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!
Standard potholder looms come with 18 or 27 pegs, but a bunch of our charts show patterns for 17 or 19 loops, or for 26 or 28 loops — what are you to do if you don’t have a loom with that exact number of pegs?
(As an aside, there are vendors who sell nice 19-peg and 28-peg looms, but those are still relatively rare.)
Smaller patterns are easy — just leave one peg free on each side when warping your loom, and then weave and bind off as you normally would. (You can skip the first peg or the last peg, or even one in the middle, whichever you’d like.) Any extra slack that was on one side or the other of your weave will quickly even itself out when you take the fabric off of your loom.
Weaving a larger pattern is a bit trickier, but like many techniques it’s only intimidating the first one or two times you try it, and then it quickly becomes second nature.
To squeeze in an extra loop while warping, choosing a spot where you’re going to double-up two loops on one peg to fit in the extra. Piglet does this in the middle of the loom, but I’ve seen other people do it at one edge or the other.
When you’re weaving in your first two weft loops, take a moment to carefully shift the doubled-up loops apart and weave over and under them as called for in the pattern. Once you’ve done the first few weft loops, they’ll hold the warp in position and you can mostly ignore the fact that they’re sharing a peg.
To squeeze in an extra weft loop, just pull a loop through normally and then stack the ends on top of an already-used peg. You could do this at the start of the process, at the end, or in the middle — but I think earlier is better, because you’ve got more slack at that point.
The picture below shows a 27-peg loom fully-warped with 28 loops (doubled up on the middle peg) and with the first two weft loops woven in (doubled up on the middle peg). Piglet does her weaving from the middle out, but this technique would work just as well if you were starting from either end and working across.
When binding off, treat the doubled-up loops separately — sometimes this will mean that when binding off you’ll need to pause just as you reach the peg with the doubled-up loops so you can manually un-stack one of them on to an adjacent peg to get to the one underneath it.
You’ll see some folks using other techniques, including the use of knitting needles or hairbands to hold the end of the extra loops, and I know Piglet tried things like that when she was first starting out, but the doubling-up technique described here is simpler and works great once you’ve done it a couple of times.
(I imagine that you could use the same technique to squeeze in more than one extra loop if you had a 29-peg pattern, but at some point you’ll run out of space to work.)
Oops! When I charted the “moving boxes” pattern in late 2022, I accidentally used two slightly-different versions of the weave structure in the pro and traditional size charts.
Piglet pointed this out last week, and wove up an example of each to highlight the differences. They both turned out nicely, so we’ve separated them into two different patterns and you’ll now find separate charts for each on our website under the names “moving boxes” and “spinning boxes,” in both 26-peg and 18-peg charts, in two colors and in three colors.
Below are Piglet’s examples of “Tri-Color Moving Boxes” in white, lavender and leaf and “Tri-Color Spinning Boxes” in white, robin’s egg, and seaglass.
As you can see, they’re pretty similar, but the “spinning” version has longer floats in the “pinwheel” sections, so everything is slightly amped up — the boxes are a bit more twisted, the pinwheels rise up a bit more, and the whole potholder shrinks up a little bit more off the loom to become a bit thicker.
We stumbled on the “moving boxes” weave back in 2022, and we still love its fun texture, with a grid of nubbles and hollows that make the fabric thicker and more insulating than a plain weave would be.
Here’s a striking tri-color example that Piglet wove up last week; the contrast between the red and yellow really highlights the two-sided nature, which becomes even clearer when it’s removed from the loom, while the deep purple ties the two sides together.
(Our first charts for this pattern used 27 pegs, but the symmetry is better with an even number of pegs, and the weave is plenty snug with one fewer loop — just leave one peg empty on each side of your loom and it’ll all even up when you bind off.)
Last week Piglet wove up a lovely large potholder using the basic rippenköper pattern — three rows of two-one twill alternating with three rows of one-two twill.
The side view shows off the gentle ribs introduced by the twill reversals.
