Drawdowns: Blueprints for Success

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A drawdown is a drawing that shows you the structure of a fabric and helps you answer questions like

What sett should I use?
Will the floats be too long?
Is my fabric going to get a lot narrower or shorter when I take it off the loom?
Will my fabric be thick or thin?
If I mix these two treadlings together, will I get wavy selvages?
If I mix these two threadings together, what will happen where they meet?
Will my fabric be flat or will it curve or ruffle?
Are some parts of my warp going to get a lot looser than others while I’m weaving and need to be tensioned separately?

Not bad for a drawing you can make quickly with nothing but pen and paper!

Learn how to create a drawdown from a draft, how to analyze what it represents, and then how to use that information when designing a fabric and planning a project.

Course Content

What is a drawdown?

Analyzing a drawdown

Designing with drawdowns

Creating a drawdown from a draft

Your turn: Warp drawdowns

Your turn: Weft drawdowns

Warp vs. weft drawdowns

Course Content

Course Includes

In order to search effectively, you need to pick a keyword that’s related to the subject of your search. If you want to find blog posts about floating selvages, for instance, the subject is “floating selvage,” not “blog post.”

Stick to singular versions of your keyword rather than plural most of the time: a keyword of selvage will find results that contain both “selvage” and “selvages,” but selvages won’t match anything that only has “selvage” without the ‘s’ at the end.

Keep in mind that the same word might be spelled in different ways – selvage and selvedge, dornick and dornik, etc.

Add extra descriptors to narrow a search, or take them off to get more results. Selvage will turn up results related to selvages of any kind, but floating selvage will narrow the results to only things that mention those two words together.

You can use the search button that’s always visible at the top of the page to search the entire site. It works just like this search field – except that you don’t even have to hit Return!

Just click the magnifying glass and type your keyword into the box that opens. A list of the top search results will appear immediately; you can click on any of them to go straight to that content.

Or, hit Return like usual and go to the page that lists all results organized by type so you can find exactly what you’re looking for.

Drawdowns: Blueprints for Success

Course Content

Course Includes

Use this field to search the entire Academy website for a topic you're interested in.

You’ll be taken to a page that lists every spot on the website where your keyword(s) are mentioned, organized by type: courses, lessons, blog posts, forum threads, help files, etc. From there you can click any link to see the related content.

In order to search effectively, you need to pick a keyword that’s related to the subject of your search. If you want to find blog posts about floating selvages, for instance, the subject is “floating selvage,” not “blog post.”

Stick to singular versions of your keyword rather than plural most of the time: a keyword of selvage will find results that contain both “selvage” and “selvages,” but selvages won’t match anything that only has “selvage” without the ‘s’ at the end.

Keep in mind that the same word might be spelled in different ways – selvage and selvedge, dornick and dornik, etc.

Add extra descriptors to narrow a search, or take them off to get more results. Selvage will turn up results related to selvages of any kind, but floating selvage will narrow the results to only things that mention those two words together.

You can use the search button that’s always visible at the top of the page to search the entire site. It works just like this search field – except that you don’t even have to hit Return!

Just click the magnifying glass and type your keyword into the box that opens. A list of the top search results will appear immediately; you can click on any of them to go straight to that content.

Or, hit Return like usual and go to the page that lists all results organized by type so you can find exactly what you’re looking for.