If you have just joined this series and want to catch up, you can find Part 1 here. 

On its own, each section of a weaving draft can only tell part of the story of the cloth. The magic of weaving lies in the way the different parts of the draft - and of the loom - work together.

This week I'm going to take a closer look at how we read and interpret a liftplan by considering its relationship to the drawdown.

Something you may not realise about a liftplan is that it is very often a ‘visual slice’ of the drawdown.

Here's a shaded twill on four shafts.

We can get a clearer picture of the structure in a draft if we remove the colour.

If I draw a box around the rightmost ‘slice’ of the drawdown, we can see that it is identical to the liftplan.

The secret is in the threading. 

Notice that this draft is threaded on a straight draw, so the warp ends in the section I have isolated are threaded 1-2-3-4. And, as we saw last week, the columns in the liftplan correspond to shafts 1-2-3-4. 

Whenever we are working with a straight draw, what we do in the liftplan is reflected directly in the structure of the cloth. 

From drawdown to liftplan and back again

This means that if I know the threading and the drawdown, I can easily obtain the liftplan.

But it also works the other way around. If all I have is the liftplan, I can easily visualise the cloth which will result from weaving it on a straight threading. 

Supposing though, that I have a different threading. What then? Of course, we can always use the elements of a draft to work out a complete drawdown, no matter how complex. But do we need to do that?

I'm speaking here about developing our visual intuition: using the patterns we see in the liftplan to get a sense of what is going on before we go into full analysis mode.

Let's change our threading to a point draw.

I've started this threading with shaft 1 on the right, so the first thing that will happen is that my liftplan will be reflected.

But now I've reached shaft 4 and I'm heading back downhill again. In fact the next little section is just like my original straight draw, so I can copy the liftplan right in.

The rest of the threading continues in the same rhythm, so I can see that I am going to create shaded zig-zags across the width of the cloth. 

The darker areas of the liftplan indicate where more shafts are lifted, and therefore where I am going to see more of the warp on the face of the cloth. The lighter areas are where fewer shafts are lifted, so in this part of the cloth I will see more weft.

Adding the colour back into my drawdown confirms this.

Reflection and repetition, as we have used them here, are two staples of weave design which we use again and again without necessarily being aware of it. Tuning ourselves into that fact can open our eyes to many design possibilities.

I'll leave you with an 8-shaft liftplan which is intended to be woven on a straight draw. Can you visualise the drawdown? What if it were woven on a point draw instead?

I'll share those drawdowns next time, along with another instalment of liftplan-based thinking.