Twill weaving patterns

In the first place, I didn’t know twill was a “balanced” weave. And since neither orange nor green were colors I liked at the time (blue and white were the only good colors from my point of view as a lover of antique coverlets), I tried to obliterate the orange with the green. So my “rosepath” turned out to be a weft-faced mass of army green. We were given several treadling variations of straight, zigzag, point, and rosepath twills to follow, but with my firm beat, they all looked pretty much the same. My conclusion was: I don’t like twill weaving (or orange, or green).

At the time, in the early 1980s, the only basic resource for weavers that included very much information about twill weaving was Marguerite Porter Davison’s A Handweaver’s Pattern Book. Since the photos of the woven samples are all black and white, they are not necessarily inspiring unless you look closely at the patterns. It took several years of steadfastly not liking twill before I noticed that, for example, you could thread her Herringbone Mixture and get thirteen different designs on the same warp (the point my original teacher was probably trying to make). Multiple types of twills are scattered throughout Davison’s book with their many treadling variations, but even so, two major elements are missing: color and fiber. Not only are twill weaving patterns infinite in number, but their appearance is infinitely changeable through the use of color, and depending on yarns and setts, the fabric hand can be literally anything: soft and supply, firm and flat, thick and plush, whatever you need for absolutely any fabric use.

The 1980s gave weavers publications with color, and twills took off. The latest Best of Handwoven eBook, Twills on Four Shafts, gives ten truly beautiful twill weaving projects that cover the gamut of twill types: herringbone, rosepath, dornick, straight, undulating, and more. Included is even the use of an advancing twill on four shafts. If I were to show you the placemats and runner designed by Barbara Elkins that are shown on the cover of this eBook, you would swear they took more than four shafts to weave. Since this technique eBook includes steps for designing and drafting twills, you can use her article to create advancing twills of your own as well as adapting all the other twill types for original designs (including weaving damask-like patterns with a simple pick-up technique).