2/2 twill

Paint the threading: click or tap a cell in the top grid, or drag along it. The cloth below changes as you go. Arrow keys and Space work on every grid.

US convention: threading on top, tie-up top right, treadling down the right, end 1 at the right, shaft 1 at the bottom. Scroll the draft to pan; Ctrl+Z undoes.

Yarn and Colour

Give the warp and the weft their colour order and log cabin, shadow weave and houndstooth appear as the cloth would show them.

The yarns in this draft

Natural dye

Any colour

Select a swatch to recolour it; every end and pick on that yarn changes with it.

Colour order

Warp, by yarn number, repeated across the ends

For log cabin: 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1

Weft, by yarn number, repeated down the picks

Fill and Repeat

The threadings weavers write a hundred times, in one click, and any run repeated across the whole warp or down the whole weft.

Threading

run advance

Treadling

Repeat a run

ends to

picks to

The threading and the warp colours travel together; so do the treadling, the liftplan and the weft colours.

What the Cloth Says

Floats, faces, the repeat and the shafts in use, read off the drawdown as you paint.

Longest warp float

—

Longest weft float

—

Face

—

Repeat

—

Shafts used

—

Treadles used

—

Sett

Wrap the yarn round a ruler, count the wraps in one inch, and halve the count for plain weave; a twill takes about two thirds of the wraps. A rule of thumb, not a number: this page has never touched your yarn.

Classic Structures

Twenty traditional drafts, each loaded whole: threading, tie-up, treadling and colours. Undo brings your own draft back.

The link is the draft, the WIF opens in every other weaving program, and the PNG is the cloth at thread scale.

Open

WIF file

Or drop a .wif anywhere on this page. WIF 1.1: threading, tie-up or liftplan, treadling and colours.

Name

Print gives the four grids in black on white, one page. The PNG is the drawdown alone, at least 8 px a thread.

How It Is Drawn

A draft has four parts. The threading says which shaft each warp end passes through; the tie-up says which shafts each treadle lifts; the treadling says which treadle each pick is woven on. The fourth part, the drawdown, is computed from the other three: at a pick, every end whose shaft is lifted lies over the weft, and every other end lies under it. That is the whole rule, and the page applies it to every cell every time you paint.

A table loom or a dobby has no tie-up: each pick lifts its shafts directly. Switch to Liftplan and the tie-up and treadling fold into one grid; switch back and every distinct lift becomes a treadle, in the order it was first used. The two are the same cloth, and the test suite checks that going there and back changes nothing.

The Cloth drawdown draws each thread as yarn: darker at the edges, lighter down the middle, and shadowed where it comes out from under a crossing thread. Structure draws the classic squares, warp-up filled. Both read the same cells.

The receipts

Seventy-four tests run before every build. Among them: plain weave is a checkerboard; 2/2 twill on a straight draw floats 2 threads both ways and repeats on 4 by 4; 5-end satin floats 4 and moves its interlacing 2 ends a pick; 1/3 twill is 75% weft-faced; a WIF exported and imported again is byte-identical; a 16-shaft, 480-end draft rides in under 2 KB of link.

Structure	Longest float	Repeat
2/2 twill	2 threads	4 × 4
Herringbone, straight treadling	2 threads	8 × 4
5-end satin	4 threads	5 × 5
Huck lace	3 threads	20 × 8
8-end satin	7 threads, flagged	8 × 8
Waffle, 8 shafts	13 threads, flagged	14 × 14

What it does not know

Yarn thickness. Every thread is drawn the same width. A thick weft on a fine warp looks nothing like this page, and a weft-faced rug even less.
Beat, take-up, shrinkage. This is the cloth as threaded, not as woven and washed.
Sett. The rule of thumb above is all it will say. The number depends on a yarn it has never touched.
Floats past the edge. Floats are measured on the drafted cloth, not the infinite repeat; a run that meets the edge is counted as far as the draft goes.
More than one shaft an end, when painting. A WIF that puts an end on two shafts opens and weaves exactly; the painter sets one shaft at a time.
Sixteen shafts, sixteen treadles, 480 by 480. A 24-shaft WIF stops at the door with its count named.

Convention

US convention throughout: threading across the top with shaft 1 at the bottom and end 1 at the right, tie-up in the top right corner with treadle 1 at the left, treadling down the right side with pick 1 at the top, drawdown bottom left. The tie-up marks shafts that rise. A WIF written for a sinking shed opens with its flag kept and its drawdown inverted accordingly.

On this device only

Your working draft is saved in this browser as you paint, and comes back when you return. Nothing leaves the device: no account, no upload, no analytics. A link you copy carries the whole draft inside it.