Author: Matthew Cavalletto

“Piggybacking on Others’ Hard Work”

Earlier today, Deborah Jean Cohen (author of In the Loop) took to Facebook to complain that two of our earliest charts, dating from late 2020, had been created by looking at photographs of potholders that she and Bill West had posted to Facebook.

In each of those two cases, we had credited them by name as our inspiration, and neither of them had objected during the intervening years, but apparently she’s been carrying a grudge all this time, declaring in her post that we had “piggybacked on others’ hard work… Sure, it’s legal, but is it ethical? You’re on notice now.”

I’m not sure what that last sentence means, and it seems I won’t ever get to ask her, because she’s now blocked me and banned me from the Facebook group she administers.

The two charts in question are not particularly complicated, and the designs they show are indubitably in the public domain — they don’t belong to anyone.

For thousands of years, weavers developed their repertoires by practicing techniques other people had developed, and then evolving their own variations on them. By the dawn of the nineteenth century these designs were being collected in pattern books, and later publishers aggregated those references into larger and larger collections, each with hundreds or thousand of charts. Hundreds of those books have been digitized, and tens of thousands of patterns from them have been posted online.

Uncountable millions of hours have gone into producing this body of techniques and patterns — the shared legacy of humanity’s ongoing love affair with string, stretching back a thousand generations — so literally everyone involved in fiber crafts today is “piggybacking on others’ hard work.”

All modern weavers have access to this incredible legacy of public domain material, allowing us to select elements that catch our eye, modifying and recombining and elaborating on them in innumerable ways, and then putting the results of our efforts back out into the world.

The idea that when Deborah looked at other people’s weaving and made her own variation of it, that effort had been meaningful creative work — but when we later looked at her weaving and made our own variation of it, this was now unethical, a form of cheating, and a shocking breach of norms — well, I don’t think it holds water.

That said, I figured I might as well rectify the perceived slight, so I have deleted the charts that we created in 2020 for “Square Spiral” and “Diamond Spiral,” and re-drawn them anew, referring to century-old sources that have been archived at handweaving.net (a genuinely amazing community resource): a square spiral found in Orimono Soshiki Hen by Kiju Yoshida (1903) now adapted for 27-peg and 18-peg looms, and a twill spiral found in Die färbige Gewebemusterung by 
Franz Donat (1907) likewise adapted for 27-peg and 18-peg looms.

I hope that Deborah will be able to rest easier now that our charts are no longer piggybacking on her proprietary hard work.

Three-Three Offset Twill

Here’s another intersting weave that produces a highly-textured extra-thick fabric: “Three-Three Offset Twill.” (It’s so hard to come up with good names!)

Each row is woven over three/under three, but instead of each row shifting over by one pick as you would for regular three-three twill, here you alternate between shifting over two and then over three.

When taken off the loom, the fabric tightens in and puffs up as with three-three twill, but the alternating shift sequence creates extra-wide wales with distinct grooves between them.

The back side features the same design, with the grooves reversed to line up under the ridges of the front. The weft floats spread out on each face, leaving the warp mostly hidden.

I’m not sure the photos below fully capture the texture, but in person it’s quite dramatic, and the feeling in your hand is very different than a plain weave.

Piglet has woven some fun color variations of this fabric, but to start with here’s a simple two-color example, with a white warp and colored weft.

Pulsating Saltire

Here’s another linear shadow-weave design just added to our charts: “Pulsating Saltire.”

It’s mostly tabby weave, so the resulting fabric is smooth and flat flexible. Parallel twill-like wales run diagonally towards each corner to produce the X-shaped design. The back side has a different but equally-striking pattern, with a small eye in the middle that disappears when you take it off the loom.

Woven here in Harrisville purple and white, this would work equally well in any contrasting pair of colors — or replace one or both with a range of related colors, like black against a rainbow, or blues against yellows.

Pinstripe Noughts and Crosses

Combining the techniques used in “Noughts and Crosses,” “Two-One Twill Pinstripes,” and “Tri-Color Two-One Corners,” this design features thin lines forming boxes on one side and crosswise corners on the other.

Woven in two-one twill, with over-three floats at the corners, this pattern weaves up quickly and shrinks when taken off the loom to form a dense fabric.

A 27-peg chart is also available, and tri-color versions are expected to follow.

Front face on the loom.
Rear face on the loom.
Front face off the loom
Rear face off the loom
Finished fabric comparison with loom shows how much it has drawn up.

Chladni Wave Plate

Here’s a fun new pattern we’ve come up with but struggled to name.

