Pattern Support
Difficulty Rating
We’ve been thinking about how to rate the difficulty—or ease!— of our patterns for a while. Simply saying a project is “difficult”, “intermediate” or “easy” feels inadequate. In particular we find that it is misleading to rate a project “easy” when most of it is easy but there might be a tricky bit here or there.
So we did two things:
We created a spread sheet which breaks down all our patterns into steps. We then assessed each step and noted where we thought there may be a trick or two needed for success. (We initially included a category for beaming but found that we marked every pattern easy to beam—both of us use a trapeze and pre-sley in a hybrid back-to-front method— so we felt that our assessment was not relevant.) You can download the PDF of our Difficulty Chart below.
We also gave each pattern a rating from 1 to 10 (easiest to hardest) which expresses our gut feelings about the patterns. These ratings are on the Pattern Gallery info pages.
Here are some terms that we find useful when we think of various weaving processes.
Chunkable: some threadings and treadlings appear complicated at first glance, until you recognize their constitutive elements: the chunks. For those patterns, spending the time to find the chunks that make sense to you will help to avoid mistakes.
Mixed warps: for warps that are in regular stripes, e.g., 4 ends in Color A and 4 ends in Color B across the warp, it is possible to wind the whole warp with 1 end in A and 1 end in B (or 2 ends in A and 2 ends in B), beam the warp as-is, and form the 4 end stripes when threading. We call such warps “mixed warps.”
See “Warp Speed: Winding Warps with Multiple Ends in Hand,” Handwoven Spring 2024, page 26, for more details about winding warps with multiple endsShuttle diving at selvedges (for deflected double weave): how to do this is explained in the patterns where it is required.
Use tabby (in tied weaves): picks alternate between a tabby pick (in plain weave) and a pattern pick.
# of shuttles: this number indicates how many shuttles are active at the same time.
Color-coded threading: colors change at block changes.
Tie-ups: with a standard tie-up, you treadle with one foot for each shed; this tie up can be used on a countermarch loom. With a skeleton tie-up, you will treadle with two feet for each shed; if indicated, we also provide a version of such tie-ups for CM looms.