The Plaid Studio / What to create / Shepherd's check
Shepherd's check pattern generator
Shepherd's check is the smallest cloth in the whole dogtooth family: four threads of each colour on a 2/2 twill. The twill's diagonal breaks each corner of the check, and that break is what gives the little points — nobody drew them.
- Thread count
G4 F4 - Weave2/2 twill
- SymmetryRepeating straight round
- SeamlessYes — the tile repeats by construction, in every engine
- ExportPNG and SVG, A4 spec sheet with a centimetre ruler, WIF weaving draft
What makes it shepherd's check
Four and four, on a twill that floats two threads over two. Because the check and the weave repeat are close in size, the pattern the eye sees comes out of the interlacement rather than the thread count alone.
Border tweeds, trousering, caps, jackets. It is the cloth the Northumberland shepherds wore, and the unit a houndstooth grows from.
How to make one
- Open the Sett engine and pick shepherd's check from the ready-made checks in the panel. The studio writes its thread count into the cloth for you.
- Put your colours on it. Choose a palette or paste your own hex codes; the ground, the field and the lines take their colours in that order.
- Set the scale in threads. The bands are threads, not pixels, so the check keeps its proportions when you change the yarn count or the repeat width.
- Export what the job needs. A seamless PNG for print-on-demand, an SVG for vector work, an A4 sheet with a ruler for a mill, or a WIF draft for a loom.
Questions
Is shepherd's check the same as houndstooth?
They are the same construction at different sizes. Shepherd's is four and four; at eight and eight the broken corners open into the dogtooth shape people call houndstooth.
Why does it need a twill?
In plain weave the same thread count gives a flat even check. The points are the twill's diagonal cutting the corners, so the weave is part of the pattern.
