> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://docs.tempoweave.com/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://docs.tempoweave.com/special-topics/cloth-orientation-rising-and-sinking-sheds.md).

# Cloth Orientation, Rising and Sinking Sheds

\*\*DRAFT\*\*

*Applies to Desktop and Mobile.*

As your draft is sort of a picture of cloth,  a picture has a right way up. Most of the time it does not matter which way up you look at it: a twill is a twill from any side. It starts to matter the moment a draft contains something that must read correctly, such as letters, numbers, a signature, or an asymmetric motif, and it matters again when a draft designed for one kind of loom is woven on the other kind. This guide covers both, and the one trap that catches experienced weavers.

### Part 1: Two ways to draw a draft

#### American and Scandinavian

Weavers draw drafts two ways, and TempoWeave supports both. **Draft Style** in Settings chooses between them.

The **American** style, the default, puts shaft 1 at the bottom of the threading, pick 1 at the top of the treadling, and reads the treadling downward. A black square means the warp rises over the weft. It is the convention of most American and British books and magazines, and of most jack looms.

The **Scandinavian** style, often called Swedish, puts shaft 1 at the top, pick 1 at the bottom, and reads the treadling upward. A black square means the warp sinks under the weft. It is the convention of Scandinavian and much of continental European weaving, and of the counterbalance and countermarch looms that tradition favors.

Put the two side by side and the Scandinavian draft looks like the American one turned upside down, with the black and white squares swapped: black now marks the warp that sinks rather than the warp that rises. That is not an accident of notation. A Scandinavian draft is drawn from the weaver's seat: sitting at the loom and looking down, the first pick is nearest you at the bottom, the cloth grows away from you toward the top, and the tied shafts are the ones that sink, because on a counterbalance loom that is what a tied shaft does. The American draft was drawn instead the way a published pattern reads on the page, top to bottom like text, on looms where the tied shafts rise. Two regions, two loom families, two ideas about what the drawing is *for*, and each convention is exactly right for its own loom.

#### The drawdown is a picture of cloth, seen from one end

Whichever style you use, the drawdown is a picture of the cloth. The only question is which end you are looking from.

In the American style, pick 1 is at the top and later picks come down toward you, so you are looking at the cloth from the far end of the loom, the way it reads on a printed page. For structure that makes no difference. For lettering it means the drawdown shows your letters upside down compared with the cloth on the loom.

In the Scandinavian style, pick 1 is at the bottom and the cloth grows upward, which is the view from the bench. Lettering reads the way it will weave.

**This is the simplest fix of all.** If you design in the American style and want to see the cloth as it will be woven, switch **Draft Style** to Bottom to Top. The drawdown flips to the Scandinavian layout, pick 1 at the bottom, and nothing in your draft changes: the threading, tie-up, and treadling are the same data, drawn from the other end. If you would rather keep the American page and move only the picks, set **Pick 1 Placement** to At Bottom instead; the threading and tie-up stay at the top. Switch back whenever you like. The rest of this part explains why the obvious alternative, imagining the picture from the other side, does not work, and what else does.

#### Why you cannot just walk around the monitor and look down

It is tempting to fix this by imagining the screen from the other side, or by physically walking around to the top of the monitor and looking down. That turns the picture upside down, which is what you want for the picks, but it also swaps left and right, which is not what you want for the threading. Thread 1 would now be on the left. Your letters would be upside down and mirrored, which is not the same as right way up.

Turning a picture upside down is a rotation. What the cloth needs is a flip: picks reversed, threads left alone. Rotation and flip differ by exactly one mirror, and that mirror is what wrecks the lettering.

#### Three correct ways to see the cloth as it weaves

Any one of these gives the right picture. Pick one; do not combine them.

