What Is a Skeleton Tieup? (Fair Warning: This Post Involves Math)

What is a skeleton tieup? I think of it as connecting two (or sometimes even three) bones, as in a real skeleton, to achieve one function -- to work like a leg or an arm, you might say.

Why do skeleton tieups exist? Because most weavers with 8-shaft jack looms would decide, upon seeing this draft for the first time, that they can't weave it because they don't have 16 treadles. That's the reason you need to create a skeleton tieup -- again, a sort of bare bones tieup using 2 treadles at a time, each treadling different groups of shafts -- so that you can weave this pattern.

Let's work through creating a skeleton tieup, beginning with this design below: an 8-shaft double-weave pattern, using a parallel threading, that calls for 16 treadles. While it can't be woven on 10 treadles using the tieup below, it can be woven on 10 treadles using a skeleton tieup.

Here is the 16-treadle tieup and treadling, enlarged.

Now, here's what the skeleton tieup looks like, using only 10 treadles. This lets you weave the same design.

The details, for those who have the patience to read them: You can see that for pick 1, you step on treadle #3, lifting shafts 2 and 8. For pick 2, you step on treadles 3 and 7, which combined lift shafts 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 8. On pick 3, you step on treadle 2, lifting shafts 1 and 7, and then for pick 4, you step on treadles 2 and 8, which together lift shafts 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, and 8. (No matter that shaft 8 is lifted by both treadles; it gets the job done.)

Looking closely, you'll see this tieup is really the identical treadling as in the preceding diagram: on the first pick shafts 2 and 8 are raised; on the second pick you're raising shafts 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 8; on the third pick, you're raising 1 and 7; and on the fourth pick, you're raising 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, and 8. The skeleton tieup uses the same liftplan, reduced (or broken into patterns) to use just 10 treadles.

In the days before computers, I'm guessing that, to create a skeleton tieup, a dedicated weaver had to sit down and figure out which groups of shafts could be combined in a pattern that would work with another group of shafts to lift the total number of shafts needed. It's all about math, which dovetails nicely with the computer era we're in. Which brings us to...  

Tim's Rudimentary Treadle Reducer 🙌

Tim McLarnan is the Tremewan Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. And, for the mind-bending ease of weavers everywhere, he created this online tool. With a few short steps, you can reduce a lengthy tieup to a skeleton tieup, allowing you to weave more intricate patterns in double weave, overshot, and summer and winter, among others.

(Please note: There are many complicated tieups that can't be reduced to a skeleton tieup. The treadle reducer will let you know that in a dismally short period of time.)

Here's how it works. First, you're asked to plug in how many shafts you have, how many treadles are in the original tieup, and how many treadles you have.

After that, these diagrams pop up. 

You fill in the original tieup, click on how much time you're willing to wait for an answer, and then click on "Find Reduction."

If you're lucky, you will get a skeleton tieup. This is what the Treadle Reducer shows you at that point.

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And there you have it! But you're not quite yet done, because, for those of you who use Fiberworks or other weaving software -- or for those of you who use graph paper, for that matter -- you will have to draft a new tieup and treadling to match the Treadle Reducer's directions. Which takes some time. (In the fifth image from the beginning of this blog post, you can see the results of changing the tieup in Fiberworks to create the skeleton tieup for the 8-shaft example I'm using. By the way, you'll have to click on "Allow Multipedal Action" in the Treadling drop-down menu.)

This may seem like a lot of work, but it's a lot less work than figuring out a skeleton tieup using pencil and paper -- and you get to weave the pattern you want on the loom you have.

Here's a sample of the pattern in double weave, woven with cotton and wool wefts 

(then washing in soap and hot water and agitating, so that the wool fulls 

and the cotton pleats for a differential-shrinkage effect).

Skeleton tieups demystified. Thanks to Professor McLarnan and thanks for reading!

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Note: for those who want to dig deeper, here's a design that could use a skeleton tieup -- but you don't really need one. All you have to do is study the existing tieup, because it's easy to reduce the number of treadles.

Again, this is NOT a skeleton tieup. I'm showing you this draft because it's a close relation to a skeleton tieup, which gives you an introduction to the basics before we get into the details. 

