Hidden Chevrons

Designed By: Shanel Wu; Warps: 230; Shuttles: 3

Loom: Schacht Baby Wolf (8-shaft)

Warp Yarns

• 10/2 Pearl cotton in black and white

Weft Yarns

• (20PR) 20/2 Pearl cotton in purple
• (CC) dyed thermochromic cotton-covered copper conductive yarn

Shuttles

1. Ground fabric (20PR)
2. Chevron 1 (CC)
3. Chevron 2 (CC)

Function

This Hidden Chevrons design is a woven fabric of two chevrons created using thermochromic yarn and interlaced on the fabric design (i.e. one continuous thread of thermochromic yarn is used for each chevron). Each chevron can be independently activated, thus allowing the fabric to have four visual states.

Draft Notes

The main technical challenge was sufficiently isolating two different thermochromic yarns so that they did not heat each other up when only one was active. To design this draft, I started in AdaCAD by creating a large canvas and filling it with the desired stitch, representing the background fabric. The thermochromic yarn images were to be woven as supplemental wefts, isolated regions where the pattern of the base weft yarn is duplicated by another yarn, in this case a thermochromic yarn. This supplemental weft could be represented in AdaCAD by cloning particular rows and assigning these cloned rows to two different thermochromic shuttles. This process allowed me to determine the sequence of shuttles to be used during weaving. Once this structure was set, I was able to isolate each thermochromic shuttle for weaving. In the final design, two rows of cotton separated each row of thermochromic yarn.

Future iterations of the interwoven, hidden images idea could take advantage of the the image to shuttle feature in AdaCAD and import the desired image, defining the specific path of the supplemental weft within the fabric to reveal the image.

Files

• Draft Bitmap
• AdaCAD Canvas for Chevron