A priceless portfolio of weaving charts for loop potholders.
Oh!! This one is delightful! Such fun to touch. And also easy to weave, with the same pattern shifting across each row. The texture on this one pulls to the inside of the fabric, leaving a remarkably flat surface, good for trivets and coasters. The back side is deeply waffled, or honeycombed. The front is a flat tiled surface. The potholder as a whole is small and thick.
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.
New fabric *boggle*. Waffle weave!!! It is RIDICULOUS. IT WAFFLES.
The “Belgian” version is crazy thick. The “Breakfast” version is modified for flatness. The “Liége” version has smaller pockets.
These would make an excellent trivet. The pockets insulate and separate the base of the hot dish from the table finish, so you don’t end up steaming your trivet onto the surface.
Shown below in traditional size, these patterns are available in both 27-peg and 19-peg charts.
Breakfast Waffle
Liége Waffle
Silent demonstration video showing the three-layer warping technique from end to end, including warping, weaving, and binding off.
The weaving here is done by hand, from the center out, but the same general approach is equally applicable if you use a hook or start your weaving on any side.
This video is uncut and takes just over half an hour; if you’re already familiar with loop weaving, you can use YouTube’s “playback speed” setting to watch it at 2x speed to see the key points of the technique in action.
If you want to jump ahead, here are the key moments in the video:
00:15 First warp
01:13 Second warp
02:15 Third warp
03:40 Weaving
24:05 Binding off
32:51 Finger-blocking
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here’s another interesting weave that changes when you take it off the loom: “Pierced Lattice.” Like two-two twill, this produces a thicker and smaller potholder than a plain tabby weave would, but the pattern is unique.
Available in both 27-peg and 19/18-peg sizes, as well as a three-color variation.
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.]
