Author: Matthew Cavalletto

The front page of this site, which contains a listing of all of our published charts, now includes a simple search feature that makes it easier to locate specific charts.

When you visit the home page of potholders.piglet.org, you’ll see a gray field near the top prompting you to “type to search.”

As you type into that field, the list of charts on the page will be filtered to only show matching entries. For example, if you type in “basket” the page will show only basketweave patterns.

Searching only works on the visible titles, so this will not find descriptive commentary that may appear in the comments area on an individual chart.

You can filter for charts by size, so if you type in “19” you’ll see only patterns which include a 19-peg chart.

Search Links

You can also include search terms in links, so if you send someone a link to http://potholders.piglet.org/?nine they will see a listing of just the nine-block charts.

This allows linking to individual charts such as http://potholders.piglet.org/?hallstat, or just the PDF files with http://potholders.piglet.org/?pdf.

Regular Expressions

The search feature uses your browser’s regular-expression engine, so you can search for “17|19” to find patterns with either a 17-peg chart or a 19-peg chart.

These can be included in links, so http://potholders.piglet.org/?waffle|padded will lead people to a page displaying patterns which contain either “waffle” or “padded.”

 

Piglet worked a 19-peg version of our “Indented Bendlets” pattern, and while she was doing so identified a few places where the 27-peg chart included some needlessly-long floats. The corrected charts have been posted to our website and are attached below.

She describes the resulting potholder as “thick, but not too plush,” and “flexible but not floppy.” She also says it is “noticeably flat and even. Very stable. This stability is tied to the way the weaving pattern is established along the major diagonals.”

I’m really happy with how this works up, and the subtle difference in plushness between the narrow and wide stripes that develops when you take it off the loom.

This is another one of those designs that looks different while it’s on the loom — the little spots of color inside each of the contrasting boxes pulls down when you bind off, leaving a solid-color diagonal stripe.

Charts attached and on our home page as usual.

The December edition of our potholder design collection has been posted as a downloadable PDF. It contains 249 designs, many at multiple sizes, for a total of 360 charts. All of the individual charts are also available as single images on our website’s home page.

A total of 109 designs have been added since October, of which 40 are available in multiple sizes. The new charts are highlighted in the table of contents, both online and in the printable document. If you already have the earlier edition, you can download just the new charts as a separate PDF.

Many of those are described in recent posts by Piglet here and on Facebook, including photos and commentary on the resulting potholders.

Piglet and I ventured out today to see the “Threads of Power” exhibit at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, exploring the development and social significance of lace, including examples of needle and bobbin lace from the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, courtesy of Switzerland’s Textilmuseum St. Gallen.

Although the fabric examples were impressive, the thing that particularly caught my attention were a few fifteenth- and sixteenth-century examples of “pattern books” — printed collections of designs to be used as source material by people working with fiber and fabric.

Those early pattern books are notable not because they’re entirely original creative works — indeed, they’re just collecting and organizing motifs that have mostly been developed by others — instead, their value lies in the crucial role they play in propagating those ideas to a wider audience beyond the narrow limits of guilds or court society, making it easy for a wide range of people to learn existing patterns, practice their skills, create items that others will appreciate, and eventually branch out to create new unique designs while drawing on this shared heritage.

These early works provide a historical reference point for the work I do in my own life to make heraldic art and small-scale weaving patterns available to facilitate the work of today’s artisans.

It was inspiring to see examples of this type of resource dating from four hundred and five hundred years ago, and I’m very pleased that I am, in my own very small way, helping to continue this tradition.

Last week we posted about “Three-Three Offset Twill,” a weaving pattern that produced a thick and textured fabric with prominent diagonal grooves. Here’s a variation with that same texture, but reversing the direction of the grooves part way across the fabric: “Three-Three Offset Bands.”

The photos below don’t really do the three-dimensionality of it full justice. The potholder is noticably thicker than a plain-weave potholder would be, and because the horizontal weft loops puff out over the surface of the vertical warp loops, both faces of the potholder winds up showing much more of that color, with more of the warp loops hidden inside the thickness of the fabric.

Earlier today, Deborah Jean Cohen (author of In the Loop) took to Facebook to complain that two of our earliest charts, dating from late 2020, had been created by looking at photographs of potholders that she and Bill West had posted to Facebook.

