Name Drafting

In April I'm giving a program for my weaving guild on name drafting. It's a process of creating an all original draft based on a name/word/saying. In the past I've made table runners to gift using name drafts to commemorate special occasions - then in the hem of the table runners I've embroidered the name/word/saying used to create the draft along with the date. A short explanation is that each letter of the alphabet is assigned a number from 1-4 in the case of a 4 harness overshot weave structure. Since my head is still 'cloudy' from my cold I decided this was something I could concentrate on today - just playing with graph paper. I have several magazines and books for my bibliography but can't concentrate on reading those articles right now, maybe tomorrow........

Here I was playing with a draft using my guild's name, 'Saturday Handweavers Guild' and another one using 'Love To Weave'. There is a much quicker way to do this using a weaving software program but that's not what I'll be concentrating on since most guild members don't have weaving software.......plus a big purpose in giving this program is to teach drafting and we have many newer weavers that have not gone past reading a draft and weaving, they don't understand how the draft works.

I'm trying to come up with some fun hands-on ideas for learning to make the drafts, first learning how to do it on graph paper, then maybe weaving with cardstock - doing that really makes it clear how it works when you treadle a pattern, raise certain harnesses and put the slip of paper through so you can see what happens when some harnesses are raised and others that stay down. I'm thinking this may be a fun activity to drive the concept home.

I'll need to start working on a handout and weave some samples - would love to get this program finished up early and let it sit until April so I can move on to other weaving.