A priceless portfolio of weaving charts for loop potholders.
Here’s our newest chart: a distinctive shadow-weave design with a pleasantly-textured surface. After binding off, the center of this design pulls up to form a raised pad, surrounded by gentle ribs.
This is a traditional motif found in Slavic redwork embroidery, variously said to represent a field or the sun shining on it. Adapted from a hand-stitched example by Hanya Vladimirovna Polotskaya.
Here’s a brand-new chart with an especially-plush weave: “Three-Three Twill Solo Wave.”
This is a variation of our “Three-Three Twill Zig Zags” chart, with the contrasting color restricted to a single stripe. There are charts for 28/27 pegs and for 19 pegs.
Note that this shrinks up even more than a straight 3/3 twill, and as a result of that, it’s super thick and soft. The example below is woven with pro-size FL/Harrisville loops, 28 in the warp and 27 in the weft, and after binding off it’s just 6.5″ x 7″.
There are some long over-five floats, but the fabric holds together well and there are no gaps in the weave.
The third in our series of knot designs is about at the limit of what you can pack into a traditional-size loom: “Mascle Knot,” with one strand making six loops and nine crossings. (Chart posted for 19 pegs.)
The example below is woven with cayenne and white loops — and we’d love to see it in other colors!
As with the other shadow-weave knots, the potholder draws up slightly more than a pure-tabby weave but not as much as a twill. The longest floats on the front side are over-two, while the back includes some threes.
Here’s another entry in our series of shadow-weave twisted-cord designs: “Solomon’s Knot.” (Chart posted for 19 pegs.)
Piglet wove this example on a 19-peg loom using plum and denim loops — try some other color pairings and let us know how they turn out!
As with the other shadow-weave knots, the potholder draws up slightly more than a pure-tabby weave but not as much as a twill. The longest floats on the front side are over-two, while the back includes some threes.
Following up on the “Twisted Cords” design from last week, here’s another newly-charted shadow-weave design on the same theme: the “Bowen Knot.” (Chart posted for 19 pegs.)
Piglet wove the version below on a 19-peg loom (Cottage Loom) using plum and white loops (Friendly Loom) — if you try this, we’d love to see photos of how it turns out in other color pairings!
The resulting potholder is very flexible, with a puffier section containing the central knots, surrounded by a slightly thinner, flatter margin. There are some three-floats on the back side, but they’re very balanced and the fabric holds together well. The structure is rotationally symmetric, but the back side looks nothing like the front, instead showing the “boxes and equals-signs” that are the hallmark of these knot patterns’s undersides.
Here’s a brand new pattern, just charted and woven for the first time this week: “Twisted Cords.”
As often happens, after weaving the draft pattern, Piglet was able to identify areas for improvement — in this case, a dozen spots where floats could be reoriented to make the lines stay straighter when removed from the loom — which I’ve now incorporated into the charts so future versions will look crisper.
Charts are posted for 27 pegs and for 19 pegs.
Piglet notes: “The distributed small floats throughout the pattern make a fabric that is flat and thin like tabby, but extremely flexible. You can crumple it in your hand. Great for pot lid knobs and pan handles.”
As part of our exploration of the possibilities of lozenge twill patterns on woven potholders, Piglet has been making up matching sets of traditional size potholders in a range of adjacent patterns, the first of which is shown below.
Despite each being quite distinct, they make a lovely set, with recurring motifs that show again and again, but rotated, inverted, or paired differently.
The following diagram shows the four different patterns used in this first group:
When comparing the charts to the photos, or looking at the on-loom and off-loom photos, you can see the ways the patterns shift and soften when they’re bound off.
Charts for each of these are included in the PDF found in yesterday’s Lozenge Twill Madness post, and will eventually be added to the main collection on the front page.
Piglet’s woven a dozen more variations, so additional posts will follow in the coming days — and I hope these photos will encourage other folks to dive in and try weaving a few of their own!
I like the dark color scheme Piglet picked for this potholder — it has a nice southwestern-desert vibe that I think complements the interlocking designs.
She reports that the regular and symmetric pattern with lots of tabby sections makes this easy to weave. The result is flat and flexible, with no puckering. The designs on the two sides are different, but complementary.
The Crystal Forest chart is posted on our website.
Breeze Block is an attractive shadow-weave pattern with bold geometric designs on both sides, which complement each other while remaining visually distinct — I have trouble deciding which is the “front” because both are strong enough to stand on their own.
The floats are evenly distributed and balance each other out, so it lies nice and flat.
It’s inspired by a chart in an old German book of weaving patterns, although I had to scale down the original to fit on our little looms.
Charts are on our website in both 27-peg and 19-peg sizes.
For the curious, below is the source image I adapted this from, taken from Die färbige Gewebemusterung (“The Colored Fabric Pattern”) by Franz Donat (1907), plate 36, figure 6. I eliminated six rows from both the warp and weft in order to get the above 27-peg design, and even more to squeeze it down to the 19-peg version.
Lozenge twill, sometimes called diamond twill, is an attractive family of weaving structures that produced by reversals in twill direction.
I say it’s a “family” because there are many variations, depending on how frequent the reversals are — ranging from little “birds-eye” twills up to big chunky diamonds — not to mention the variations produced by switching between 2/2, 2/1, 3/3, or any number of other twill ratios.
But how many such patterns are there, given the constraints of our tiny potholder looms, and how different would they look? A bit of web-searching failed to turn up an answer, so with Piglet’s help, I decided to try to explore this question systematically.
The results were startling — even just confining ourselves to 2/2 twill, and the limited canvas provided by the traditional-size loom, there are hundreds of distinct possibilities.
I charted a few dozen of them, and Piglet got to weaving, figuring that by sampling a few points in the space of possibilities we could decide which ones were the most attractive, and add those to the collection on our website.
… but they were all lovely, and it’s impossible to decide!
I’m not sure the world really needs a hundred different lozenge twill potholder-weaving charts, but I figured I’d start by presenting some of what we found and we’ll work out the rest of the details as time goes on.
You can view the first tranche of more than fifty charts in this PDF file, and I’ve included an analysis of some of the similarities and differences between them below.
To understand the relationships between the patterns that appeared at different scales, I gathered small versions of each on a summary diagram.
The diagram shows a range of repeat sizes, along with two variations available at each size. (Each of these variations also has an equivalent with inverted colors, which I am omitting for simplicity.) Below each miniature chart is a label that encodes some information about it, explained more fully below.
As you scan across the diagram, you’ll find various motifs that repeat in adjacent charts, and similarities that emerge at regular intervals across them, and you can guess at charts that might look good side-by-side as a pair… but it’s important to remember that the woven products will look different than these digital charts, and the real test is when the loops come off the loom and draw up into their final fabric form — so it’s no use just staring at the pictures, you have to dive in and weave them up and see how they turn out in real life.
… which is exactly what Piglet has been doing. More photos in the next post!
Each image on this grid is labeled with [Half Repeat Width] / [Half Repeat Height] — [Center] [Adjacent].
The repeat scales are shown as half of the number of loops in the warp or weft before the pattern repeats.
The center and adjacent values refer to the “spot” in the very center of the design, and to the corresponding spots that are diagonally adjacent to it; they are shown as:
Each image’s center/adjacent values can be one of the following:
At each given repeat size, the pair of images will fall into one of these groupings:
