Your first draft, end to end

Twenty minutes, four shafts, no prior knowledge of the program. At the end you will have a balanced twill, a sett you can defend, and a threading card you can clip to the castle of the loom. Everything below is keyboard-first; the mouse only paints.

1. Describe the loom, once

   A new file opens on four shafts and four treadles, which is what we are weaving, so there is nothing to change. Two settings are worth a look now rather than after you have warped: the shaft numbering under Preferences → Loom, and whether your shafts rise or sink. Draft counts shaft 1 at the front of the loom by default and draws it as the top row. If your loom and your notes disagree with that, flip it here and the whole file follows, including every export.

   Press ] to add a shaft and [ to remove one if you want to try this on eight later.

2. Thread a straight draw

   Press T for the threading region. Click the first square on shaft 1, then drag to the right while holding Shift: the run snaps to a diagonal and lays down 1‑2‑3‑4 over and over for as many ends as you drag. Sixteen ends is plenty to see the pattern; the repeat count comes later and does not change the file.

3. Tie up two and two

   Press U. The tie-up is a small square, one column per treadle, one row per shaft. For a balanced twill each treadle lifts two neighbouring shafts, and the pair shifts up by one as you move right: 1 and 2, then 2 and 3, then 3 and 4, then 4 and 1. That last pair wraps around, which is the whole secret of a twill — the diagonal has to get back to where it started.

4. Treadle it, and read the cloth

   Press R and click down the treadling column in the order 1, 2, 3, 4, or type the digits — the cursor advances by itself. The drawdown fills in as you go, and after four picks the diagonal is already visible.

   This is the moment the program earns its keep: change one square in the tie-up and the whole drawdown answers before you have let go of the mouse.

5. Settle the sett, then believe the warnings

   Open the sett panel and enter what you are actually using — say 8/2 cotton at 100 ends per 10 cm, four ends per dent in a 25/10 cm reed. Draft now knows the width of your warp and will say, in the status line, how many ends a 48 cm towel needs.

   Press F8 for the float overlay. A balanced twill floats over two in both directions, so at a warning limit of five nothing lights up. Lift three shafts per treadle instead of two and the warp floats become three; the overlay will box them and the cloth will want a closer sett. That relationship — more float, closer sett — is the one piece of judgement the program cannot do for you.

6. Get it out of the screen

   For a hand-tied loom, print the threading card: it comes out in bands of 100 ends with every tenth end numbered along the top and the bottom edge, so it still reads after you have folded it twice. For a dobby, export a peg plan — .pln, one line per pick — and check the preview header, which prints the shaft convention in words so a mirrored lift cannot sneak through.

   Save the file. It is one text file; put it in whatever folder your other drafts live in. Ctrl+E repeats the last export with the same settings, which is the key you will use most once a project is under way.

Four mistakes that fill our support mail

The pattern is mirrored on the loom

Shaft numbering. Your loom counts from the back, Draft was set to the front. One switch in Preferences, and re-export the peg plan.

The drawdown is empty although the threading is full

No tie-up. A treadle that lifts nothing produces a pick where every end is down, and sixteen of those are a blank rectangle. Press U and look for empty columns.

The diagonal goes in steps instead of a clean line

The treadling and the threading disagree about direction. A straight draw with a straight treadling gives a clean diagonal; if you treadled 1‑2‑3‑4‑1‑2 with a point threading you will get the kink you are seeing, and the chevron entry shows what that looks like deliberately.

The peg plan is one pick short

Some dobby interfaces consume the first line as a header. Our export writes a trailing blank pick as an end marker — restored in 3.4.2 after we broke it in 3.4.0 — but if your box expects a leading one, add it in the export dialogue.

Where to go after this

Three honest suggestions. Weave this twill as a 40 cm sampler and change the treadling every 10 cm — straight, reversed, point, random — because four structures on one warp teaches more than four files. Then open the library and drop in a diamond, which uses the threading you have already got on the loom. When you want to know what the program will and will not hand to your loom, that is the formats page.