Karelian red pick-up weaving

I love to explore my heritage through my crafts and the warm summer glazed terrace we have tempted me to start another weaving project. My mother told me that my grandmother used to do Karelian red pick-up weaving in the 1940s. This technique has been on my list of crafts to learn and I decided to learn it!

After some digging, one of my aunts found these lovely table runners made by my grandmother. The hand-woven table runners have yellowed in storage but the skills of my grandmother is still showing.

Here is my YouTube-video:

Weaving details

If you are a weaver, you might be interested in details of the weave:

The background is simple even weave with the density of 10 yarns/cm. I had to buy a new reed comb to achieve this and I chose to use a comb number 50 and thread 2 warp yarns per slit. My new reed comb (or railing) is made by Toika, which is a Finnish company that has been making railings since 1898.

I couldn’t figure out where to buy specific tools for Karelian red pick-up weaving. Luckily those were not hard to make at home. I had some weaving sticks that I didn’t need that I chopped in half. I sharpened one to make a tool to pick-up the pattern warp yarns. The rest got holes to one end. These sticks are about 50 cm (20″) long and they are used to store my pattern – like a simple wooden binary memory! I didn’t actually need the holes that I made but those holes will come useful, if I weave any wider patterns in the future.

The yarn

My white yarn is Esito wet-spun, half-bleached heckled flax Nel 16/2 tex 103×2 from Lankava. This is used for the base. The pattern is woven using red Esito line linen yarn, Nel 8, tex 206. I don’t understand all those yarn specifications well enough but white yarn is twice the weight of the red one. Therefore, I decided to use the red yarn doubled.

I thought myself smart when I wound the white linen into 4 balls to make creating the warp faster. This was a bad idea! The white linen was so curly that I ended up lots of unnecessary twist in my warp. This resulted in some very annoying loose warp yarns that I had to tighten in order to be able to weave properly. Perhaps, if I had had an access to a proper warping mill, creating the warp wouldn’t have been so painful, but unfortunately the weaving centre was closed for the summer and I had to manage with my wobbly warping frame.

Red pick-up weaving

Red pickup patterns are easy to design even by yourself. You can just draw the pattern on a gridded paper or use a free pixel drawing app like Pixilart. The pattern is easier to centre if the number of squares is an odd number. The square size depends on the density of your pattern but it is usually 2 or 3 yarns. For me 2 yarns was the best choice, especially since my warp yarns were already grouped in pairs due to my choice of a reed comb.

The patterns always have vertical symmetry. If course, if you really love to work extra hard and pick-up every single row in your design by hand as you go, you could skip the symmetry, but it is not what was traditionally done. The symmetry is what makes this technique interesting as you can store your pick-up pattern on pattern sticks behind the heddles. With two yarns per every square, you’ll have to weave every pick-up row four times but with this handy wooden binary memory, you’ll only need to pick-up the pattern once!

This kind of patterning creates a negative pattern on the wrong side. That means that you can change the look of the table runner just by flipping it over!

I used two different patterns from an old Finnish book called Karjalainen punapoiminta by Vappu Kiiski.

The finished table runner

Here is the table runner after I took it out of the loom, wove-in the yarn ends, and washed and ironed it dry. I was worried about the red colour bleeding, so besides detergent, I added salt and several colour catcher sheets to my hand-washing water. (The temperature was about 60 degrees Celsius). The fabric shrunk quite a bit, but the colour didn’t bleed!

I finished the ends with a drawn thread hem and I was done!