I am weaving an eight-shaft pointed threading with a variety of structures for a workshop I am scheduled to teach at the Intermountain Conference summer of 2027. I have already woven one for four shafts, but I have thought of a few possibilities I didn’t include in it, so I was thinking I should use the eight-shaft version and turn it into a four-shaft pointed threading…. Not so fast.

The conventional wisdom is that we should use all of our shafts, regardless of what the pattern calls for, to have even wear and tear on our loom.

Most weavers follow that advice for plain weave; the drawdown of the four-shaft version is identical to that of the 2-shaft version:

For other structures, however, the “back four” of an eight-shaft loom are not always used. A straight twill is a good example. Four shafts may be used:

Instead of all eight:

If we want to use a four-shaft structure on eight or more shafts, we do have to pay attention as to what a repeat of the structure is. For example, here is a pointed twill:


Its threading is not: 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1, as we can see from the draft below. We use a thread on shaft 1 at the end of all the repeats to balance the motif.

If we use the correct threading for the structure and add the same threading to shafts 5 through 8, we can weave the same fabric as the one using shafts 1 through four, as we see below.


Back to thinking whether I could take an 8-shaft pointed threading and use it for a four-shaft pointed twill: just looking at the threading, it was obvious that the eight-shaft threading lacked the pivot points, that is the forward straight draw and the backward straight draw were too long.

Still, I was curious as to what I would get if I treadled the eight-shaft pointed threading with the same treadling as the previous draft, the four-shaft woven on eight shaft. Here is the drawdown:


They do have motifs in common, as shown by the black and red squares surrounding the similarities, but the contours are different.




Next time you would like to weave a four-shaft structure on an eight (or more!) shaft loom, think about the possibility of spreading the threads and thus the weight. Should you wish to weave an eight-shaft equivalent of a four-shaft structure, check out the differences, they are not always very obvious.

Happy Weaving!