[Update: When we asked for name suggestions on Facebook the most common theme was variations on “waves” — ripples, echoes, sound waves, vibrations, radar, microwaves, etc. I struggled with choosing between them, until I was struck by the parallel with Chladni wave plates, invented by German physicist Ernst Chladni in the early 1800s, who found that by sprinkling sand on a metal plate, you could reveal their vibration patterns, a technique that is now used to design violins and other acoustic equipment.]

In progress…
Off the loom
Back side

October Edition

The October edition of our potholder design collection has been posted as a downloadable PDF. It contains 135 designs, many at multiple sizes, for a total of 211 charts.

Of those, 46 designs and 72 charts are new in this edition. 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.

Also published at the same time is a new edition of the blank-chart templates, which now include options for split-loop designs.

 

Adapting A Pattern: Diamonds Case Study

Some of our weaving patterns are adapted from historical sources, but at times this journey can require a fair amount of revision until we settle on a final design we’re happy with.

For the curious, here’s an example of one such journey. I was flipping through images on handweaving.net when one particular design caught my eye.

Detail from “Softened Diamonds,” handweaving.net pattern 74570

I started by choosing a section of that design to replicate as a 27-peg potholder weaving pattern.

I handed this off to Piglet, who promptly wove it up, marking up the chart as she went along.

However, when it came off the loom, the results were disappointing — those long floats weren’t consistently stabilized, and some of them mashed together, producing a design that was no longer symmetrical.

Nonetheless, the diagonal tile effect was attractive, and I was determined to salvage something from this, so we brainstormed a revised design that utilized only the center section, repeated over the entire fabric.

Piglet wove this one up just as quickly, and we crossed our fingers that it would be an improvement.

When it came off the loom, we were pleased to see that the results were much more regular.

But we were still not content with the center of the individual tiles, which lost their crosspieces when off the loom, leaving just a set of angled bars that broke the four-way symmetry of the diamonds.

We were pretty sure we could fix this by switching the center pick of each tile,

And sure enough, that wove up pretty much as we expected:

The result is much more evenly symmetrical.

This version of the “Diamond Tiles” pattern has now been added to our portfolio, along with a related version named “Open Diamond Tiles” that has a bit more space in the middle of each tile.

Tri-Color Twill Splotches

While some of our charts involve complicated weaving patterns, it’s fun to explore the interesting designs that can be produced by combining very regular weaving with a varying choice of loop colors.

Both of the designs shown below are two-two twill throughout, which is to say that you weave over two loops and then under two loops, consistently across the entire fabric, shifting the weaving over by one loop on each row. Because it’s all twill, the resulting fabric is smooth, and slightly smaller and thicker than a plain tabby (over one/under one) woven with the same loops.

They both use three colors — you can choose any three colors you would like — but one is threaded AABBCC while the other uses AABCCB. The result is a repeating pattern of organic shapes that is reminiscent of houndstooth twills, but in smaller and more varied arrangements that might bring to mind modern camouflage designs.

Piglet wove one using forest colors of green, tan, and brown, and the other with winter colors of black, white, and gray. The resulting potholders are symmetrical, with the same designs shown on the back. You can easily adapt this to 18-peg looms by only using the first eighteen rows and columns of the chart.

Tri-Color Twill Splotches on the loom.
Tri-Color Twill Splotches finished front view.
Tri-Color Twill Splotches chart
Broken Twill Splotches on the loom.
Broken Twill Splotches finished front.
Broken Twill Splotches chart.

June Edition

The June edition of our potholder design collection has been posted as a downloadable PDF.

It contains 89 designs, many at multiple sizes, for a total of 139 charts.

Of those, 15 designs are new since the May edition:

  • A lovely repeating tile design (Roses and Thorns);
  • Two styles of nested chevrons (Fish Scales, Three-Color Fish Scales);
  • Larger heart variations (Super Hearts, Pulsating Heart);
  • A forest of branches (Branch, Three Parallel Branches, Five Parallel Branches, Seven Parallel Branches, Forked Branch, Branch and Root);
  • Extra-thick twill weaves (Three-Three Twill, Three-Three Twill Waves, Three-Three Shift Twill, Magical Three-Three Twill).

Most of those are described in recent posts by Piglet here and on Facebook, including photos as well as commentary on the weaving experience and resulting fabric.

The table of contents has been reorganized to group related designs together, which will hopefully make it easier to find charts you might be interested in.

And the online table of contents now highlights any designs added since the last edition, making it easier to find (and print) only the newest pages.

Enjoy!