A plaid is not a picture. It is a list of numbers, and somebody wrote the list before anybody wove anything. Here is ours, and two sheets to draw it on.
Four rust, twenty eight pine, four cream, eight pine, twenty four charcoal, eight pine, four cream, twenty eight pine. Add them up and you get 108. Then the list starts again from the beginning, forever, all the way across the shirt.
It is a grid with the colours already printed along the top edge and down the left edge. That is the recipe, laid out twice: once going across and once going down.
One square on the sheet stands for four real threads, because 108 divided by four is 27 and 27 squares is a thing you can actually colour in. Every stripe in our recipe divides by four exactly, so nothing was fudged to make it fit.
For each square, look up to the colour at the top of its column, then left to the colour at the end of its row. Colour the square with whichever of the two is darker.
On real cloth the two threads take turns being on top, which is finer than a pencil can manage. Darker wins is close enough, and at arm's length you will not be able to tell.
Put it on the floor and look at it from standing up. The pattern only turns up when you stop looking at the squares. That is true of the real cloth as well, which is why nobody can judge a plaid off a small photograph.
The second sheet has empty squares along both edges. Fill them in with any colours you like, in any counts you like, then colour the middle the same way.
Two things to try. Keep one colour going for a long stretch and one for a very short one, because a plaid with all its stripes the same width looks like a chessboard and not much else. And put one single line of a loud colour in, on its own. That is what the four rust threads are doing in ours.
This strip is drawn straight from the same 108 numbers that go to the mill. It is not a picture somebody made to look nice. Change one number in the list and this strip changes with it, which is exactly what would happen to the shirt.
The Lumber Outlet Group · Log Labs · The Fashion Files
Name of your pattern: ________________________________
Threads to a square: ______ · Squares across: 27 · Threads in one repeat: ______
When yours is finished you have done the job somebody at a mill does. If you want to see what happens to a pattern after that, the Build Log follows the same road for two wooden things: drawn, then priced, then made, then measured, then posted.
That is the end of this one
The word for what you just did is sett.
A sett is the list of colours and counts that makes a plaid, and it is the entire design. Hand a weaver the sett and they can weave the cloth without ever seeing a picture of it. That is why our shirt exists as numbers a long time before it exists as cloth.
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