The pattern shown above, pattern #42887 on Handweaving.net designed by Eugenio Poma of Italy in 1947, is an intriguing double-weave pattern that gives you the illusion of squares rising above the surface of the cloth, in a sort of embossed effect.

Folks with 8-shaft table looms could weave this, because these looms have a direct tieup (one lever lifts one shaft at a time) and thus can weave any possible combination of 8 shafts (way more than 16 combinations). But a jack loom has 10 treadles that are fixed (tied up), so you have only 10 possible combinations of shafts. 

So is our design unweavable on a jack loom? If you study the tieup carefully, you'll see that, in 4 instances, 3 treadles lift the same shafts. Why? Perhaps it's because these repetitions in the tieup helped the designer "build" the pattern on a straight draw (and perhaps that helps the weaver with treadling or in understanding how the illusion of the embossed squares is created). 

Anyhow, let's break it down so that we can eliminate the duplications in the treadles.

Treadles 1, 5, and 9 all lift shafts 1, 2, 3, and 6. So you let's combine all these for treadle 1.

Treadles 2, 6, and 10 all lift shafts 3, 6, 7, and 8 -- same thing, so these 3 identical treadles are treadle 2.

Treadles 3, 7, and 11 all lift shafts 1, 3, 4, and 8 -- they become treadle 3.

Treadles 4, 8, and 16 all lift shafts 1, 5, 6, and 8 -- they become treadle 4. 

We've reduced 12 treadles down to 4. Now we have 6 more to play with, but the final reconfiguring requires just 4 treadles.

We will make the "new" treadle 5 the same as the original treadle 12, to lift shafts 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8. The new treadle 6 will be the same as the original treadle 13, lifting shafts 2 and 6. The new treadle 7 is the same as the original treadle 14, lifting shafts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8. And finally, the new treadle 8 is the same as the "old" treadle 15, lifting shafts 4 and 8.

There you have it! We've combined all of the treadles that lift the same shafts and retained the 4 original treadles that are one-offs, meaning that they appear only once in the original tieup.

Here's the result.

Remember that this is NOT a skeleton tieup. It's merely a rearranged, reduced-to-the-lowest-number-of-shafts-lifted kind of tieup. But I've started with this exercise to give you the basic idea of how a weaver can reduce a 16-treadle tieup to just 8 treadles. 

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, working with 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 George Relyea 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 -- for an 8-shaft draft -- 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.

Open Registration for My Upcoming "One Warp, Many Structures" Zoom Workshop

 

Above: An Echo sample by Maryann Ariizumi of the Seattle Weavers Guild, woven 

on 12 shafts in my "One Warp" workshop. Photo courtesy of Maryann Ariizumi.

Thanks to the generosity of the Ann Arbor Fiber Arts Guild, we're opening up the registration to weavers everywhere (no exaggeration) to take my "One Warp, Many Structures: Explorations in Extended Parallel Threadings" 3-day workshop. (For a detailed description, click here and scroll down. To register, click on the two links at the top of the page. For further questions, please contact me at kovnatdenise[at]gmail.com.)

The workshop will be in the Eastern Time zone on three Saturdays: February 22, March 1, and March 8, with three Zoom sessions each day. The idea is that weavers can weave along at home and then join the teaching sessions where they will show their work online, ask questions, view my PowerPoints and presentations, and discuss issues, just as we would in any workshop. I ask weavers to upload photos of their work as they proceed, as this is a really useful tool for discussion.

We make extensive use of Google Drive, where you'll have access to loads of handouts, photos, WIFs, drawdowns for printing out, and reference material. Further, all of our sessions will be recorded and uploaded to YouTube, for those who want to review or miss a session. And, as always, I'm available via email or text or phone to answer questions.

My samples of an 8-shaft pattern called "Many Rivers," showing both sides 

of the double-weave variation of this particular threading.

Thanks to program chairs Carolyn Michaels and Trish Ritchie for their willingness to make this workshop available to weavers outside the Ann Arbor Guild. Hope to see you on Zoom in February!

Here's the News from NEWS

Last week I taught at the New England Weavers Seminar -- well known as NEWS -- in Worcester, Massachusetts. Not only was it run very well (right down to the excellent IPA I had at the dinner for jurors and NEWS committee members), but I had a great time teaching my workshop, "One Warp, Many Structures: Explorations in Extended Parallel Threading." 

