Welcome to Bower! In this tutorial, you will build on the previous skills you learned to draft faster and create more complex weaving projects.
We will cover the selection, clipboard, and structure tools which will help you immensely.
Recall that this is your starting screen. The Bower interface is organized into a toolbar on the left, the editor in the center, and a properties pane on the right.
Let's first start creating an interesting threading. Using the pen tool, draw in the threading section of the editor. I've created a sequence 1-2-3-2-3-4-3-2-3-2-1 for a zig-zaggy point twill.
Next, (1) choose the Select tool in the toolbar on the left.
You can (2) left-click and drag (which creates a dashed blue selection box) in the threading section of the editor. All data inside the blue dashed box is considered selected.
Next, copy the selection to the clipboard using the Copy Selection tool button. Once you click it, note the software will automatically switch to the Stamp Clipboard tool.
The software's internal clipboard is where it stores a copy of editor data. It can only store one copy of a selection at a time.
You should have the Stamp Clipboard tool active now (1). Again, after you click Copy Selection the software automatically switches you to the Stamp Clipboard tool.
When you hover over the threading section with your mouse (2), you can see a faint green rectangle which is a preview the clipboard data. Position your mouse accordingly and click to stamp the clipboard data to the threading.
You can see the result in (3). This lets you copy and paste complex sequences wherever you want in the draft instead of redrawing them every time. This is very helpful for large projects with hundreds of ends.
Note: If you are on tablet or iPhone without hovering functions, you will not see the preview until you left-click and drag. The Stamp Clipboard tool stamps when you release your finger or stylus.
To remove the selection box, click on the Deselect button in the toolbar. You can see the dashed blue rectangle disappears.
To recap, the Select tool, Copy Selection, Stamp Clipboard, and Deselect tools give you the standard copy/paste workflow in the Bower software. These tools work in the threading, tie-up, and treadling sections of the editor.
Next, click on the Structure Tools button in the toolbar which opens a subtoolbar. Choose the Delete End/Pick tool (1).
When you hover over the threading (2), the end column under the cursor will highlight in red. When you click, it will delete that end. You can also left-click and drag to delete a range of ends.
As you can see in (3), the entire column for the end is now gone. This tool works similarly for treadling except it deletes picks a.k.a. rows in the editor.
Keep the Structure Tools open in the toolbar and in the subtoolbar choose the Insert End/Pick tool.
When you hover over the threading (2), a thin green line between two ends appears. When you click, it will insert an end between the two ends.
In the tutorial, I clicked with the Insert End/Pick tool 10 times to insert enough ends to add another copy of my zig-zag point twill sequence. The tool works similarly in the treadling section for inserting picks.
As you can see, the Delete and Insert End/Pick tools helps you edit the middle of threading/treadling sequences with ease.
For this tutorial, we copied and stamped the zig-zag point twill sequence to fill the new inserted ends.
Next, use the Select tool and select all cells in the tie-up. Remember, the selection tools work in the threading, tie-up, and treadling sections of the draft.
Use the Clear Selection tool button to delete all data inside a selection. You can see everything inside the dashed blue box has been cleared.
With an empty tie-up, the drawdown updates accordingly and shows us all warp threads.
The Clear Selection tool is useful when you want to delete portions of your draft, often to redo them.
For the tutorial, we used the Pen tool to draw in a descending 2/2 twill tie-up.
Next, we will use the Tromp as Writ feature in Bower. This copies the threading sequence over to the treadling, or vice versa.
Go to the Operations tab (1) which has an "fx" icon. Click on the Tromp button in the Operations Section.
This opens a pop-up window with many options for Tromp as Writ. Select the Threading -> Treadling (2) option and click the Apply to commit.
You can see the threading sequence has been copied over to the treadling section and rotated accordingly.
Note that if there is not enough sequence to copy over, it will start again. So a threading 1-2-3-4-3-2-1 will be copied as a sequence 1-2-3-4-3-2-1-1-2-3-4-3-2-1-1-.... Use the Delete Pick tool to remove duplicate picks if you so desire, or set up the threading as 1-2-3-4-3-2 which repeats cleanly.
The final tool we will introduce to you this tutorial is the Reorder Tool which helps you reorder your shafts or treadles. Click on it (1) under the Structure Tools subtoolbar.
Hover over the threading section of the editor (2), and it will highlight an entire shaft row. Left-click and drag to a new gap which is highlighted as a darker blue line. When you release the mouse button, the software will move the shaft row being dragged into that gap. as seen in (3).
This also works in the treadling section in which it highlights entire treadle columns. This tool helps you organize your shafts and treadles for easier threading/treadling with the physical loom.
Congratulations on finishing this tutorial learning Bower!