In each of those two cases, we had credited them by name as our inspiration, and neither of them had objected during the intervening years, but apparently she’s been carrying a grudge all this time, declaring in her post that we had “piggybacked on others’ hard work… Sure, it’s legal, but is it ethical? You’re on notice now.”

I’m not sure what that last sentence means, and it seems I won’t ever get to ask her, because she’s now blocked me and banned me from the Facebook group she administers.

The two charts in question are not particularly complicated, and the designs they show are indubitably in the public domain — they don’t belong to anyone.

For thousands of years, weavers developed their repertoires by practicing techniques other people had developed, and then evolving their own variations on them. By the dawn of the nineteenth century these designs were being collected in pattern books, and later publishers aggregated those references into larger and larger collections, each with hundreds or thousand of charts. Hundreds of those books have been digitized, and tens of thousands of patterns from them have been posted online.

Uncountable millions of hours have gone into producing this body of techniques and patterns — the shared legacy of humanity’s ongoing love affair with string, stretching back a thousand generations — so literally everyone involved in fiber crafts today is “piggybacking on others’ hard work.”

All modern weavers have access to this incredible legacy of public domain material, allowing us to select elements that catch our eye, modifying and recombining and elaborating on them in innumerable ways, and then putting the results of our efforts back out into the world.

The idea that when Deborah looked at other people’s weaving and made her own variation of it, that effort had been meaningful creative work — but when we later looked at her weaving and made our own variation of it, this was now unethical, a form of cheating, and a shocking breach of norms — well, I don’t think it holds water.

That said, I figured I might as well rectify the perceived slight, so I have deleted the charts that we created in 2020 for “Square Spiral” and “Diamond Spiral,” and re-drawn them anew, referring to century-old sources that have been archived at handweaving.net (a genuinely amazing community resource): a square spiral found in Orimono Soshiki Hen by Kiju Yoshida (1903) now adapted for 27-peg and 18-peg looms, and a twill spiral found in Die färbige Gewebemusterung by 
Franz Donat (1907) likewise adapted for 27-peg and 18-peg looms.

I hope that Deborah will be able to rest easier now that our charts are no longer piggybacking on her proprietary hard work.

Here’s another intersting weave that produces a highly-textured extra-thick fabric: “Three-Three Offset Twill.” (It’s so hard to come up with good names!)

Each row is woven over three/under three, but instead of each row shifting over by one pick as you would for regular three-three twill, here you alternate between shifting over two and then over three.

When taken off the loom, the fabric tightens in and puffs up as with three-three twill, but the alternating shift sequence creates extra-wide wales with distinct grooves between them.

The back side features the same design, with the grooves reversed to line up under the ridges of the front. The weft floats spread out on each face, leaving the warp mostly hidden.

I’m not sure the photos below fully capture the texture, but in person it’s quite dramatic, and the feeling in your hand is very different than a plain weave.

Piglet has woven some fun color variations of this fabric, but to start with here’s a simple two-color example, with a white warp and colored weft.

Here’s another linear shadow-weave design just added to our charts: “Pulsating Saltire.”

It’s mostly tabby weave, so the resulting fabric is smooth and flat flexible. Parallel twill-like wales run diagonally towards each corner to produce the X-shaped design. The back side has a different but equally-striking pattern, with a small eye in the middle that disappears when you take it off the loom.

Woven here in Harrisville purple and white, this would work equally well in any contrasting pair of colors — or replace one or both with a range of related colors, like black against a rainbow, or blues against yellows.

Combining the techniques used in “Noughts and Crosses,” “Two-One Twill Pinstripes,” and “Tri-Color Two-One Corners,” this design features thin lines forming boxes on one side and crosswise corners on the other.

Woven in two-one twill, with over-three floats at the corners, this pattern weaves up quickly and shrinks when taken off the loom to form a dense fabric.

A 27-peg chart is also available, and tri-color versions are expected to follow.

Here’s another interesting weave that changes when you take it off the loom: “Pierced Lattice.” Like two-two twill, this produces a thicker and smaller potholder than a plain tabby weave would, but the pattern is unique.

Available in both 27-peg and 19/18-peg sizes, as well as a three-color variation.