Vanity – Piglet's Potholder Patterns

More Split-Loop Twill Charts

For the fans of split-loop twill, I’ve posted some additional charts including more zig-zag variations and some new traditional-size charts for designs which previously only came in pro size.

Twills and split-loop techniques have circulated in the potholder world since at least the Nellie Bee days, more than eighty years ago, both because they have been repeatedly imported from the wider world of weaving — where twill and varying weights of warp and weft have been commonplace since before the the invention of writing — and because they have independently been reinvented by uncountable numbers of people sitting at their loom and deciding to try something new.

As much as we appreciate the many people who have shared their work as inspiration for our community — I think the first time I ever saw a split-loop twill zigzag potholder was in a post by Susan Lockhart in the Potholder People group on Facebook back in August 2021, but a bit of searching turned up split-loop diamond and zigzag twills being sold on Etsy in 2016, and no doubt there are innumerably more examples I haven’t found — these designs are too simple and common to think that anyone “owns” them; they’re indisputably in the public domain and the shared heritage of humanity as a whole.

With the benefit of that foundation, there’s room for limitless creativity and craftsmanship — choosing colors and materials, combining multiple techniques, and incorporating your own effort and intentions into your work. We can’t wait to see what you create with these elements!

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.

“Piggybacking on Others’ Hard Work”

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.