Getting to grips with Photoshop

A week of learning Photoshop applied to weaving lift plans.  Alice Schien's book The Lift Plan Connection is basically a manual for Photoshop for those who want to use it's features to design lift plans. You have to make your own pattern presets for all the weave structures you want to use, but the process after that is sooooo quick. I can take a jpeg or bitmap picture, or something drawn on Paint or Photoshop and generate a 4 layer (which means 4 different weave structures if you want them) liftplan in about 2 minutes!
This one is only two layers, produced from a simple 3 line doodle followed by one of photoshops filters (twirl filter). layers are 3-1twill and broken twill - this is the lift plan pasted into WeaveIt.

Now I have set up half a dozen preset Network threadings in Weavit, it takes literally 3 minutes to go from the sketch to ready-to-weave.

Unlike designing in the weaving software (in the tie-up lift plan or  sketchpad) the 'weavability' of the final design in Photoshop is guaranteed, once you have done the ground work setting up the pattern library in Photoshop. From there, you have only to follow two weaving rules: don't mix  network initials that aren't mutiples of each other e.g. a 4 end with a 5 end; and avoid mixing weave structures that are disparate and fortunately there aren't many and they are pretty obvious even to a numpty like me. Then, a simple float search is all that's required in the weaving software after the wif has been generated.  

In my teaching I have found that, invariably, anything that improves accessibility and promotes faster progression earlier in the learning process leads to engagement and better learning. If I were teaching weaving in my technology class to GCSE students today, this would be the tool I would use as the first step for students understanding of weave structures and designing their own. This is directly analogous to the huge leap forward in teaching that CAD provided: by directing it early at the novice they move much quicker towards being engaged in getting their ideas to fruition.