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.
Because of the way the warp loops are hidden under the weft and only peek through occasionally, it almost looks like we’ve found a stash of multicolor tie-dyed loops, or maybe we’ve strung the loops at an angle, or some other kind of trickery — but as you can see from the “on the loom” photos, they’re just regular single-color loops woven in the normal fashion.
This uses the “four-four shift twill” pattern from our site. It’s a simple over-four/under-four sequence, so it weaves up really fast, but the offset from one row to the next is different from regular twill and that’s what produces this effect.
The appearance is symmetrical on the front and back sides of the potholder. The example shown here is pro size, but it should work just as well at a traditional size.
Piglet used a rainbow of eleven bright colors, but I suspect you’d also get pleasing results with a different color palette as long as you used a large number of colors. (This weave also looks good in a small number of colors but it no longer exhibits the startling rainbow effect seen here.)
This is a brand-new discovery so we’re still learning what it can do… If you give this a try, please post some photos and let us know how it turned out!
Someone recently asked for advice about making thicker potholders, and I thought I would share my recommendations here for easy reference.
Obviously the choice of materials makes a big difference. Opting for high-quality cotton loops or plush wool loops will produce fuller results than if you use thin poly loops or scraggly offcuts.
But the less-obvious factor is weaving structure, where there are a variety of techniques that yield thicker results:
Twills produce thicker results. Try Three-Three Houndstooth or Four-Four Twill Fletching.
Weaves with raised ribs have room for extra air space. Try Alternating Float Weave, Alladorf 60, or Liége Waffle.
Weaves with multiple layers are often twice as thick. Try Padded Basketweave, Three-Three Shift Twill, or Double-Faced Twill.
Charts for all of these are included in our collection.
New York metro-area folks — Piglet and I will be exhibiting at the Kings County Fiber Festival as part of our local living-history group, making and showing potholders based on weaving patterns found in historical textiles.
Next Saturday, October 7 from 10AM to 5PM, we’ll be in Brooklyn’s Washington Park, at the Old Stone House, on Third Street between 4th and 5th Avenues.
The park will be filled with more than fifty fiber-craft exhibitors and vendors, but we should be easy to find — just look around for the group of people who are all wearing medieval-style clothing.
If you’re in the area and enjoy handcrafts, the festival is worth a visit — and please do swing by our table and introduce yourself; we’d love to meet some of you folks in person!
[Update, October 6:] Sadly, the fiber festival has been cancelled due to rain.
