First Attempts at Baltic Style Pickup

Time for another project update. This time it will be about pick up inkle weaving.  I've been wanting to try this technique out ever since I bought the wonderful book The Weaver's Inkle Pattern Directory by Anne Dixon. This desire to work on pickup also coincided with our latest SCA event, the Shrewsbury Faire. As part of the faire, there were baking and "livestock" competitions, and I volunteered to make prize ribbons. That turned out to be a very good excuse to give pickup a try.

The first thing I did was warp up the loom for the usual 2 yard length I use, and begin with a practice pattern in order to get the technique down. It's not very difficult once you get used to it, but can be somewhat tedious. The specific technique I used was Baltic style pickup, which involves warping in the sequence B-B-P-B-B-P ... with alternate threads heddled and unheddled and with the pattern (P) threads being thicker than the background (B) threads or doubled up.

Baltic Style threading scheme for 9 pattern threads

I used #10 crochet thread for the background and #3 for the pattern. For the weft I used the same thread as the backgrond, this is a requirements for this technique, as the weft thread does show through the background.  This band has 9 pattern threads.

First few repeats I wove, slow going, but not too difficult.

A great feature of Baltic Style pickup is that the reverse side of the band will have a color-mirrored version of the pattern. This can lead to some very interesting shapes.

the reverse of the band also has a cool pattern!

Once I wove a couple of feel of that band, I used some popsicle sticks (buy them in bulk, they are super useful!) to create separations and began on the prize ribbons.  For the third place, there is already a font drafter out in Anne Dixon;s book, so it was easy enough to use that. I chose a slightly different pattern from the same book. One thing which I quickly learned is that when weaving letters, special care must be taken, otherwise the letters will come out looking spiky as in the upper band shown below. My way to fix this was to use a popsicle stick (like I said, very useful) to push the pattern threads back towards the woven band at every pick. This makes them pop out of the body of the band and makes the floats come out cleanly.

Third place prize ribbons, note the top one had some issues with the spiky T.

I next set up a short warp for the first place. This time I used a blue background and metallic gold pattern. I did not have #3 gold thread so I doubled up on it to get the correct texture.  This is something I do not recommend. By having doubled up threads rather than a single thick one, the opportunity for mistakes is greatly increased.  These ribbons use 13 pattern threads.

First place prize ribbons.

I also made some second place ribbons with red background and white patter (11 pattern threads), which I think came out by far the best of the three sets. Unfortunately I neglected to take any pictures of them and they have already made their way to the contest winners.

The font patterns for 1st and 2nd place I had to draft myself since there are no font patterns included in the book for those number of pattern threads.