Ask Madelyn: Half Dukagång and a Correction

Hi Madelyn, I am confused by Figures 1 and 2 in your article in the March/April 2017 issue of Handwoven, “The Draft: Half Dukagång,” pages 14–15. In Figure 1, the drawdown for the right side of the fabric (woven underneath) shows three-thread floats for tabby picks two and four. And Figure 2 doesn’t really look like a summer and winter draft. Can you explain? Jean

Hi Jean!

I would love to be able to explain how those errors happened, but I can’t really figure it out. I create the drawings of the threads in a weaving program, then work with them in Photoshop, and then do the drafts in Adobe Illustrator. By the time I finish, I have multiple copies of everything and, er, “mistakes were made.”

Here are the corrected figures. Figure 1 shows the usual threading for the Scandinavian weave “half dukagång.” It is really a lot like summer and winter. I wanted to show in the article that half dukagång can be woven on a summer and winter threading. Summer and winter is more “shaft efficient” in that you can weave two blocks on four shafts.

Figure 1: Dukagång structure

Patterning in half dukagång is usually done with pick-up rather than with loom-controlled blocks, but structurally it is the same as a version of summer and winter in which only one tie-down shaft is raised throughout, illustrated in Figure 2. The treadling in 2b is often called the dukagång treadling for summer and winter.

Figure 2: Summer and winter structure

More than almost anything else, I hate making errors in articles about weave structures and drafting. Beginning weavers especially, but all of us really, struggle hard to understand the connection between what the threads are doing and what the words and drafts are trying to show. If you think you understand what’s being explained and then look at a draft that doesn’t match the understanding you worked so hard to get, it’s extremely discouraging. But in weaving, there are so many ways to make errors in diagrams, words, numbers... Always, when you think there is either an error or else you have totally misunderstood something, don’t assume it’s you. And for all of us who write about weaving: we can never check our work too many times. Thank you so much for pointing this out to us.

—Madelyn

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