What is Twill?

Please login to bookmark

Twill is the most common structure apart from plain weave. It has unlimited variations: straight twills, broken twills, point twills, dorniks, rosepaths, M&Ws, advancing twills, undulating twills, plaited twills… the list goes on and on.

Twill can be simple or very complex, making it accessible to weavers with any kind of loom. Fancy and decorative twills may require lots of shafts but one of the most common – perhaps THE most common – takes only three: the denim fabric that many jeans are made of is a three shaft twill.

We’ll be looking at the structure and drafts of many, many different twills on three, four, eight, and more shafts over several Twill courses, but before we focus on individual twills, let’s answer a different question first:

What do all these twills have in common, and what sets twill apart from other structures?

In this course you’ll learn

The properties of the twill structure
A technical description of twills
How to classify twills in different ways
What twill ratios are
How to pick the right sett for a twill, just from its ratio

Suggested reading: This course assumes you’ve completed Drawdowns Part 1: Structural Drawdowns and Ashenhurst’s Formula to Determine Sett or are familiar with the subject matter they cover.

Course Content

What do we mean by “twill”?

A technical description of twill

Regular, reversing, and broken twills

Regular twill ratios

Twill ratios and sett

What is Twill – Your Turn

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.

What is Twill?

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.