Hallstatt 74 – Piglet's Potholder Patterns

Inspired by a 2,700 year old (late Iron Age) textile fragment from a salt mine in Hallstatt, Austria, we have a lovely 2/2 twill with 3 direction changes, generating a regular fabric with 3-floats spread among the columns. The outcome is flexible and drapey, with very little bias, so it does not skew. In honor of the Iron Age culture, I chose flax for the background, and willow (which could be produced by woad overdyed with weld.)

I happened to have 7 loops in an older dye lot of willow. This is a perfect place to use them. The stripes are separated enough that the contrast is not obvious. The pattern change seems deliberate. They will fade in use to be closer in color. And the variation honors natural dying (as you might expect, overdying woad with weld can produce *many* shades).

Hallstatt, an elegant two over two twill that changes direction in three places to produce, in combination with the threading pattern, two rows of chevrons in the same direction.

Changing direction in the 2/2 twill rows creates 3-floats in the columns. Don’t panic when you see loose columns at the points! Front view…

…and rear view, showing the 3-floats on the back columns. The adjacent rows will tie those down.

With the 5 center rows in place, all columns are locked down.

Our color pattern begins, with no change in the weaving pattern.

Here we have reached the mid-point of the chevrons, and are about to reverse our direction.

Shifting our 2/2 twill into reverse, we have again generated 3-floats in our columns, which we will lock down on adjacent rows…

Here are the full stripes in place. From here we continue in the same direction we were going, finishing out the background color.

Here is the chart for this iteration. It is doable in a traditional version, with some design modification. I would not recommend plucking a subset of rows and columns directly from this 27-peg chart.

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