Creating Taquete Designs

Here's how I do the charted designs for taquete. I use Fiberworks PCW, which has a wonderful little feature. You can create something called a sketchpad, which gets saved as a bitmap file. You can set the size of the grid and then enlarge it so it's easy to select the squares. For this, the grid is 11 squares wide, and the height I set depends on the design I'm creating. If you think of each column in the grid as representing a block, you could label the column with the number of the pattern shaft for that column -
3 4 5 6 7 8 7 6 5 4 3
but after you do a design or two, you don't need the label.



This is assuming that you have used a summer and winter threading with the blocks in point order. The shell design shown here is completely symmetrical so it can be woven with no pickup. The teapot and teacup both require a small amount of pickup for the handle of the cup and for the spout and handle of the teapot.

In both of these cases, I simply have a two color design - one color (white) for the background and one color for the pattern. You can also make a design with multiple colors - though if you get more than three or four, you're going to be juggling shuttles quite a bit!


If you want distinct designs that don't merge (assuming you have repeats of the blocks in point order), then create your design so the right and left columns are part of the background.

This is addictive!!!