In my last post I talked about using Alice Schlein’s book ‘The Liftplan Connection’ to learn how to design fabric in Photoshop Elements. The next step was to see how this worked with double weave (interchanging double plain weave). I’d woven double weave on eight shafts before:

I was interested to see how, essentially, not having fixed threading blocks would work. So, of course, I wove some samples. I used a straight and a point threading, and then a section of networked threading, to see how it looked. I used 8/2 cotton for these samples, with a sett of 30epi.

The liftplan for double weave repeats over 4 shafts and 4 picks, so it wasn’t very surprising when lines and shapes at least 4 pixels wide in Photoshop gave the best results, with the number of picks also being divisible by 4 to allow patterns saved in separate Fiberworks liftplans to work together and weave correctly. I love the way that the technique allows for organic ‘hand drawn’ shapes to be translated into the cloth, as well as more geometric patterns. And I also love how the geometric patterns change subtly when the cloth is washed and finish, and become something unexpected.

I began to push the designs further, and then tried out some other weave structures – these dots are in twill, with a plain weave background. The reverse of the cloth is entirely plain weave. And the tumbling blocks design is the same one as I used in the photo in my previous post, but this time woven as double weave in the two ‘faces’ of plain weave, plus a 2/2 twill.