A new catégorie for my blog: Discovery of the month!
Want to present once per month something I found around weaving that aroused my curiosity: that could be a new technique, a designer or a single piece.
This month I decided to show off a weaving technique I explored in February and that has become immediately a new favourite: Halvdräll!
I discovered this technique due to Arianna E. Funk and her recent works for GIST: Yarn & Fiber.
She designed for them, among other things, a pair of dishtowels in Halvdräll (free pattern download) and I’m fallen in love.
I used this technique to weave some cushion covers and as I’m really, really happy with the outcome, I thought I might share this technique here.
1. Introduction
I have fallen in love with Halvdräll due to this three characteristics:
- it’s a technique that allows me to weave what I love most: blocks!
- it’s a quite easy, 4 shaft technique, that permits nevertheless endless possibilities to play around with just by changing colours
- I find the end result quite modern looking!

2. Basics
As I’ve just discovered this technique, I can only share my first impressions and things I learned and read so far:
- The name indicates that it’s a Swedish weaving technique and I haven’t found much written about it in English. I suppose that it has another name in English books, but until today I’m not sure which is the corresponding technique in English. (any suggestion would be appreciated!!)
- Arianna describes it as a “simplified overshot technique“
- On 4 shafts you get two blocks with short weft pattern floats and two blocks with small spots at the same time
- The weft floats are short and secure because they are tied down.
2. How-to
- You need 4 shafts and treadles.
- As a derivate of overshot the technique is built on the rhythm of every other pick tabby, every other pick pattern
This means:
Yarnchoice:
You need two different yarns thicknesses to create this pattern
– one, finer yarn for the warp and the tabby picks
– a thicker yarn (at least two times thicker than the first one) for the pattern picks
Sett/ Density:
I used the sett for a tabby weave, as I do for overshot.
Threading, Tie-up and Treadling:
The draft below shows the very easy to memorize draft. Nothing fancy, the treadling is so easy you really can concentrate on you colour play . The block width and height is easily adaptable, you can add one or two colors in the warp etc. A lot to explore I think.

3. Realisations
Below some photos of my cushion cover experiments.
Warp: I worked with Cottolin from Venne, sett of 8 ends per cm and four different colours.
Weft: the weft is completely mixed. This was an experiment and I used every rest of yarn I found in my stash, cotton as well as wool.







4. Variante
Below a variante of Halvdräll I found in the book “Simple Weaves” by Birgitta Bengtsson Björk et Tina Ignell.
The technique shown here ties down a floating white weft to make small stars.



Hope my “Discovery of the month – Halvdräll” was an inspiration for you to give this technique a trial, it’s really worth exploration!
1 Comment