Twill(ing) Really Is Thrilling
By: Melissa Ludden Hankens / January 2010
It didn’t hit me until just now that Yearning to Weave has officially turned one. This means special dessert. I’m a big fan of celebrating occasions of any sort with dessert, and I am sorry that you are not here to help me celebrate. But fear not! I will ensure that your serving of celebratory dessert is, um, not wasted.
My first proper weaving lesson was on a four-shaft Schacht table loom, a direct tie- up loom. Schacht builds two direct tie-up looms: the Wolf Pup and the table loom. They are referred to as direct tie-up because each shaft is attached directly to a lever or treadle. Raising a shaft to create a shed is as simple as pulling a lever or depressing a foot treadle. If you want to raise more than one shaft at a time, you need to pull or depress more than one lever or treadle at the same time.
Typically it is recommended that you have at least 100 heddles on each shaft, though depending on what you like to weave, you may want to increase quantities on some of the shafts. For example, on my Wolf Pup, I have more heddles on the first shaft for when I do lace weaves and more heddles on the second and third harnesses, which I find helpful when weaving point twills.
I am a very happy owner of a Wolf Pup, and I love it. It doesn’t take up much space when I’m not weaving, and I can put it in my car without assistance. This makes bringing it to workshops or classes a cinch, or even bringing it from room to room. The Wolf Pup comes standard with four shafts and an 18” weaving width, while the table looms are available in 15”, 20” or 25” weaving widths and either four or eight shafts.
Four shafts open up a new world of weaving possibilities, but mostly I love this type of loom as it gives me the ability to weave twills easily and efficiently. I didn’t jump onto the twill party train right away. I was originally more fascinated by combining color and texture in plain weave. But about a year ago I decided I wanted to weave myself a jacket.
After much research, I decided that a 2/2 straight twill weave would give me the drape and finish I was looking for. A 2/2 twill is created when a weft thread repeatedly passes over and under two warp threads. Here’s another way to think about this. The 2/2 designation tells you how many shafts are up/down when throwing a pick. So a 1/3 twill means that you’d only be lifting one shaft per pick, while three remain down.
Chapter two in Sharon Alderman’s Mastering Weave Structures is an excellent twill tutorial. She gives an overview of why twill weaves should generally have a closer sett than plain weaves. If you think of plain weave where each pick goes over one warp thread and under the next, the weft picks require just as much space as the warp threads to exist on that plane of weaving. They separate each warp thread from its neighbor on their slalom path across your weaving.