My Book: Exploring Multishaft Design
This book guides you step by step as you make your own drafts for many different kinds of designs. Each chapter is a workshop that you take at home, using your own loom. Not a beginning weaving text, the book assumes you know basic 4-shaft weaving and are interested in using more than 8 shafts. Although most of the examples are for 16 shafts, some are for 12 or 24 shafts, and most of the exercises can be done with 8. The goal is to understand exactly how structures work, through drafts, so you can create the fabrics of your dreams (and a lot of samples). Chapters include straight twills, plaited twills, curves, designing in the liftplan, advancing twills and some network drafting, using a straight draw threading to weave many structures, shadow weave, warp rep, and a long chapter on double weave. And more! The drafting exercises are designed for use with graph paper or weaving software. Special instructions are included for table looms, mechanical dobby looms, traditional treadle looms, and computer-assisted looms. This is a thorough introduction to multishaft design, and includes some ideas that will be of interest to more advanced weavers. All photos in the book are black and white, but I have color pictures on here. You can also find a correction here for a mistake in chapter 1, for which I apologize.

128 pages, 10 chapters. Soft cover, spiral bound, printed in 2000.

You can order the book directly from Bonnie, or through selected weaving supply businesses in the USA and Canada. It costs $29.95 plus shipping and handling: $5.00 for priority mail in the USA or $3.00 for book rate, plus sales tax if you live in Maryland. Send the check to Bonnie Inouye. My mailing address is on the first page of this website. For more information, write to [email protected]