Marcy Petrini 

May, 2024

Aretha Franklin’s song applies to weaving!

I was writing the block monograph for my Convergence^® seminar and I decided to add basket weave thinking “when one block weaves weft floats, the adjacent block weaves warp floats.”

The blocks may be more obvious if I showed a figured basket weave, which is a classification I learned from the book More Than Four. A Book for Multiple Harness Weavers by Mary Elizabeth Laughlin. What we often weave, same number of threads per shaft, is a common basket weave; if we combine basket weaves with different number of threads, we have a fancy basket weave, which can still be woven on two shafts. A figured basket weave is a combination of common and / or fancy which require more than two shafts.

I knew I had woven a table runner with a figured basket weave a long time ago. The task in front of me was to find either a picture of the runner or the runner itself so Terry could take a picture. Then I had to find the drawdown.

The first task proved to be easier than I thought. I guessed that the runner was woven in the early 1980s, so I checked Terry’s directories from those years, and I found it. A close up of the fabric is below.

I fill an Excell worksheet for every project I do now, but I wasn’t sure how long ago I started. Looking at my computer directory for projects, I found my computer files started in early 2000’s.

Before computer worksheets, I had used manual forms stored in many three-ring binders. However, I have discovered looking for other projects that I wasn’t always complete with the information, so I was concerned that my search would yield nothing useful. I started with binder #2 labeled 1980s (I started weaving in the late 1970s).

And there it was, in the middle of the fat binder, all the information about the figured basket weave! It turned out that in addition to weaving the runner, I had woven samples for the 1983 exchange of the Chimneyville Weavers Guild (as it was called then).

The information brought a smile to my face! Below is the scan of the manual drawdown. I had done only one repeat of the threading because filling boxes is time consuming, but I added three threads of the next repeat, to see what happens at the junction.

I had written a computer program to do drawdowns. Once I had the manual drawdown for a small part of the project, I could visualize the rest with the computer printout. Below is a scan of a part of the wide printout that was in the binder. Only certain characters were available on a dot matrix printer back then, so I used a star in the place of a box.

From the printout, I could see the overall pattern.

It’s hard to believe now, but some people objected to a computerized drawdown. The complaints were that handweaving was done by hand, computers shouldn’t be involved. Other people were also writing drawdown programs, so I wrote an article in defense of these programs, “Computers Don’t Weave” in Shuttle Spindle & Dyepot, XIV:3:62-65, Summer 1983.

For the monograph, I redid the drawdown using software, shown below.

It was fun going down memory lane. It reminds me of ever changing times.

Happy Weaving!

Marcy