The Plaid Studio / What to create / Weaving software
Weaving software, in a browser
A thread count in, a woven cloth out: the real interlacement drawn thread by thread, a draft you can edit on a grid, a yarn that decides the cloth's actual size, and the production files a mill or a loom asks for — including a WIF draft. No installation.
- InputA thread count —
K4 B24 K2 W6— typed, described in words, or read off a photograph of real cloth - StructurePlain, 2/2, 3/1 and 2/1 twill, 2/2 basket, herringbone, S or Z; or draw your own draft on a grid up to 16 ends by 16 picks
- YarnEnglish cotton count (Ne), five fibres and cloth presets; the yarn sets the density, so the design has a real size in centimetres
- DrawingEvery crossing is worked out, so the colours blend the way a loom blends them rather than being filled as flat blocks
- OutWIF 1.1 weaving draft, an A4 CAD sheet at true size with centimetre rulers, a spec sheet, an ASE palette, and PNG at up to 600 dpi
- SeamlessOne repeat that tiles exactly, for print as well as for weaving
What makes it a CAD tool and not a pattern filler
Most tools that draw a check let you pick stripe colours and widths in pixels. That is a picture of a plaid. The difference here is that three things the cloth actually depends on are real:
- The draft decides the crossings. How the weft passes over and under the warp is what makes a twill's diagonal and what decides which colour dominates at each crossing. Two designs with the same colours and different drafts are different cloths, and they look different here too.
- The yarn decides the size. A thread count says nothing about how big the cloth is. Set the count in Ne and the density follows it, so a stripe holds its width rather than its thread count — change to a finer yarn and more threads fill the same twenty millimetres, which is what happens on a loom.
- The sett mirrors properly. A reflective sett is written once; the first and last stripe are the pivots and everything between them appears twice. An odd pivot count puts the mirror axis mid-thread, and the studio says so rather than rounding it away.
The files a mill or a loom asks for
| File | What it carries | For |
|---|---|---|
| WIF 1.1 draft | Threading, tie-up, treadling and the colour of every end and pick, worked out from the drawdown | Weaving software, computer-assisted dobby looms |
| CAD sheet, A4 | The design at true size with centimetre rulers and the colours it uses | Measuring on paper; handing over without a conversation about pixels |
| Spec sheet | Thread count, tile size, finished dimensions | The written half of a hand-off |
| ASE palette | The colours, named | Illustrator and Photoshop, without eyedropping a PNG |
| PNG, 72–600 dpi | The rendered cloth, with the real dpi written into the file | Proofs, print, listings |
The WIF is the one worth a sentence of proof: its threading, tie-up and treadling are derived from the drawdown itself rather than assumed, and the output has been read back with an independent reader (pyweaving) to confirm the draft it describes is this cloth.
A block weave can ask for more shafts than the loom on the other end of the file has, so the studio tells you the number it needs and suggests a simpler weave on the stripes when it goes over twenty-four.
Who this is for
Hand weavers with a table or floor loom who want to work out a sett and a draft before warping. Small mills and labels prototyping a check and handing a true-scale sheet to a weaver. Designers who need the woven look to be right rather than approximate — and who also need the same design as a print file, which is the other half of this studio.