Author: Matthew Cavalletto

The May edition of Piglet’s Portfolio of Priceless Potholder Patterns was published last night. Now over 70 designs, many in multiple sizes, for a total of over 100 charts. Posted both as a downloadable PDF and as individual page images. Clear monochrome charts can be used on-screen or printed affordably. Available for free under an “open culture” license so you can use, print, share, copy, adapt, and change to create new designs.

Folks who are familiar with our efforts will know that we add new charts from time to time, and May has been especially productive. If you downloaded a PDF six weeks ago it would have had 53 pages — but the latest version is now 113 pages, and it will continue to grow in the future.

We recognize that this “moving target” creates a challenge for folks who want to be able to print the whole thing out one time and treat it as a completed paper book, but it seems like an inescapable part of releasing our work as we go.

We’re sometimes asked why our weaving charts are drawn in just black and white (or sometimes shades of gray) rather than including specific colors.

Part of the answer is that keeping the charts monochrome makes it easy and affordable for people to print them at home or local service bureaus — color printing at a neighborhood copy shop is often ten times as expensive as black-and-white, and a design that looks great in color may be an unreadable mess of indistinguishable grays if run off on a basic laser printer.

More importantly, we want our designs to inspire you.  We encourage people to combine our weaving charts with color inspiration from other sources to create new, never-before-seen designs of their own.

One of the most enjoyable parts of this process has been releasing a new chart online and seeing a flood of people post photos of it woven using wildly different color schemes, including ones we would never have imagined.