1. **Draft Style: Bottom to Top**, or **Pick 1 Placement: At Bottom** (Settings). Either puts pick 1 at the bottom with the treadling reading upward; Draft Style also moves the threading and tie-up below the drawdown, the full Scandinavian page, while Pick 1 Placement moves only the picks. This is the flip done for you, and it is the cleanest choice for a project with lettering: the drawdown shows the cloth the way it grows on the loom, and the letters read correctly while you design.
2. **View Fabric ▸ As woven.** A checkbox at the top of View Fabric that flips the rendered cloth so pick 1 is at the bottom, without changing any setting. Use it to check a draft you would rather keep in the Top style. It stays on until you turn it off.
3. **Temporarily reverse the threading.** Select all of the threading and use Reverse, look at the drawdown from the top of the monitor, then undo. This is the manual version of the same flip. It works, and it is easy to forget to undo.

#### The combination trap

Changing Draft Style to Bottom *and* changing Origin Side from Right to Left does not double the correction, it cancels it. Draft Style: Bottom flips the picks. Origin Side: Left mirrors the threads. Both together are a rotation, which is the walk-around-the-monitor picture again, letters mirrored. If you are correcting orientation for lettering, change one thing.

Origin Side is a real choice for weavers who thread from the left, and there is nothing wrong with it. It is just not an orientation fix.

#### Front or back: which face will be up

Everything above assumes you want the letters to read correctly on the face that is *up* on the loom. Many weavers happily weave a piece face down, especially with structures whose long floats are better kept underneath. If that is you, the test changes: switch to **Back View** and check that the letters read correctly there. If they do, weave it face down as planned. View Fabric's **Back** button shows the same thing rendered as cloth.

Remember that turning cloth over is itself a mirror. The back of the cloth is the front flipped left to right, so lettering that reads correctly on one face is mirrored on the other. There is no way to have letters read correctly on both faces of a single-layer cloth; you have to decide which face is the show face before you weave.

### Part 2: Rising shed and sinking shed

#### What the two sheds are

On a **rising shed** loom, jack looms among them, pressing a treadle lifts the shafts tied to it. The tied shafts rise, their warp threads go over the weft, and the pick is thrown under them.

On a **sinking shed** loom, counterbalance and many countermarch setups, pressing a treadle lowers the shafts tied to it. The tied shafts sink, their warp threads go under the weft.

The tie-up is the same object on both looms, a list of which shafts each treadle moves. The difference is the direction they move. So the same tie-up, treadled identically, weaves the *opposite* interlacement on the two looms: every place the warp was on top is now underneath, and the other way round.

#### What that means for the cloth

The cloth is the same cloth. What changes is which face is up while you weave. A draft designed for a rising shed and woven on a sinking shed comes off the loom face down. Barry's rule, which is worth memorizing: **on a sinking shed loom you see the back, but not flipped.** The face inverts. The geometry does not: thread 1 is still on the same side, pick 1 is still first. Nothing is mirrored.

This is why the sinking-shed setting in TempoWeave changes the drawdown's face and nothing else, and why it is not the same as Back View, which mirrors the threads as well because turning real cloth over does.

#### Where TempoWeave sets the shed

* **Project ▸ Rising Shed / Sinking Shed** sets it for the current draft, and the choice is saved in the draft file.
* **Settings ▸ Default Shed Mode** sets what a new draft starts with. Choosing Draft Style: Bottom switches the default to Sinking, since the two conventions usually travel together, but you can set either independently.
* The drawdown always shows the face that is up on the loom you have selected. Switch the shed and the black squares invert.

For most weavers this is the whole story: set the shed to match your loom and the drawdown shows what you will see while weaving.

### Part 3: The trap when converting between sheds

Sometimes you want to do more than *see* the sinking-shed face. You want to *change the draft* so that a rising-shed tie-up weaves the intended face on a sinking-shed loom, or the reverse. The obvious way is to invert the tie-up: tie what was untied, untie what was tied. For a single-treadle draft that is exactly right. **Change Face** on the tie-up does it in one step.

For a **multi-treadle draft**, where some picks press two or more treadles together, inverting the tie-up cell by cell is silently wrong.

