Blog – Page 4 – Piglet's Potholder Patterns

An Unexpected Variety of Boxes

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.

What a serendipitous mistake!

Tri-Color Moving Boxes

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.

We’ve posted 26-peg and 18-peg charts for this.

(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.)

Three-Row Rippenköper

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.)

Wreath of Branches

Here’s a fun variation on a familiar design, bent into a loop to form “Wreath of Branches.”
• 27-Peg Chart: potholders.piglet.org/?wreath_of_branches

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?)

A Basket of Flowers

Oh wow, check out what we stumbled across! Exploring the diamond twill space, Matthew was inspired to try lengthening the cross floats, to emphasize the little flowers shapes that the smallest version makes. We got another magic fabric! This is a very striking result with a flat(ter) side and a bumpy(ier) side, one of which is very squares, and the other very diamonds.

Flower Basket, we are calling it. As charted, it is 18 columns, 19 rows, for pattern symmetry. It works up *very* quickly, with only 2 pattern rows, one of which has very few over/unders (4-floats across its length).

I first worked it in lavender & leaf. I was expecting the front side to draw up into flowers, so I put the lavender into the white areas — oops! The *back* side draws up into flowery diamonds, so I ended up with leaf flowers on the bottom of my work, and the basket-woven effect on the top.

Before posting the charts to our site, I flipped the back and front from the draft version Piglet wove from, so the “flowers” should now form on the front face, in the “dark” color of our chart. — Matthew

The cayenne and white combination has much better contrast, so you can see the effect more clearly. The resulting fabric is great as a potholder. It does not bias or curl in any particular direction. It lies flat, and is quite thick and protective.

What a fantastic discovery! I cannot stop chortling over and petting it.

Matthew’s Postscript, March 2:

I love the fact that there are so many fun variations to explore in this space, and so many connections to make with the work that other talented weavers have done!

When I posted the chart for this design, I also included a split-loop variation, from which Eve created a fun weave that included horizontal stripes along the weft.

That reminded me of a design I’d seen a long time ago, and I poked around until I found this cool example from Christine from May 2022.

Then this afternoon a stray comment brought a neat weave from Linda from January 2023 back to the top of my Facebook feed, which uses a different variation of diamond twill and orients the color variations along the warp

Looking for similar patterns led me back to a lovely four-color weave by Julie from June 2022, which turns out to use the same split-loop structure as the one I’d posted, and includes pointers back to even earlier examples on Pinterest.

It’s wonderful that these basic structural elements — so simple that they’re independently re-discovered over and over again — can support such a wide range of expression as to create endless streams of unique woven pieces of art.

I’ve added another pair of charts incorporating the striped warp shown in Julie’s example — and may a thousand flowers bloom!

Gene’s Potholder Story

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.

>> Click to Read “A Love for Potholders Built a Connection to the World”

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.

Valentine’s Heart Potholders

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.

Pulsating Heart

Super Hearts

Jumbo Hearts

It’s Raining Hearts (Hallelujah)

Sea of Hearts

Four of Hearts

Queen of Hearts

Box of Hearts

Lots o’ Hearts

Fish Scales

Three-Color Fish Scales

Two-One Basketweave Chevrons

Two-One Twill Pinstripe Chevrons

Tri-Color Two-One Twill Chevrons

Updated PDFs Available with New 2023 Charts

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!

On Credit for “Original” Designs

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.

Clasp Weave: American Flag

When I bound off the French flag this morning, I stared at for long enough to realize… half of a traditional loop plus one full length traditional loop *also* equals one pro loop, which means, VOILA!!! US FLAG!

[Added by Matthew:] This example is woven on an oblong (18×27) loom, but you could use the same technique to make a square pro (27×28) potholder with more stripes.

Warp the lower eight pegs with alternating red and white pro loops. Warp the upper ten pegs with alternating red and white traditional loops, using a folded-over blue traditional loop threaded through the loose ends of each pair.

Weave the first eighteen rows with alternating red and white traditional loops woven in tabby plain weave to form stripes.

To weave the last ten rows, fold a red and blue traditional loop over each other and place them on the loom with one empty peg between them. Weave them into each side, with the blue loop weaving into the blue square and the red loop into the red and white stripes. Then place a white traditional on the empty pegs and weave it in, in between the split legs of the red and blue loops. Do the same with another white loop next to them, then repeat the process to the end of the loom.

Bind off as usual.