Saturday, December 5, 2015

Playing With Norwegian Pick-up Pattern Motifs in the Colors of the Season

In the delightful book "Norwegian Pick-Up Bandweaving" by Heather Torgenrud, she states "Pick-up weaving is full of fascinating design possibilities. From a simple threading you can 'pluck forth' hundreds of intricate and colorful patterns, watching them blossom row by row, varying them endlessly."
I totally agree!!!
Many traditional patterns are set forth in this volume and I highly recommend it.
There are two types of pick-up patterns illustrated, the second of which is the "speckled" method in which two background threads are alternated with one pattern thread. She tells us that the traditional Norwegian bands had red wool for the pattern threads and natural cotton or linen for the background. In these patterns, dropping as well as picking threads is necessary.
I decided to try some of the patterns on the 3-color pickup threading to see what would happen. With the 3-color method, dropping of threads is not as effective, since there are always two colors at play in the background instead of one. So, I used her patterns in a different way. I did only the pick-up part, and did no dropping. And because of the color changes, some of the elements of the pattern line up a bit differently.
The result was interesting, I think. The combination of red, white and green was fun especially for the Christmas season. I experimented with alternating red and green in the pattern motifs.




Heather also has a blog which some of you will find very interesting. Check out this post on "Pattern Design Basics". 

3 comments:

  1. Oooo--I like these a lot. So merry!

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  2. Will you be putting some of these--Xmas and others--up in your etsy shop?

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    1. Jan- This was one piece, just an experiment. When I posted a picture of it on my Facebook page, someone decided that he needed it for a ukulele strap, so off it went to Massachusetts. Maybe I should have made some bookmarks or something?

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