Lifting plan — where it appears
Named by 15 essays across 4 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.
What a dobby stores
A pattern chain does not store picks. It stores lifts — the distinct sets of shafts a draft ever raises — and for most drafts worth weaving that number is very much smaller than the number of picks, which is the second half of the reason a wide repeat is affordable.
A jacquard is every end its own shaft
The machine is usually described as the one that weaves anything. What it actually does is abolish one of the loom's two budgets and make the other proportional to the width of the repeat — which turns a constraint on the design's kind into a constraint on its size, and those are very different things to be short of.
Four ways to write a weave down
A weave's name in the trade is a pair of numbers — 2/2, 3/1, five-end satin — and the notation is so universal that it is easy to forget it is a notation. It has an image and the image is computable: of the 426 cloths at four by four, five have a name of that kind, and there are four names for the five.
What a figure costs the loom
A block design's shaft count does not depend on how wide the figure is, or how deep, or how many blocks it has. It depends on how many *different* block-columns it has, and each new one costs exactly one repeat of the ground weave — 8 shafts, then 16, then 24, in a straight line with no slope to fit.
How many shafts a draft needs
Every quantity counted so far is a property of the cloth. This one is a property of the loom — the number of distinct columns in the matrix — and it is very probably the strongest single predictor of which of the twenty-two thousand four-by-four drafts anybody ever wove.
Where the heddles go
A draft says how many shafts it needs and says nothing about how the ends divide between them. On a satin stripe over a plain ground the two ground shafts carry twenty times what the stripe shafts do — and the only cure is to spend shafts, which turns the threading into an allocation problem with an exact answer.
Three mistakes and the shape each one leaves
A loom holds a design in three separate objects, and one error in each of them is the same size of error. What they cost differs by a factor of seventeen hundred — and the largest of the three is the one nobody can see happening, because every thread is exactly where it should be.
A lifting plan says nothing without a threading
The second of the notations for something larger than a weave is a pair, not a notation: a threading and a lifting plan, and neither alone expresses anything. The pair's image is exactly the drafts with no more distinct columns than there are shafts — 98 at two shafts, 5,282 at three, all 22,874 at four — and it is not nested with the profile draft's in either direction. The profile reaches 192 drafts that need all four shafts, and misses 64 of the 98 a two-shaft loom weaves.
The shortest notation has the longest mistakes
Four essays of this account have asked what each notation can express. None has asked what happens when one is written down wrong, and the answer is an identity rather than a tendency: a notation's symbols partition the cloth, so the count of symbols times the reach of one is the piece, in every notation, with nothing to trade. One threading digit decides 810,000 intersections of a square metre and one of a jacquard's holes decides one — and only the threading can be wrong while the cloth is right.
A second wrong digit is silent only by cancelling the first
One wrong threading digit leaves the cloth exactly as it was 576 times in 252,968, all on three-shaft drafts. The obvious guess about two was that silence would become the rule, since two changed digits can swap two shafts and swapping shafts is the harness's own freedom. Counted over all 1,074,972 pairs, two wrong digits are silent 1.29 per cent of the time — five and a half times as often, on fifteen times as many cloths — and never by adding one silent slip to another. Every silent pair is two audible errors cancelling, and at two errors point paper and lifting plans, which can never be wrong silently by one symbol, are silent almost as often.
Silence lives in the lifting plan
Two wrong threading digits leave a four-end cloth exactly as it was 1.3 times in a hundred, and the question left was whether a longer repeat makes that rarer or commoner. At eight ends the answer depends on something the question did not name. With a lifting plan of unrelated rows, silence all but vanishes; with a twill's plan — one row slid a pick at a time — nine four-shaft threadings in ten can be silently mis-threaded, and even single errors are silent one time in five hundred. The repeat hardly matters. The plan's symmetry does.
A proof plan has no slide in it
A threading error that a 2/2 twill hides is invisible in the cloth and still wrong on the loom, and it shows only when the loom is re-pegged. Re-weaving every silent error under eight other plans says which do the showing. The twill run the other way and plain weave never expose one. A 1/3 twill exposes 44 per cent, a broken twill 70, and a plan of eight unrelated rows all but 864 — and those 864 are not errors at all, because each is the right threading started at another end. So the plans nest: whatever a broken or a point twill hides, the 2/2 hides too, and a threading proved under a 2/2 twill has passed the weakest test there is.
A weave holds its selvedge with two of its own columns, or not at all
A selvedge holds where its edge end changes face at every turn of the weft there, and the turns at one edge fall on alternate pick boundaries. So an end can hold the right edge only if its column changes face at every odd boundary, and the left edge only at every even one. Whether a weave can hold a selvedge is then whether its set of columns contains one of each kind, and nothing about its width matters. Two ends re-entered on the right shafts make 13,238 of the 22,874 four-by-four drafts hold at any width, where 3,262 did. The other 9,636 need a shaft of their own. A weave with an odd number of picks has no column of either kind, and never can.
An eight-shaft error hides in the row's mirror
At four shafts the lifting plans nest, with the 2/2 twill hiding every threading error the others hide. An eight-shaft loom has satins as well as twills, and their slides are different slides, so the order was expected to break. It does not. Over every threading that puts one end on each of eight shafts, the 4/4 twill hides every double error any of eleven other plans hides, and a satin hides exactly what a 1/7 twill hides, error for error. What decides it is not the slide. Every silent error is an exchange that turns the threading into a copy of itself, the slide accounts for one in six of them, and the rest hide in the row's mirror.
A tucked-in edge asks every weave the odd repeat's question
A shuttle weft turns at one edge per pick, alternately, and that alternation is what let a 2/2 twill hold both selvedges with two ends re-entered on its own shafts. A rapier or air-jet loom cuts every pick at both edges and tucks both tails into the next shed, so every boundary between picks is a turn at both edges — the question an odd repeat always asked. Only a plain column answers it. Of the 22,874 four-by-four drafts, 10,382 can still hold their edges on their own shafts, against 13,238 under a shuttle; the 2/2 twill is among the 2,856 lost. And the tucked zone carries two picks in every shed, which lies flat only below between a half and two thirds of a weave's maximum pick density.
Named alongside it
The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.
ThreadingCensusHarnessShaftsNotationEnumerationJacquardPoint paperRepeatShaftSymmetryFault