vary across the threading. It gets complicated.

In keeping with that explanation, here's what the Earl might look like on 8 shafts. 

Not bad, eh? Not quite as ornate as the original design, of course, which is what happens when you're weaving with fewer shafts. But it's a pretty good adaptation, in my view. 

So how to do this? Since the design is tromp as writ (treadled as threaded), all one has to do is reduce the ups and downs of the threading to fit into 8 shafts, then repeat the threading in the treadling and create a tieup that mimics the original.

Let's start with the first twill line. For the 14-shaft version, you have a descending twill line, from upper right to lower left, which can easily be reduced from 14 to 8 shafts.

Original twill line on 14 shafts

Same twill line reduced to 8 shafts. This is the easy part ;o)

For the second motif, forming a "V," the original threading has a descent and an ascent of 6 shafts each, beginning at shaft 14, descending to shaft 9, and then ascending back to shaft 14. To keep the draft within 8 shafts, I began the "V" at shaft 8 and then descended to shaft 5 and back up to 8. That means the "ratio" is now 6 shafts reduced to 4 shafts -- not quite following the ratio of 14 shafts to 8 shafts, but creating a "V" threading that looks like the original pattern.

The Earl on 14 "V" threading (second motif from the right in original threading).

6 ends going down, then going back up

The "V" motif (aka descending-point-twill block) reduced to 8 shafts

This might not be true for all weavers, but when I downsize a pattern, I'm not looking to maintain an exact ratio for every block in the threading, as if 14 to 8 would be the rule throughout. (Besides, it just won't work out mathematically, because sometimes you would have to round up or down accordingly in your numbers.) More important, in my view, is to try to follow the original silhouette of the draft. So, for the above portion of the threading, a 6-shaft descent in the original 14-shaft threading becomes a 4-shaft descent in the 8-shaft version.

Moving on to the next descending twill motif: the line in the original descends 10 shafts beginning on shaft 14. For 8 shafts, the line begins at shaft 8, the topmost shaft (as with the original design) and descends 6 shafts. Again, the ratio differs from the original 14 to 8 -- in this case, the ratio is 10 to 6. So I'm adhering to the form of the design rather than exactly to the numbers.

On 14 shafts, the third twill block descends from shaft 14 to shaft 5

On 8 shafts, the third twill block descends from shaft 8 to shaft 3

The next twill line, ascending from the right to the left: the design rises 5 shafts in the original and 3 shafts in the 8-shaft adaptation. I could continue describing the pattern adaptations, but I think that you get the idea....

As you can see, there's a method to the madness here. Basically, you want to preserve the overall form of the threading. This means you don't have to be precise as much as you have to be painterly, you might say, creating a simpler line that follows a similar shape of the original, but with shallower ascents and descents.

The bigger challenge is when you want to reduce a complex design on 14 shafts to just 4 shafts. It can be done, certainly, but you lose a lot of detail.

Here's how you might design The Earl on 4 shafts.

It's hardly recognizable, you might say.  

And yet... this is still an Ms and Ws pattern, with interesting motifs throughout, worth weaving into a scarf or a tea towel. (It also might work as a great threading for overshot. But that would be another post.) If you look back at the threading of the original draft, you'll see that this 4-shaft version does follow the hills and valleys of that threading, even though much is lost in the details of the pattern. 

I invite you, dear reader, to share in the comments your own method of adapting a draft to fewer shafts. Someone else might have a more exacting approach, for certain. (Perhaps someone really savvy could use AI, come to think of it.) And certainly some patterns (other than twill) may lend themselves better or worse to a reduction in shafts. In any event, the approach I've outlined works well for me.

Thanks for reading!

Here's to John Erskine, 2nd Earl of Mar, painted by Adam de Colone, 1626.

(Still, we're more interested in the canvas.)

This Pattern Is More than 400 Years Old... with a Few Changes

 It all starts with a 1626 portrait of John Erskine, 2nd Earl of Mar and Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, painted by Adam de Colone. 

The painting hangs in the National Galleries of Scotland, where researchers have found that the canvas is in fact a linen tablecloth, a practice that was common at the time. The tablecloth was woven on 14 shafts in this Gebrochene pattern.

If you're a frequent reader of this blog, you may recall that I've written about this before -- most recently, on September 18, 2022, in a post that gives you more details on how I altered the pattern but kept the original design line. I learned of it maybe 20 years ago from Marjie Thompson, who calls it "The Earl". 

It was not a stretch to take the threading and create a parallel threading 14 shafts above it, which I did just to see what would happen. I figured it could be woven as Echo or, by adding tabby to the treadling, as Jin (aka Turned Taqueté). The Jin drawdown I designed looks like this.

Here's a detail to give you a better idea of the design.

I really liked the varied geometry of the pattern, so this is what I used for the motifs in the center of the scarf, using two different weft colors, violet and gold. (The gold is in the central section, where the fabric scrunches up into pleats, seen around the neck on the mannikin. That's because the yarn is a combination of silk tram and stainless steel, which has memory.)

The mountain-like motifs at the beginning and end of the scarf -- in purple and orange -- are woven in a doubleweave pattern using what I call a "carved" tieup. (The idea is outlined in Marian Stubenitsky's definitive work, Weaving with Echo and Iris, which provides all number of tieup options for Echo woven as doubleweave.)

