I got a wonderful new book recently and I just want to keep weaving the patterns in all their variations ignoring all else! One of the book's strong suits is that it gives pattern motifs with lots of variations, 288 of them! The author, Heather Torgenrud, encourages you to mix and match different motifs using them like building blocks to create your own designs. It's really very clever the way she laid it out!
The book's title is:
Pick-Up Bandweaving Designs: 288 Charts for 13 Pattern Ends and Techniques for Arranging Color.
The patterns all use 13 pattern threads. I like working with this number as it's enough to allow for a fairly interesting and intricate pattern motif, but it's not an overwhelming task to keep track of that many.
In conversations with the author, I asked if they were all traditional designs. This was her response, "They are my own designs and variations, all very much in a traditional style. I do describe my design process in the book so that people can get an insight into that and hopefully be encouraged to develop their own patterns if they don’t already do so".
She added, "The charts are all in grayscale so that weavers can imagine them in their own colors, but the second part of the book is filled with color photos of woven samples to illustrate the discussion of color specifically as it applies to this particular pick-up weave." Often, with this kind of pickup, weavers tend to think in terms of using just one background color and one pattern color. She encourages ways to incorporate more either in the background or in the pattern and gives great tips!
I am looking forward to using more of the inspirational charts to build my own designs. I've been weaving some in cotton and some in wool, some with contrasting wefts and some with matching wefts, some with short repeats and some with longer ones. Mixing elements to create my own designs is delightful fun!
If you are new to Baltic (Speckled) Pickup and want to learn from a master, Angela K. Schneider has recently released a great how-to video, Baltic Pick-Up on the Inkle Loom. As a seasoned teacher, she is very thorough! The downloadable 55-minute video answers all of the questions a new pickup weaver might have including recommended tools and equipment as well as clear step-by-step instructions.
You can find it here at Long Thread Media: https://shop.longthreadmedia.com/products/baltic-pick-up-on-the-inkle-loom-video-video-download
For my very basic overview of Baltic (Speckled) pickup, check out these blog posts, parts one and two. There are some older, but very good resources listed there. https://aspinnerweaver.blogspot.com/2020/04/doing-some-baltic-pickup-and-looking-at.html
Although this technique has many names, it has come to be commonly known in the 2020s as "Baltic".When I learned from books back in the 1980s various authors called it by different names. The one that stuck with me was "Speckled" from Evelyn Neher's book, Inkle. I agreed with her logic in calling it by the appearance of the plain weave pattern before doing any pickup as in the illustration below.
The top two rows show the warping chart, and the part below is the drawdown, or how the pattern looks when woven. A simple red diamond design in pickup is shown against the white background.
Along the left side, same warping chart, is shown in a different format that may be easier for some weavers to work with as there is space in between the blocks. The pattern was drawn with this free online tool, https://www.raktres.net/seizenn/#/inkle
Happy Weaving!
Annie
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