A priceless portfolio of weaving charts for loop potholders.
Here’s a pair of examples that highlights the extent to which Three-Three Offset Twill weave brings the weft to the surface while hiding most of the warp.
Both of these examples are woven using the same pattern, but in one case the color is in the warp while in the other it’s in the weft — and when removed from the loom, the results are dramatically different.
Woven by Piglet in the autumn of 2022.
This design integrates sections of two-one twill with contrasting one-two twill to produce a block effect.
The asymmetric pull of the twills adds a bit of a curve to the loops.
Woven by Piglet in the autumn of 2022.
A pleasant combination of the split-loop technique (which tends to produce tighter, flatter results) with two-two twill (which tends to have the opposite effect), this potholder winds up with dimensions similar to a plain-weave example, with with a lovely angled stripe.
Woven by Piglet in the autumn of 2022.
I put together a little chart to help visualize the range of sizes produced by different weaving patterns.
The differences are striking: the long-float twills can be as small as 60% of the area of a plain-weave potholder (20% smaller in both height and width), but they make up for that by being up to twice as thick — or even more than that in the case of ribbed and waffled weaves.
This is definitely not an authoritative scientific survey — I just grabbed a ruler and took some rough measurements from a mix of recently-made samples fresh off the loom and well-worn ones that have been hanging in our kitchen for years.
There’s a lot of variation; in places where you see little black bars sticking out of the right edge, those show a range of smaller and larger measurements I took from different examples. There are multiple factors at play, but I suspect the biggest driver is the variation in loops — sometimes you’ll get a bag of loops that are stretchier or tighter than usual, and that impacts the size of the finished product.
These measurements are all from potholders woven with Harrisville (“Friendly Loom”) cotton loops, with no skipped pegs — if you’re using wool or poly loops, I’d expect the results to be different.
The front page of this site, which contains a listing of all of our published charts, now includes a simple search feature that makes it easier to locate specific charts.
When you visit the home page of potholders.piglet.org, you’ll see a gray field near the top prompting you to “type to search.”
As you type into that field, the list of charts on the page will be filtered to only show matching entries. For example, if you type in “basket” the page will show only basketweave patterns.
Searching only works on the visible titles, so this will not find descriptive commentary that may appear in the comments area on an individual chart.
You can filter for charts by size, so if you type in “19” you’ll see only patterns which include a 19-peg chart.
You can also include search terms in links, so if you send someone a link to https://potholders.piglet.org/?nine they will see a listing of just the nine-block charts.
This allows linking to individual charts such as https://potholders.piglet.org/?hallstat, or just the PDF files with https://potholders.piglet.org/?pdf.
The search feature uses your browser’s regular-expression engine, so you can search for “17|19” to find patterns with either a 17-peg chart or a 19-peg chart.
These can be included in links, so https://potholders.piglet.org/?waffle|padded will lead people to a page displaying patterns which contain either “waffle” or “padded.”
Hello NYC-adjacent potholder folks! You are invited to join Piglet and me for a free hands-on workshop we’re running for our historical re-creation group in the evening of Thursday, March 16.
We’ll be talking about some of the weaving structures found in pre-modern fabrics, including pieces of cloth that survived from 500, 1500, or 2500 years ago, that were woven in many variations of tabby and twill. We’ll use examples from our stash of potholders to demonstrate the differences, then hand out looms and loops and let people weave up their own potholders using those same styles.
If you live in the NYC area, and have any interest in learning about handcrafts from more than 400 years ago, bring a loom and some loops and join us!
The photograph below shows some of the samples to be discussed. Top Row: 3/1 ribbed twill; 2/1 twill; 3/1 broken twill. Center: 2/2 houndstooth twill; 2/2 broken chevron twill; 2/2 chevron twill; 2/2 diamond twill. Bottom: plain weave with doubled warp; gauze; 3/3 twill.
Piglet worked a 19-peg version of our “Indented Bendlets” pattern, and while she was doing so identified a few places where the 27-peg chart included some needlessly-long floats. The corrected charts have been posted to our website and are attached below.
She describes the resulting potholder as “thick, but not too plush,” and “flexible but not floppy.” She also says it is “noticeably flat and even. Very stable. This stability is tied to the way the weaving pattern is established along the major diagonals.”
I’m really happy with how this works up, and the subtle difference in plushness between the narrow and wide stripes that develops when you take it off the loom.
This is another one of those designs that looks different while it’s on the loom — the little spots of color inside each of the contrasting boxes pulls down when you bind off, leaving a solid-color diagonal stripe.
Charts attached and on our home page as usual.
The December edition of our potholder design collection has been posted as a downloadable PDF. It contains 249 designs, many at multiple sizes, for a total of 360 charts. All of the individual charts are also available as single images on our website’s home page.
A total of 109 designs have been added since October, of which 40 are available in multiple sizes. The new charts are highlighted in the table of contents, both online and in the printable document. If you already have the earlier edition, you can download just the new charts as a separate PDF.
Many of those are described in recent posts by Piglet here and on Facebook, including photos and commentary on the resulting potholders.
Piglet and I ventured out today to see the “Threads of Power” exhibit at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, exploring the development and social significance of lace, including examples of needle and bobbin lace from the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, courtesy of Switzerland’s Textilmuseum St. Gallen.
Although the fabric examples were impressive, the thing that particularly caught my attention were a few fifteenth- and sixteenth-century examples of “pattern books” — printed collections of designs to be used as source material by people working with fiber and fabric.
Those early pattern books are notable not because they’re entirely original creative works — indeed, they’re just collecting and organizing motifs that have mostly been developed by others — instead, their value lies in the crucial role they play in propagating those ideas to a wider audience beyond the narrow limits of guilds or court society, making it easy for a wide range of people to learn existing patterns, practice their skills, create items that others will appreciate, and eventually branch out to create new unique designs while drawing on this shared heritage.
These early works provide a historical reference point for the work I do in my own life to make heraldic art and small-scale weaving patterns available to facilitate the work of today’s artisans.
It was inspiring to see examples of this type of resource dating from four hundred and five hundred years ago, and I’m very pleased that I am, in my own very small way, helping to continue this tradition.
Last week we posted about “Three-Three Offset Twill,” a weaving pattern that produced a thick and textured fabric with prominent diagonal grooves. Here’s a variation with that same texture, but reversing the direction of the grooves part way across the fabric: “Three-Three Offset Bands.”
The photos below don’t really do the three-dimensionality of it full justice. The potholder is noticably thicker than a plain-weave potholder would be, and because the horizontal weft loops puff out over the surface of the vertical warp loops, both faces of the potholder winds up showing much more of that color, with more of the warp loops hidden inside the thickness of the fabric.
