The Loom Setup Panel
The Loom Setup section is at the top of the properties panel on the right side. This is where you configure the structural parameters of your draft — dimensions, loom mode, sett, and presets.
Resizing Your Draft
Change the number of warps, wefts, shafts, and treadles using the dimension controls. Increasing warps makes your fabric wider. Increasing wefts makes it longer. Adding shafts and treadles gives you more structural possibilities but also more complexity.
Navigating the Canvas
As you resize your draft, it may extend beyond the visible area. Use the Pan tool to left-click and drag the canvas to reposition your view. Use the Zoom tool to left-click and drag horizontally to zoom in and out. If you get lost, click Home View to reset the canvas so the entire draft fits on screen.
Tieup + Treadling Mode
This is the default loom mode. It maps to a traditional floor loom: shafts are tied to treadles, and you press treadles in sequence. The tieup grid and treadling grid are both visible and editable. This mode is compact — a small tieup grid can describe a long repeating sequence.
Liftplan Mode
In liftplan mode, there are no treadles. Instead, each weft pick specifies exactly which shafts rise. The liftplan grid replaces both the tieup and treadling grids. This maps to a dobby loom, where each pick can lift any combination of shafts independently.
Liftplan mode is more verbose — every pick is specified individually — but also more flexible. You can create patterns that would require more treadles than a floor loom physically has.
Switching Between Modes
Switch loom modes in the Loom Setup section. Bower converts your draft data when you switch. Going from tieup+treadling to liftplan expands the tieup into per-pick shaft selections. Going from liftplan to tieup+treadling decomposes the liftplan back into a compact tieup and treadling sequence. The drawdown stays the same — it's the same fabric described differently.
Setting EPI and PPI
EPI (ends per inch) controls warp density. PPI (picks per inch) controls weft density. These settings don't change the draft structure — they describe how tightly the fabric is woven. Sett values are used when exporting a PDF at actual size, so the printed output reflects real-world dimensions.
Applying Presets
Bower includes a library of preset threading and treadling sequences. Open the preset popover from Loom Setup to browse structure families — straight draw, point twill, skip draw, and more — each available in variants for different shaft counts. Applying a preset fills in the threading or treadling grid for you. You can also use tromp-as-writ to generate a treadling sequence that mirrors your threading.