Sometimes designers accustomed to selling sketches get them up in a very deceptive manner in order to deceive manufacturers or their agents, who may have very little knowledge of the work; but this can easily be checked by submitting them to a practical designer before purchasing them.
A design that may be very suitable for one class of cloth may be equally unsuitable for another class, and in many cases fashion regulates the suitability quite independently of its artistic merits. For coloured work, designs should be of such forms as lend themselves to the disposing of colours, no style being more suitable than Persian; whereas in plain work, as damask, the flow of line or the variation of the forms, assisted by portions of fancy shading or twilling, must give the complete effect. Again, different degrees of fineness of cloth will suit for different designs; of course, any pattern that can be put on a coarse cloth can also be put on a fine one, but many patterns are very suitable for fine work that could not be put on a very coarse fabric. When it comes to fine coloured silks, anything that the artist can paint can be fairly represented, as may be seen in the work from the Coventry silk marker looms, so that any design can be put upon cloth; but the question is, Is the cloth suitable for the design?
Fig. 68
[Fig. 68] shows a piece of 8 × 9 design or point paper; 8 × 9 meaning that each of the large squares, or designs, contains 72 small checks or squares, 8 in breadth and 9 in length, but the 9 should occupy the same space as the 8. Ten by ten appears to have been the standard design, as patterns are still counted by the 100 designs, each containing 100 checks, or 100 checks in length and the same in breadth: and in some places machines are known as so-many-design machines; thus, a 400 jacquard is called a 40-design machine.
When each design contains as many checks in length as it does in breadth, the paper is intended for work that is to have equal quantities of warp and weft threads in it; thus 8 × 8, 10 × 10, 12 × 12 paper would all suit for cloth with, say, 80 threads of warp and 80 picks of weft per inch, the difference being that 8 × 8 is intended for a jacquard with 8 needles in the row, and 10 × 10 and 12 × 12 for 10 and 12 row machines respectively. It is not necessary to have different papers to suit, as one could be used for all, and after the pattern is painted it could be ruled in rows to suit the machine, but it is much more convenient to get the correct size of paper.
If 80 threads of warp required to have 100 picks per inch, then to find the size of the paper state as 80: 100:: the number of needles in one row of the machine to the number of cards in each design, giving 8 × 10, 10 × 12-1/2, or 12 × 15; but 10 × 12, or 12 × 14 would have to be used for the last two, as a half could not be made, and 12 × 15 is an unusual size. Either would do by drawing out the design a little when enlarging it for the point paper. Square paper might also be used by counting off the number of checks required, and drawing an elongated pattern to cover them; but it is more desirable to have suitable paper for work that is at all particular, and in case of such as 12 × 15 paper, 8 × 10 is the same proportion, and could be used for it, the squares afterwards being ruled in 12’s for the card-cutter.
Each upright space on the design paper, between the lines, represents a thread of warp or one hook of the jacquard, and each space between the horizontal lines represents a pick, or shot, of weft, or one card of the pattern; so that a painted pattern is a magnified view of the texture of the cloth, in common jacquard work.