Double-Faced Twill

Here’s another extra-thick potholder with a tricky twill weave that requires a bit of extra effort: double-faced twill.

It features two completely separate faces, produced by two independent weft layers, joined by a single warp which shows up as a thin diagonal stripe on both sides.

This edge-on photo (taken right before binding off) highlights the multi-layer structure:

As you might expect, the resulting potholder is extra thick — after all, it has 50% more loops than usual!

It lies nice and flat, with none of the curling we often see in uneven twills, because each side is uneven in the opposite direction, so they balance each other out.

The chart shows the independent weaving pattern for the upper and lower loops on each weft peg — the upper face is three-one twill, while the lower face is the opposite one-three twill:

I’m sure folks can come up with interesting color choices — perhaps a rainbow spectrum on one side and black on the other, with thin white pinstripes crossing both of them?

It should also be possible to extend this technique to include zig-zags and diamonds, although we haven’t attempted that yet.

This photo sequence shows the process from end to end.

The loom is warped (in pink) and the first two pairs of weft have been woven in. This is the first time we’d tried this, so we didn’t stack the wefts at first.
We’ve now woven in five pairs of weft loops, and you can see the structure emerging.
On the underside you can see the mirror image.
Now that we understand what’s going on, we start stacking pairs of loops onto shared pegs and gently encouraging them to align on top each other.
The same thing happens on the underside.==
From here on, we begin weaving directly onto the stacked pegs.
The underside continues to show the mirror image.
The weaving is complete with all 18 pegs filled on each side.
The completed underside.
Side-on view looking along the warp.
Side-on view looking along the weft.
When binding off, we treat each pair of weft loops as if they were a single loop.
Here we’re picking up a second weft pair…
… and pulling them through.
The completed front.
And the reverse.
Ready to deploy.

If you give this a try, please drop us a line and let us know how it turned out!

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