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
-
The loom
-
The shed
-
The beat
-
The yarn
Asked at the mill gate
What is a loom draft?
The three decisions that produce a cloth, written as grids. The threading — which shaft each warp end passes through. The tie-up — which shafts each treadle lifts. The treadling — the order the treadles are pressed. A fourth grid, the drawdown, is the cloth those three compute, and nobody draws it.
How is a drawdown 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.
Why is weaving a binary craft?
Because at every crossing 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.
What is Kala cotton?
An indigenous short-staple cotton, grown rain-fed in Kachchh without irrigation. It spins to a coarser, more irregular yarn than long-staple cotton, which is exactly why the cloth has texture. We dye it in the yarn rather than in the piece, so the colour is part of the structure.
Which dyes do you use?
Four — indigo, madder, myrobalan and iron. Indigo and madder are the two oldest dyes in Kachchh and sit on opposite sides of the colour wheel, which weavers found long before anyone drew a wheel.
Do you write drafts for other mills?
Yes, and it is a large part of the work. Most of drafting is deciding what to leave out of the tie-up: eight shafts can express far more structures than any single cloth should try to carry, and the restraint is the craft.
How do I order cloth or commission a draft?
Write to studio@webstoree.com or call +91 89815 64862. For cloth, say the structure, the width and the running metres. For a draft, send the loom — how many shafts and treadles — and what the cloth has to do.