Everybody was enthusiastic and their samples showed it -- as you can see from the 12-shaft samples above, woven in Jin (bottom) and Shadow Weave (top) by Diana Vaughan.

Diana was one of the conference organizers (forgive me that I can't recall her specific title) and the entire volunteer team did a terrific job in planning and running this big event, which may be the largest of the regional conferences in the U.S. (I don't have any research to back this up, just hearsay and a glance at the long list of attendees.)

I figure that, since weaving is such a visual craft, the best way for me to describe the workshop is to show it in photos. Unfortunately, I took pictures only at the end of the workshop on Sunday, so Amy Somerstein had already packed up her loom and left -- leaving me with no images of her beautiful work! But I think I got images of everyone else and if I didn't, my apologies.

Debra Colo Nemetz here with her Doubleweave samples 

of the eight-shaft "Falling Stars" pattern

Jennifer Rogers also wove 

Falling Stars, shown here as Rep

Jennifer on the floor re-tying treadles. 

For those with floor looms, 

this had to happen a lot....

Fran Osten wove an eight-shaft pattern called "Fun House" on a gradient warp. 

The blue and magenta yarns each shifted from dark to light values going right to left, 

adding lots of depth and interest to her samples.

Here's the Shadow Weave version of the eight-shaft pattern "Many Rivers," 

woven by Barbara Keller

Barbara Keller herself

Sylvie Faucher of Quebec also wove "Many Rivers," shown here as Rep.

(Sylvie was camera-shy, so I didn't get a good photo of her, unfortunately.)

Danyelle Brodeur, also of Quebec, weaving the Rep version of Fun House.

A few years ago, I noticed that one of the favorite patterns in Carol Strickler's book was #728, a multiple-tabby design that allows for many colors in the warp and never ceases to grab you with its treadling rhythm. I realized that it could easily be adapted for Echo, Jin, Shadow Weave, Rep, Doubleweave -- all the designs in this workshop -- so I added it to the workshop. 

Echo and Jin variations on #728, the eight-shaft design found in Strickler,

woven by Krysten Morganti.

A few other variations by Krysten...

And here's Krysten.

Diana Vaughan ventured into 12-shaft territory 

with the pattern I call "Pink and Green."

Here are some of Diana's samples woven as Echo. 

The pattern on the bottom right is particularly striking, 

with colors ranging from navy to khaki to turquoise to yellow. 

(Her warp was turquoise and dark blue and her weft was orange!)

Mayine Yu (who goes by Lynn) of Brooklyn, NY, also wove the "Falling Stars" pattern.

Here, she's working on a Doubleweave version that uses one wool yarn 

alternating with one cotton yarn in the weft. When the sample is washed and agitated 

with soap and warm water, the wool fulls and draws in the layer of cotton, 

creating vertical pleats in the fabric. The technique is called "differential shrinkage."

Anne Graham of New Haven also wove the 12-shaft pattern called "Pink and Green."

Here's a detail of Anne's samples in Echo. Note the changes in weft color 

and how much they change the color blending in the samples.

Christina Zook's Falling Stars variations in Rep (below) and Doubleweave (above)

Christina at her loom. Note that her weft colors of bright blue and burgundy 

are the same yarns and colors as her warp for her Doubleweave sample. 

The weft colors can vary and produce interesting color blending, 

but the effect is stronger in some designs than in others.

Here's Marjorie Wheeler working on her Doubleweave design for "Falling Stars." 

(Marjorie was also a key volunteer for NEWS 

and I hope I thanked her enough for all her good work!)

Christine Ross at work on her Doubleweave sample of "Falling Stars."

Ann Guralnick also chose the eight-shaft pattern #728 in Strickler. 

At the top is a Doubleweave variation and below that, Rep Weave.

Ann at her loom

The samples were beautiful, the company was great, and the food was excellent. OK, maybe the rooms were a little cold, at least to begin with -- but what more can you ask for a good conference? 

The morning everyone was leaving, I woke at 6 a.m. to the sound of a weaver calling out to her friend, "Goodbye! Drive safely! See you soon!" I think that says a lot about the camaraderie of these gatherings.

Can't resist posting one more image: This one of Ann Guralnick's samples 

of Strickler #728, starting at the bottom with Shadow Weave

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!