Marcy Petrini 

February, 2025 

Earlier this month, I gave a presentation to the Westfield Weavers Guild on plain weave, setts, different size threads, and color interactions.

At the end of the talk, my friend Catherine Marchant asked a question about tabby, which has gotten me thinking about the different ways we use the word.

The fabric determines the structure, and a tabby cloth is a balanced plain weave: the same number of warp ends per inch and picks per inch, as shown in the sample below. For example, the sett may be 12 epi and the weft is 12 picks per inch.

What about 13 picks per inch, or 11? Is that still a tabby cloth? Let’s not get too technical, but we can all agree that the fabric below is not a tabby, it’s a weft dominant plain weave.

The treadling steps to achieve that plain weave, whether is tabby or plain weave, depend on the structure, but we tend to call tabbies the treadles which are attached to the shafts that will produce plain weave when used.

For example, if I am weaving a compounded fabric with a supplementary weft, for example overshot or summer and winter, I may say that I always put my tabbies on the right side of the treadles. However, these treadles will be different for these two structures.

For overshot, my tabby treadles are:

For summer and winter, my tabby treadles are:

As long as we know the structure, we know what we mean by tabbies, and we can attach the shafts to whatever treadles we find convenient to weave.

However, do these tabbies always produce a true tabby?

When I sample structures with a supplementary weft, I like to use 10/2 cotton for warp and ground weft. My sett for the warp, however, is not the 24 epi that I would use to make a tabby in a simple cloth (simple by Emory’s definition, one warp, one weft). I use 18 epi to allow room for the supplementary weft.

Within the compounded fabric, that ground cloth is, in fact, a tabby: a sett of 18 and 18 picks per inch for the ground weft, as shown in the summer and winter sample below.

A supplementary weft fabric means that the supplementary weft is not needed for the integrity of the cloth. If I were to cut out the supplementary weft that produces my motifs, I would be left with a tabby: 18 epi and 18 ppi – a rather loose fabric, but balanced.

Some weavers, however, prefer to sett the warp as they do for a true tabby. Thus for the 10/2 cotton, they would sett it at 24 epi. To give room to the supplementary weft, then they use a smaller ground weft, for example 20/2 cotton.

Now we have a ground cloth of 10/2 cotton sett at 24 epi and a ground weft of 20/2 cotton which presumably weaves at 24 ppi.

Is that tabby? It’s definitely plain weave!

We can ask the same question of rectangular float weaves (Emory classification) which are derived from plain weave: huck, huck lace, Bronson lace, spot Bronson, etc. For example, huck lace can have areas of plain weave as shown in the fabric below.

On four shafts, the tabbies for huck lace are those of plain weave 1 & 3 vs. 2 & 4, not surprisingly, since the structures is based on plain weave.

But is the plain weave area tabby? In the fabric above, it doesn’t look it. When I weave lacey weaves, I chose the warp sett depending on the effect I want: balancing lacey areas and plain weave, I may use the tabby sett; if I have lots of lacey areas and I am afraid that the fabric will be too sleazy, I may increase the sett; conversely, if I use huck which has lots of plain weave areas, I may decrease the sett to increase the drape for the lacey fabric.

So, are those plain weave areas tabby? They are plain weave!

In weaving, we always have grey areas…..it’s ok, just as long as we know what we are weaving, and we like the final result!

Happy Weaving!

Marcy