(It turned out that her remaining stash of yellow loops were from two different dye lots, so you’ll notice that a couple of the ribs are a slightly darker shade — it’s subtle, but I think it adds to the visual interest.)
As with the other branch designs, the motif is echoed by another set of branches pointing in the opposite direction, and it’s all repeated on the back side with the colors reversed.
It’s mostly tabby weave, with ribs of over-two floats running down the spine of each branch, so it lies nice and flat and square.
(Perhaps it could represent a laurel wreath, awarded to someone who approaches cooking as an Olympic sport?)
While Piglet has been weaving tabby potholders for decades, it was just over three years ago that she stumbled on the potential for more complex weaves, and drew me into the project of creating this collection of charts. Since then we’ve spent hundreds of hours weaving, and hundreds of hours making charts — a wonderful crafting collaboration.
Our decision to post these charts online for free was a natural outgrowth of our professional backgrounds in the open-source software world, and our immersion in various online enthusiast circles of open cultural production: our dream was that they would help other people on their own creative journeys.
Since then, word of our charts has spread by word of mouth within this little niche, and it’s been lovely knowing that a few thousand people come to potholders.piglet.org every month to download patterns. However, there’s no way for us to know who actually ends up using those charts, and it’s hard to have a clear sense of how much influence our work has had.
So it was very touching when a couple of our friends told us about an article they’d found in the Spring 2024 issue of Handwoven Magazine, in which Lucy Morris writes about her husband Gene, whose dementia makes speaking difficult, and whose one expressive outlet is that he weaves hundreds and hundreds of potholders and gives them away.
The article shows him happily surrounded by stacks of his work — and every one of them seems to have been woven from our charts!
“Piglet’s Portfolio of Priceless Potholder Patterns is exquisite, and Piglet will never know how the portfolio’s patterns have delighted our eyes and changed a life.” — Lucy Morris
It’s heart-warming to know that this thing we created is making a difference in the life of someone we’ve never met. Our thanks go out to Lucy for sharing this story, and to Gene for bringing so many of our charts to life.
With Valentine’s Day coming up next month, I wanted to round up a collection of charts featuring heart shapes. Most of these are shadow weave, but a few other techniques make an appearance towards the end.
We’ve posted a lot of new charts over the last year, but haven’t gotten around to updating the combined PDFs that let you download the entire collection at once.
The turning of the year seemed like a good time to rectify that oversight, and so over the last week I’ve taken a pass through all of our files and published the results as a complete PDF of the 2023 edition.
There is a lot of new content, with 94 new designs bringing our collection up to 343 distinct patterns. More than half of those designs are available in multiple sizes, with 168 new pages giving us a grand total of 528 charts in this edition.
If you’ve already downloaded and printed the December 2022 edition, there’s a separate PDF just of the new charts added in 2023 so you can print those and add them to your existing collection.
Also new in this edition are separate files by weaving style. If you know you particularly like shadow weave, or you only want to work in twills, you can download separate files that contain only those types of charts.
You can further narrow your selection by loom size, as there are separate files for seven-inch (18-peg “traditional”) and ten-inch (27-peg “pro”) looms. All in all, we have almost two hundred charts for seven-inch looms, and just over three hundred charts for ten-inch looms.
We hope these charts are useful to you, and we look forward to seeing what you create!
I wanted to follow up on a conversation that happened in a Facebook group earlier today about giving credit to the “original” creator of a design.
For the record, Piglet and I didn’t invent the pattern discussed in that case, and we don’t own it. If you weave potholders that look like that, you aren’t obligated to mention us or give us any credit.
People have been weaving things out of string for thousands of years, and they have been weaving potholders out of stretchy loops for nearly a hundred years. Given that history, I think it’s very likely that every technique we’ve explored has been tried before, and I am confident that if you could somehow go through all of the millions of potholders that have been woven over the last century, you would be able to find earlier examples that look a lot like nearly every design we’ve posted.
