Nobody draws the pattern.
A weaver decides three things — which shaft each thread passes through, which shafts each treadle lifts, and the order of the treadles. The cloth is what those three decisions compute. You can do it yourself further down.
Weaving is the oldest binary craft. A thread is over or it is under, and everything a cloth can be is decided by which. Jacquard punched that decision onto cards in 1804, and the cards went on to run everything else.
Cloth
Kala cotton, indigo-dyed in the yarn, woven eight shafts wide on pit looms in three villages.
Drafting
We write drafts for other mills. Most of the work is deciding what to leave out of the tie-up.
Dyeing
Indigo, madder, myrobalan, iron. Four dyestuffs, and every colour on this page comes from one of them.
Weave something
Three grids you can edit and one you cannot. Click a square in the threading, tie-up or treadling — the drawdown recomputes, and the cloth beside it is that drawdown rendered as thread.
How the drawdown is computed
Every crossing in the cloth is one lookup:
drawdown[pick][end] = tieUp[ treadling[pick] ][ threading[end] ]Press a treadle; it lifts some shafts; every warp end threaded on a lifted shaft rides over the weft. That is the whole loom. The diagonal in a twill is not drawn anywhere — it appears because a shaft sequence met a treadle sequence.
Six structures, one warp
Every swatch below is woven from the same threading colours. Only the tie-up and the treadling change.
Four pit looms
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The loom
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The shed
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The beat
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The yarn