When you're weaving four-color doubleweave on an Echo threading, these "carved" variations in the tieup make for lots of color shifts, so that a color first appears on top of the cloth and then shifts to the bottom. This maximizes the potential for color blending.

Adding to the potential for color play: I used a painted warp combined with a black warp for the parallel threading. The technique is quite simple: You wind a two-color warp of natural and black and then paint the entire warp. The natural-colored yarn absorbs the dye and the black does not. 

I love the yarn that I used for the warp, and I doubt I will ever find it again, because I got it at one of those wonderful guild sales. It's a 24/3 unmercerized cotton, so I really didn't have to worry about threads breaking and selvages fraying. For the doubleweave weft, I used 16/2 bamboo in blue, orange, and burgundy, and for the Jin wefts, I used 60/2 silk in deep violet and, as I mentioned, tram-silk/stainless-steel in gold, purchased from Lunatic Fringe, which pleats and bends in the center section.

To me, the motifs look like mountains and the colors remind me of a western sunset. So I've named the piece "Colorado", which means "ruddy" in Spanish. It reminds me of the sunsets over the Sangre de Cristo range, near where my daughter and her family live. The Earl is well traveled indeed.

Thanks for reading!

Gebrochene, Echo and Jin with Fiberworks: Putting 'The Earl' Through His Paces

Ah, the old Weaver's magazine... such an endless source of inspiration! Recently, I was looking at an issue from 1997 and came upon a story by Marjie Thompson about the source of the above draft, "The Earl's Canvas." (Thanks to Thompson for sharing it with me.) She had given a talk to our guild about this years ago and I never forgot the beautiful silk scarf she wove. 

The pattern was discovered in a portrait of John Erskine, second Earl of Mar in Scotland, in the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. Painted in 1626 by Adam de Colone, it features a Jacobean noble with a lace ruff and badge of office. 

What's interesting to weavers, however, isn't the painting itself, but rather the canvas it's painted on. According to Thompson, a museum curator analyzed the pattern in the 1970s and found that it's actually a 14-shaft Gebrochene design that was probably an old tablecloth. 

And what is Gebrochene (pronounced in German "geBROKena")? Literally it means "broken," but to weavers it's basically M's and W's. According to Thompson:

"It's a twill interlacement with an elaborate threading and treadling and a twill tieup. Usually both warp and weft are the same yarn, historically linen. Gebrochene tablecloths are pictured in medieval art and Gebrochene drafts are found in... books from the early 17th century. Patterns can be quite elaborate; one design by Jacob Angstadt shows over 900 ends in one repeat."

At last we get to the point of this blog post, which is: This beautiful draft can easily be translated into an Echo threading. And a Jin design. And Shadow Weave and Rep and Double Weave, all through the magic of Fiberworks.

You start by reducing the "The Earl" threading to 8 shafts (because not everyone has a 16-shaft loom). Next, under the Treadling dropdown menu, select "Weave as drawn in" and then make the treadling tromp as writ. Then select "Draft" and "Thickness" and click on "Exactly as drawn."

Next, using the Warp dropdown menu, click on "Parallel Repeat." In the box that opens, select "Extended Parallel," "Shafts shift by 4" and "Also duplicate colors and spacing." Then click "Apply." (And then "Close.")

Next, still in the Warp dropdown menu, click on "Fill Warp Colors." In the space that says "Single Color A," scroll down and select "AB." Then click "Replace." (Because this is just an exercise, I've simply gone along with the pre-selected colors in boxes A and B in the "Fill Warp Colors" box. You can select your own colors by using your cursor to drag colors from the "Colors" column that appears when you click on "Fill Warp Color.")

Hard to see in the above image, but if you look closely you can find blue and aqua in the boxes above the threading, indicating the colors of the warp threads below.

Next, create a 4/4 ascending twill tieup, which is a classic Echo tieup. The elementary way to do this is to draw it in by clicking on the boxes you want -- but to do it faster, you can just fill in the tieup for the first treadle and then click on the "Tieup" dropdown menu, select "Twill Repeat" and then "Step Up," "Step by 1," "Treadles per group 1" and "Apply."

Yes, it's Echo and yes, the Earl pattern is identifiable -- but it has long floats. (A good rule of thumb, according to Bonnie Inouye, is that floats in Echo should be no longer than 5. This is where the "Float Search" function on the "Tool" dropdown menu in Fiberworks comes in handy.)

Next step, alter the tiedown by breaking it up so that the floats aren't as long. Here's an example.

The motifs are still a bit squashed, right? There are ways to fix that -- one of them being to change the treadling.

Another way to alter the "flattened" Echo draft is to add tabby to the tieup, changing the structure to Jin.

You can alter the Jin design a bit by changing the tieup to create what Bonnie Inouye describes as "decorated Jin" -- changing it from a 4/4 tieup to a 4/2/1/1 tieup (plus tabby, of course).

Now that's a design befitting an Earl, don't you think? At the risk of losing readers, I will show you a few more designs. Here's how the Earl looks as Double Weave (both front and back views).

And here's a Rep version:

And then there's Shadow Weave -- although I'm not sure I like it so much.

So there you have it: "The Earl" as interpreted for extended parallel threadings, 400 years after it was used as the canvas for a nobleman's portrait. 

Thanks for reading!

[For further study: Eva Stossel is a blogger and peerless weaver who wrote about this subject on her blog and in the Complex Weavers Journal in 2012. You can read her blog post by clicking here.]