Norwegian Pick-Up Bandweaving

Baltic-Style Pick-up

Baltic-style has become a common name for the pick-up weave that my upcoming book, Pick-Up Bandweaving Designs, is about. The technique is also traditional in many folk cultures outside the Baltic, and you might see it referred to by other names elsewhere. In Mary Meigs Atwater’s Byways in Handweaving, the book that I learned from many years ago, it’s labeled as “Staggered Set-up—Mexican and European.” Some weavers refer to it as “Basketweave Background” and others as “Speckled.” In Norwegian Pick-Up Bandweaving, I followed the lead of the classic Swedish book Band, by Liv Trotzig and Astrid Axelsson, and called it Type 2 pick-up.

Baltic-style pick-up has a distinctive appearance. The pattern ends are separated by two background ends, and when woven in tabby, this threading produces staggered flecks in pattern color. The pick-up patterns are characterized by raised motifs in pattern color, a receding basketweave texture in background color, and geometric designs based on intersecting diagonal lines. On the reverse, the pattern and background change places. The more pattern ends a band has, the more intricate the pattern can be.

Band Heddles

In addition to the inkle loom, I weave bands on two kinds of heddles—the band heddle (Norwegian bandgrind) and the pattern heddle (Norwegian spaltegrind)—in a backstrap arrangement. Both are hole-and-slot heddles, but the pattern heddle also has dedicated short slots for the pattern ends, which then float in the middle of the shed. On the pattern heddle, I use a pointed shuttle to select the pattern. On the band heddle (and inkle loom), I use my fingers to pick up and push down the pattern ends.

Charts

Charts are representations of pick-up patterns on graph paper. For Baltic-style pick-up, one vertical column represents one pattern end, and one horizontal row represents the position of the pattern ends in relation to one shot of weft. A darkened square means that the pattern end is visible on the face (above the weft) on that shot. A blank square means that the pattern end is visible on the reverse (below the weft) on that shot. Background ends are not represented.

Drafts

Warp drafts show the order of colors in a band. The two rows represent the two threading positions that produce tabby—open/heddle on an inkle loom, hole/slot on a band heddle, and odd/even shafts on a floor or table loom. Which row you choose to represent which threading position is up to you. On the pattern heddle, the pattern ends are threaded in the special slots, and the background and border ends are threaded in the regular holes and slots. If only half of the warp is shown, read the draft from left to right through the center and then from right to left. In Baltic-style pick-up, the pattern ends are thicker than the background ends. They can be a thicker yarn or the same yarn doubled or tripled.

Face & Reverse instead of Front & Back

I use the term face to describe the side of the band that faces the weaver when the band is on the loom and the term reverse to describe the other side. Pick-up bands are reversible, and either side can be used as the right side, so this makes more sense to me than referring to front and back.

Shot instead of Pick

A shot is one pass of the weft through a shed. A more commonly used term for shot is pick, but I don’t use it in connection with bandweaving to avoid confusion with terms for pick-up weaving.

Tabby instead of Plain Weave

Tabby is an interlacement with a two-shot sequence in which the weft travels over and under alternate warp ends on one shot and over and under the opposite warp ends on the next shot. In a warp-faced tabby band (that I often refer to simply as a tabby band), the warp is closely spaced so that it covers the weft, and the order of colors in the warp determines the pattern. A synonym for tabby is plain weave, but according to Dorothy K. Burnham’s Warp and Weft—a Dictionary of Textile Terms, plain weave has an imprecise meaning, and “tabby is recommended as a more specific term.” I’m happy to to follow Burnham’s recommendation because tabby can be full of pattern and color and is not what I would describe as plain.