Weaving with Knitting Yarn

Marcy Petrini

August, 2018

A friend gave me a ball of a DYS Homespun Yarns in color way “Hot Pink Grape”; this is a 4-ply unmercerized cotton with a gradient from hot pink through purples; the gradient is made by starting with 4 plies of the same pink and then exchanging one ply at the time until the other end of the yarn is 4 plies of purple.

 I have seen the nice results from friends who have knitted with this yarn, but what about weaving with it? Wouldn’t it make a fun shawl starting from one color and ending up with the other? I thought it would show best as weft.

Because a four-ply cotton can be dense, I decided that the warp should be lighter; silk is my go-to yarn to lighten up fabrics and I have lots of colors in my stash.

The cotton ball has 500 yards and wraps at 18 epi; with it, I figured I could make a 60” shawl about 18” wide, so my warp needed to be 20” and 97” long. I ended up winding 3 yards, to have some room to sample.

I chose a 20/2 purple silk; normally I would sett it at 24 epi for a twill (and this shawl needed to be a twill for drape), but because the 4-ply cotton is fatter, I calculated the sett to be 18 epi.

I wound about 5” of the solid purple; then I thought the warp needed sprucing up, so I wound 10” with a 20/2 purple and pink variegated silk for the middle and another 5” of solid purple for the other edge.

Next, the pattern: I wanted a twill for drape, I didn’t want a pattern to detract from the color changes and I wanted a twill I had not woven before (or at least that I remembered). That also meant that I could add it to the Pictionary! I browsed through Davison’s book and came across a crepe twill. Perfect!

Here is the shawl. I love the gradation!

The drawdown and a close up of the fabric are in the Crepe Twill Pictionary page . If you have a Pictionary already, the Crepe Twill is new.

Pictionary update: in addition to the Crepe, all 21 additional twills are in the Pictionary now; 8 files for the finger manipulated weaves have also been added. They are located on this website under Pictionary; download all or those you are interested in.

I hope you enjoy your Pictionary. I welcome questions, corrections and additions any time.

Happy weaving! 

Please email comments and questions to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

What is a Block?

Marcy Petrini

June, 2018

Block is a term that describes any structure forming floats organized in squares or rectangles. A color gamp has blocks of color, a twill gamp has blocks of twills woven with different treadling; and, given enough shafts, any structure can be organized in blocks.

Traditionally, the term has been used for structure that form organized floats inherently. Basket weave and the group weaves – huck and huck lace, Spot Bronson and lace, Swedish lace and M’s & O’s – form blocks as an integral part of the cloth. The three weaves below – overshot, crackle and summer & winter – form blocks using an additional pattern weft; their similarities make them confusing, so here is a comparison of the three.

Click here for the full-sized table (a PDF will open a new window)

Overshot, tromp as writ, also called star fashion:

Crackle traditional, each block a different color:

Summer & winter, treadled as singles:

Each one of these structures offers many more options, but I hope these comparisons help you differentiate between them.

Please email comments and questions to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

A Pictionary

Marcy Petrini

July, 2018

A Pictionary is a dictionary with a picture, in this case of four-shaft weaving structures. I presented the concept at a Reno 2018 Convergence^® seminar. Participants received a notebook with 66 entries in alphabetical order. My plan is to include all of those – a bit at a time – on my website for people to download as they wish.

The Pictionary will grow over time. At Convergence^®, participants noticed that some structures were missing, and I have a “to do” list of others. In some cases, I simply ran out of time, and the structures will be coming soon; in other cases, my samples are of poor quality, so they will require reweaving. And I am sure that there are some structures I have never woven! Something new to try.

This month, the four structures that have been uploaded are the plain weave and its derivatives: plain weave, tabby, ribs and basket weave . Each of these four links points to a different PDF that will open in its own browser window. The rib entry has been edited from the Convergence^® version.

Totally new this month is a ribbed twill, with samples from the Convergence^® yarns, only one of which was completed before I left. So, if you have a Pictionary notebook, you can now add the Ribbed Twill.

In the future I also hope to include how to transform a structure from four shafts to more shafts.

At the seminar we also discussed two spreadsheets: one for planning and one for matching a project warp ends to structure repeats. Originally, I had planned to put those on the website for downloading, too, but I found out that it is not wise to have executable files (spreadsheets execute calculations) on the web site because they can be prone to mischief. However, I will be glad to email them just for the asking.

I hope you enjoy your Pictionary. I welcome questions, corrections and additions any time.

Happy weaving!

Please email comments and questions to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Name Draft Symmetry

Marcy Petrini

May, 2018

In the previous two blogs we discussed the schemes and the rules for designing a name draft using overshot, and then how the draft could be adjusted with incidental threads to make it symmetrical. Our other option for making the draft symmetrical is to flip it, much as we do to produce a pointed twill, or in our case a reverse pointed twill, as shown below:

And we combine it, remembering to eliminate one of the “1”s in the middle:

Similarly, we can flip our overshot blocks. Here is our original threading: 

And here is the symmetrical draft pivoted around block A (1, 2) in the middle, shown in the lighter blue, reducing it to 5 threads:

The reduction also occurs when we thread more than one repeat, as shown below; the light blue is once again the pivots for the two repeats; the dark pink is the combined block A for the end of the first repeat and the start of the second; the total number of threads is also reduced.

Below is the tromp-as-writ drawdown, or star fashion:

Click here for the full-sized draft (a PDF will open a new window)

And here is the rose fashion:

Click here for the full-sized draft (a PDF will open a new window)

Remember that in these drafts, what looks like long warp floats are, in fact, tabby areas as the tabby weft is not shown to emphasize the design.

All the drawdowns are derived for a sinking shed loom. Note for example that, in the above draft, all of the threads woven by the first block, D, shafts 1 and 4, are covered: those threads are lowered and the supplementary weft covers them.

While I prefer using numbers for clarity, traditionally sinking shed tie-ups are shown with “X” and rising shed tie-ups with an “O” (think “balloons rise”). To convert a sinking shed tie-up to a rising shed one, we lower the opposite shafts since, for example, when shafts 1 & 2 are lowered in a sinking shed loom, 3 & 4 remain up; in a jack loom, we can obtain the same effect by raising 3 & 4 thus leaving 1 & 2 lowered. Here is how to convert:

I haven’t woven this particular draft, but I have done a name draft of my name a while back, so there are lots of possibilities. Here is the fabric from a previous name draft.

This is the last blog on name drafting, so it’s really your turn! Try your name, or a saying; try different schemes if the first one doesn’t give you a pattern that you like; use various incidental threads where needed, so that a pleasing design results; leave asymmetrical or try strategies to make the threading symmetrical; treadle star or rose fashion – or any of the other possibilities used with overshot.

Please email comments and questions to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..