Blog – Page 4 – Piglet's Potholder Patterns

Lozenge Twill Madness

Lozenge twill, sometimes called diamond twill, is an attractive family of weaving structures that produced by reversals in twill direction.

I say it’s a “family” because there are many variations, depending on how frequent the reversals are — ranging from little “birds-eye” twills up to big chunky diamonds — not to mention the variations produced by switching between 2/2, 2/1, 3/3, or any number of other twill ratios.

But how many such patterns are there, given the constraints of our tiny potholder looms, and how different would they look? A bit of web-searching failed to turn up an answer, so with Piglet’s help, I decided to try to explore this question systematically.

The results were startling — even just confining ourselves to 2/2 twill, and the limited canvas provided by the traditional-size loom, there are hundreds of distinct possibilities.

I charted a few dozen of them, and Piglet got to weaving, figuring that by sampling a few points in the space of possibilities we could decide which ones were the most attractive, and add those to the collection on our website.

… but they were all lovely, and it’s impossible to decide!

I’m not sure the world really needs a hundred different lozenge twill potholder-weaving charts, but I figured I’d start by presenting some of what we found and we’ll work out the rest of the details as time goes on.

You can view the first tranche of more than fifty charts in this PDF file, and I’ve included an analysis of some of the similarities and differences between them below.

Pattern Comparison

To understand the relationships between the patterns that appeared at different scales, I gathered small versions of each on a summary diagram.

The diagram shows a range of repeat sizes, along with two variations available at each size. (Each of these variations also has an equivalent with inverted colors, which I am omitting for simplicity.) Below each miniature chart is a label that encodes some information about it, explained more fully below.

Next Steps

As you scan across the diagram, you’ll find various motifs that repeat in adjacent charts, and similarities that emerge at regular intervals across them, and you can guess at charts that might look good side-by-side as a pair… but it’s important to remember that the woven products will look different than these digital charts, and the real test is when the loops come off the loom and draw up into their final fabric form — so it’s no use just staring at the pictures, you have to dive in and weave them up and see how they turn out in real life.

… which is exactly what Piglet has been doing. More photos in the next post!

About the Chart Labels

Each image on this grid is labeled with [Half Repeat Width] / [Half Repeat Height] — [Center] [Adjacent].

The repeat scales are shown as half of the number of loops in the warp or weft before the pattern repeats.

The center and adjacent values refer to the “spot” in the very center of the design, and to the corresponding spots that are diagonally adjacent to it; they are shown as:

A: black dot
B: black plus
a: white dot
b: white plus

Each image’s center/adjacent values can be one of the following:

AA / BB: tiles all same colors, same center.
Aa / Bb: tiles alternating colors, same centers.
AB / BA: tiles all same colors, alternating centers.
Ab / Ba: tiles alternating colors, alternating centers.

At each given repeat size, the pair of images will fall into one of these groupings:

AA + Bb: identical black-dot tiles paired with alternating-color plus tiles.
Aa + BB: alternating-color dot tiles paired with identical black-plus tiles.
AB + BA: black-dot and black-plus tiles; paired versions are same pattern but offset.
Ab + Ba: tiles have mixed centers and colors; paired versions are inverted and offset.

Double-Faced Twill

Here’s another extra-thick potholder with a tricky twill weave that requires a bit of extra effort: double-faced twill.

It features two completely separate faces, produced by two independent weft layers, joined by a single warp which shows up as a thin diagonal stripe on both sides.

This edge-on photo (taken right before binding off) highlights the multi-layer structure:

As you might expect, the resulting potholder is extra thick — after all, it has 50% more loops than usual!

It lies nice and flat, with none of the curling we often see in uneven twills, because each side is uneven in the opposite direction, so they balance each other out.

The chart shows the independent weaving pattern for the upper and lower loops on each weft peg — the upper face is three-one twill, while the lower face is the opposite one-three twill:

I’m sure folks can come up with interesting color choices — perhaps a rainbow spectrum on one side and black on the other, with thin white pinstripes crossing both of them?

It should also be possible to extend this technique to include zig-zags and diamonds, although we haven’t attempted that yet.

This photo sequence shows the process from end to end.

The loom is warped (in pink) and the first two pairs of weft have been woven in. This is the first time we’d tried this, so we didn’t stack the wefts at first.

If you give this a try, please drop us a line and let us know how it turned out!

Skipping or Adding Loops

« Click for More FAQ Pages

Standard potholder looms come with 18 or 27 pegs, but a bunch of our charts show patterns for 17 or 19 loops, or for 26 or 28 loops — what are you to do if you don’t have a loom with that exact number of pegs?

(As an aside, there are vendors who sell nice 19-peg and 28-peg looms, but those are still relatively rare.)

Smaller patterns are easy — just leave one peg free on each side when warping your loom, and then weave and bind off as you normally would. (You can skip the first peg or the last peg, or even one in the middle, whichever you’d like.) Any extra slack that was on one side or the other of your weave will quickly even itself out when you take the fabric off of your loom.

Weaving a larger pattern is a bit trickier, but like many techniques it’s only intimidating the first one or two times you try it, and then it quickly becomes second nature.

To squeeze in an extra loop while warping, choosing a spot where you’re going to double-up two loops on one peg to fit in the extra. Piglet does this in the middle of the loom, but I’ve seen other people do it at one edge or the other.

When you’re weaving in your first two weft loops, take a moment to carefully shift the doubled-up loops apart and weave over and under them as called for in the pattern. Once you’ve done the first few weft loops, they’ll hold the warp in position and you can mostly ignore the fact that they’re sharing a peg.

To squeeze in an extra weft loop, just pull a loop through normally and then stack the ends on top of an already-used peg. You could do this at the start of the process, at the end, or in the middle — but I think earlier is better, because you’ve got more slack at that point.

The picture below shows a 27-peg loom fully-warped with 28 loops (doubled up on the middle peg) and with the first two weft loops woven in (doubled up on the middle peg). Piglet does her weaving from the middle out, but this technique would work just as well if you were starting from either end and working across.

When binding off, treat the doubled-up loops separately — sometimes this will mean that when binding off you’ll need to pause just as you reach the peg with the doubled-up loops so you can manually un-stack one of them on to an adjacent peg to get to the one underneath it.

You’ll see some folks using other techniques, including the use of knitting needles or hairbands to hold the end of the extra loops, and I know Piglet tried things like that when she was first starting out, but the doubling-up technique described here is simpler and works great once you’ve done it a couple of times.

(I imagine that you could use the same technique to squeeze in more than one extra loop if you had a 29-peg pattern, but at some point you’ll run out of space to work.)

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.