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Colour and weave, in three drafts

Structure is one drawing and colour is another; lay them over each other and blocks appear that are in neither alone. Three library structures show it with the same plain or twill interlacement underneath.

The idea

A drawdown tells you which thread is on top at every crossing. If every warp end is the same colour and every pick another, the drawdown is the picture. Give the warp and the weft an order of colours and the picture changes without a single thread moving, because a warp float now shows whatever colour that end happens to be.

Log cabin

Plain weave throughout, floats of one in both directions, and yet it makes hard-edged blocks. The trick is a colour order of dark, light, dark, light that reverses every so often; where warp and weft are in step you read vertical lines, where they fall out of step the lines lie down. See it drawn in the log cabin entry.

Houndstooth and shadow weave

Put a colour order over a 2/2 twill instead of plain and the diagonal drags the blocks into points: four dark then four light each way gives houndstooth, while alternating end for end gives the low-relief ghost of shadow weave. The generator keeps the interlacement and lets you imagine the colours; the drawdowns on those pages are drawn in indigo and natural so the effect is visible.