Up Your Inkle Game with Turned Krokbragd

Looking at the sweet little sheep and multicolored diamond patterns of Joan Sheridan's bands, it's easy to think that they must be tablet woven or involve some fiddly pick-up technique. But really, it's just a clever technique for weaving a three-shaft pattern on an inkle loom.

On a rigid-heddle or multishaft loom, krokbragd is woven as a weft-faced design, where each pick is made up of three different shots of weft. It's a slow weave on those looms and requires juggling multiple shuttles and frequent color changes in the weft. On the inkle loom, however, krokbragd is so much simpler.

The turned in turned krokbragd refers to turning the pattern from weft-faced to warp-faced for the inkle loom and that makes all the difference. With a warp-faced weave, you only need one shuttle because all the color changes are already setup in the warp. With turned krokbragd you can open up a whole new world of patterning, including the adorable sheep shown in the band above.

Joan Sheridan's gorgeous Walkabout Band Set from Fall 2025 issue was woven using turned krokbragd. Photo by Matt Graves

Turned krokbragd is slightly more complex than plain weave on the inkle loom, but not by much. It requires a three sets of heddles, but don't let that deter you—instructor and inkle-weaver extraordinaire Joan Sheridan has a few tricks up her sleeve to make warping for turned krokbragd a piece of cake. The longtime owner of Heritage Spinning & Weaving, Joan has learned to help her students avoid and recover from mistakes. Whether it's a well-placed bag clip, some painter's tape, or a stack of hair elastics, I picked up so many inkle-weaving tips watching her new course, Weave Turned Krokbragd on an Inkle Loom. Her method for making a continuous string heddle had me taking notes (check out the Add Heddles for Krokbragd video lesson for more details).

With a few tweaks, you can create a third shed on an inkle loom.

Along with the instructional video, the Weave Turned Krokbragd course includes pattern PDFs, warping plans, and diagrams to understand the weave structure. It took me a few tries to understand the mechanics of setting up the loom and warping it correctly, so referring to the diagrams often was a must for me.

Not everyone falls in love with band weaving right away. It can take some imagination to find uses for the miles and miles or ribbon that a prolific inkle weaver can create. But between the loveliness of the designs and the portable, habit-forming nature of the weaving, turned krokbragd won me over.

—Anne