#### Why it goes wrong

When you press two treadles together, a shaft moves if it is tied to *either* treadle. In the language of logic, combining treadles is **or**. Inverting a treadle is **not**. So if you invert each treadle in the tie-up and then press the pair, the shafts that move are "not A or not B." What you wanted for the inverted pick was the complement of everything the original pair moved, which is "not (A or B)." By De Morgan's law, "not A or not B" equals "not (A and B)": the complement of only the shafts the two treadles *share*. Those two sets are the same only when the treadles overlap completely, which in a real tie-up they never do.

The practical result is a draft that looks plausible in the tie-up, weaves a different structure, and usually shows long floats where the combination picks were. The mistake is not visible in the tie-up grid, because the grid was inverted correctly. It only shows in the resolved lifts, pick by pick.

The general rule: inverting looks like something you can do to the tie-up, one cell at a time, but combination treadling makes it something you must do to each *pick's* resolved lift. Do it at the wrong level and it is wrong without warning.

#### Convert Shed does all of this for you

**Project ▸ Convert Shed**, just under Rising Shed / Sinking Shed, rewrites the draft so it weaves the same cloth on the other kind of loom and then switches the shed setting to match, so the drawdown shows the same face as before. It applies the rules in this guide automatically: a liftplan has every lift inverted; a single-treadle tie-up draft has its tie-up inverted; a multi-treadle draft is first given one treadle per unique lift, so the inversion happens at the right level, and then folded back into combination presses with the Treadle Reducer so you keep the treadle count you started with. Only if that fold cannot cover every lift does the draft keep the expanded form, and the message then tells you the new count. It is one undo step. If a multi-treadle draft would need more treadles than a loom allows, it says so and suggests converting to a liftplan first.

The manual routes below are still there for weavers who want to see each step.

#### The safe ways to convert a multi-treadle draft

1. **Do not convert at all.** Set Project ▸ Sinking Shed and weave from the draft as it is. The drawdown shows the sinking-shed face and the tie-up is untouched. The cloth comes off face down relative to the original design, which is often perfectly acceptable, and nothing can go wrong.
2. **Convert to a liftplan first.** Tools ▸ To Liftplan resolves every pick, including combination presses, into the exact shafts it lifts. Now invert the liftplan itself, which works at the pick level and so cannot fall into the trap:
   * In the liftplan, select every pick and every shaft column. Drag from the first cell to the last, or start a selection and extend it to the whole liftplan.
   * Choose **Change Face**, from the ribbon's Weft menu or by right-clicking the selection. Change Face only inverts the cells you selected, so a partial selection converts only part of the draft.
   * Check the drawdown: every black cell is now white and every white cell black, on every pick. A liftplan is the right form for table looms and dobbies anyway, so for those looms this is the natural route.
3. **Expand the treadles first.** Tools ▸ Treadle Expander gives every unique lift its own treadle, so the draft becomes single-treadle. Now the tie-up can be inverted safely with Change Face, and the treadling is unchanged. You may need more treadles than the original, which the Expander tells you before it applies.

Whichever you choose, check the result in View Fabric before you dress the loom. Floats that were not in the original design are the sign that the conversion went wrong.

### Quick reference

| I want to                                           | Do this                                                                                                  |
| --------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| See the cloth as it grows on the loom               | Draft Style: Bottom to Top, Pick 1 Placement: At Bottom, or View Fabric ▸ As woven                       |
| Check lettering for a piece woven face up           | Front View or View Fabric Front, with the flip above                                                     |
| Check lettering for a piece woven face down         | Back View or View Fabric Back                                                                            |
| Show the face a sinking-shed loom weaves            | Project ▸ Sinking Shed (view only, tie-up unchanged)                                                     |
| Convert a single-treadle draft between sheds        | Change Face on the tie-up                                                                                |
| Convert any draft between sheds, automatically      | Project ▸ Convert Shed                                                                                   |
| Convert a multi-treadle draft between sheds by hand | To Liftplan, select the whole liftplan, Change Face; or Treadle Expander, then Change Face on the tie-up |
| Correct orientation for lettering                   | Change one thing only, never Draft Style and Origin Side together                                        |