Winter and Spring were filled with teaching responsibilities, six classes in one semester! I taught Nordic pick-up band weaving on a backstrap loom at these venues: the Weavers Guild of Minnesota and the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, and Vesterheim, the National Norwegian-American Museum and Heritage Center in Decorah, Iowa. In the midst of all that, I broke my wrist, slipping while de-icing my driveway. Fortunately I managed to teach all classes despite the mishap.
Vesterheim was my favorite. I loved the all-day sessions. Over four full days, students learned backstrap weaving using a hand-held band heddle — actually just a six-inch segment cut from a rigid heddle. By the last day students were weaving pick-up patterns in 9 and 13 pattern threads. Students without prior weaving experience started with plain-weave bands, then moved on to weaving Nordic/Baltic patterns. Here, a student is weaving a band with a classic pattern of 13 threads.
Randy, a student from California, showed me his key fob, purchased during a trip to Norway.
It appears to have plain-woven borders, with the central area woven with some sort of pick-up pattern. Like the classic Nordic pick-up patterning that students were learning, it was woven with a thicker red pattern thread over thin white background threads. The exposed weft is white, also thinner. But its patterning is not like typical Nordic/Baltic bands. Note in particular that the areas with only background weave do not show the characteristic basket-weave structure.
How was the pattern woven? As a former mathematician, I realized that the steps one does to answer this question has striking parallels to steps in higher math:
| Step | Math | Weaving |
| Problem | Solve a quadratic equation | How was this band woven? |
| Analysis | Lots of doodling, head-scratching, etc. | Inspecting the band, comparing with known methods, etc. |
| Theorem or Hypothesis | x = quadratic formula | Threading and pick-up weaving diagrams |
| Proof | Plug in x, verify solution | Weave a test band and compare |
Well, I’ve finished the first step: I’ve got a problem. On to step 2. Hoping to lay bare the weaver’s secrets, I zoomed in on the diamond motif (outlined in yellow) and its thick white border:
The green borders were plain-woven and exposed enough of the weft to reveal that the diamond was also plain-woven in five picks, in a horizontal bar pattern, alternating groups of three red warp threads with four white. After studying the structure for a while, following warp threads up and down, I tentatively sketch the threading diagram of the central pattern area, drawn here in standard fashion for inkle weaving.
The close-up also reveals the secrets in the thick V-shaped white borders. The white weft floats over groups of four white warp threads, in alternate alignment. It follows that the red warp threads, in groups of three, must have been pushed down in a V-shape. Let’s look at the fob’s back to confirm:
Yes, there’s the diamond’s plain-woven complement, surrounded by a V-shaped red area formed by red 3-span floats, in groups of three, in alternate alignment..
I was confident that I now knew enough about the structure to draw a pick-up pattern for testing.
In the diagram, each row is a pick, and each column represents a group of three red pattern threads. (Since red warp threads are always picked up in groups of three, the pattern diagram can be compacted to show show only the pick-up for each group.) The pattern repeats every 18 picks. A white “^” indicates that a group is to be picked up, and a black “v’, dropped.
This, then, is the theorem that needs to be proven by weaving a test bad!
I used red 5/2 perle cotton for the pattern warp, and white 10/2 perle cotton for warp and weft. Here are side-by-side comparisons. First, the front:
and the back:
Q.E.D.