We had a lot of fun running an unweaving, aka “reverse drafting” workshop in Sheffield last Tuesday! This was inspired by a workshop Alex helped run with Ellen Harlizius-Klück and Dave Griffiths back in 2014, and more recently the ongoing “reverse drafting club” run out of Chicago with international participants. The idea is to pick apart woven fabric, to understand how the weave structure and thread colours interact. This can be a really puzzling and surprising experience which can really open your mind to textile structure. We focussed on houndstooth patterns, but with some others mixed in too. Some of the textiles were handwoven samples that are very expensive by the metre, but where you can order sample swatches online for a pound or two.
We worked in groups around three tables, coming up with methods for notating the weaves on grid paper. The more textile-experienced minds (like Toni Buckby whose notation is shown above) came up with and shared systematic procedures for reverse drafting, like first focussing on the colour sequences of the threads, and noting that for the vertical warps and horizontal wefts, before notating interlacements where warp-over-weft are notated with a black square in the grid.
We then had a look at the free, web-based AdaCAD weaving software, simulating our samples and finishing up by exploring crackle weave techniques on-screen.
In short this two-hour workshop seemed to work very well as a way to understand weaving without the time demands of actually weaving! First getting involved with the material by literally taking it apart, getting some tacit knowledge about it before exploring the abstract structure in software.
