Like many new weavers, I've always wanted to try twill on my rigid heddle loom, but if you're like me and have been brave enough to read about using double heddles, special warping, and lifting the heddles in a particular sequence, you may be exactly like me and put it off for another time. This morning, I wondered how difficult it could be. Isn't weaving simply raising and lowering threads and sending another thread over, around, under? Isn't it a fairly simple process to create a fairly simple piece of fabric? If my (extremely simplified) theory would hold water, could it be that twill is (gasp!) simple?

I dug out my little Wonder Weave loom and looked up twill online. I found a very simple pattern on Wikipedia, and started weaving 2 by 2 twill with a needle and yarn. It looked bad, but I could see a pattern emerging:

I then warped my Knitting Board (10"). I had purchased the AKB extenders which turn the knitting board into a frame loom for simple weaving projects. I used the identical pattern from the Wonder Weave, and after just a few inches, the diagonal weave of the twill jumped right out at me:

Basically, the pattern is two over, two under. To get the twill, your second pass will begin with a "one over, two under" then continue with the 2×2 pattern.

Here is a link to the image I used when weaving this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:22twillsm.png.

Experimenting is the spice of life. Now if I could just finish one of those projects on my "big" looms.