TIEUP QUADRANTS

Posted by Peg in South Carolina 

As I continued staring at the tieup in Smith’s draft, I slowly began to realize what I had been doing wrong: I had been trying to see a twill tieup pattern that went through all 8 treadles.  What I had forgotten was that I was dealing with each set of four shafts individually, not as a whole unit.

INCORRECT TIEUP

Here is my incorrect tieup.  It was based on trying to get diagonal lines to run through all eight treadles.  Well, it does, but only on the first two treadles. 

QUADRANTS AND CORRECT TIEUP

Here is the correct tieup. The diagonal is there on the first four treadles of the first four shafts.  And it is MIRRORED in the first four treadles on the second four shafts.  But what about treadles 5 through 8?  Here things are just reversed.  The lower left quadrant becomes the upper right quadrant and the upper left quadrant becomes the lower right quadrant. The result is that there is a twill diagonal which runs through each quadrant;  it just doesn’t run through the whole tieup.

So to read tieups like these I have to remember to think in terms of quadrants, not in terms of the whole.

I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN

The major irony is that I had already written about precisely this phenomenon in an earlier post!  Go here if you would like to read it.

Related Posts:  
Reading Smith’s Draft
Crackle in Parallel Shadow Weave

“Tieup Quadrants”  was written by Margaret Carpenter for Talking about Weaving and was originally posted on April 22, 2010. ©2010 Margaret Carpenter aka Peg in South Carolina