Category: Updates

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!

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.