Designing Borders for Pick-Up Bands

Recently, a reader emailed a question about designing borders for pick-up inkle bands. While projects in Little Looms have the borders built into the design, most pattern book drafts only include the pick-up pattern—not the border. If you’ve been weaving inkle bands for a while, it can feel like second nature to add on a border, but when you’re a new weaver, it can seem daunting. I should know—I was once a new bandweaver who also felt a bit lost when designing my first sampler bands. After answering the reader, I thought it would be fun to put that same information into an article to help others.

General Guidelines

The short answer on how to approach designing a border is “it depends.” Which, while accurate, is not very helpful. Instead, I prefer to give some general guidelines. These guidelines are at least partially based on my own personal preferences. They are by no means rules set in stone, so you can feel free to pick and choose what works for you and your designs.

Christina’s Border Basics

• To make your pick-up stand out better, use a thread the same thickness as your background thread for most or all of the border.

• I’ve found having at least six warp ends for each border works well in my designs. You can use more, but if you go below six, the border feels too narrow.

• However many border ends you add to your band, make sure your selvedge ends are both heddled.

Now, these are merely the barest of bones to get you started designing—there’s a whole world of different ways to design borders from basic stripes to more elaborate patterning. Let’s take a look at some fun examples.

Simple Stripes

If you want more to your border than just a few extra ends of your background warp, adding a stripe of a contrasting color is an easy and elegant way to elevate your edges.

Just keep in mind: if you add a contrasting color to your border, one end will give you a dashed line while adding two or more ends will give you a solid line.

Simple striped borders are a classic choice for pick-up bands. Click on either photo in the gallery to get more information and a closer look. Photos by Christina Garton