How To Weave A Checkerboard Pattern – Weaving For Beginners
A checkerboard pattern looks great in almost any wall hanging. But how do you weave these checkerboard patterns yourself?
The first time I tried to weave one I thought it would be super difficult. But making a checkerboard pattern is actually a lot easier than it looks.
All you need to know is how to do the tabby weave.
Easy right?
So let’s go over everything step by step.
1 Weave the first row with your first color
The first row will be a standard tabby weave with a yarn color of your choice. So simply weave the weft yarn over and under adjacent warp threads until you reach the end of the first row.
2 Weave the second row with your second color
For the second row you want to use the tabby weave again. But this time you will use weft yarn of a different color and you will go over and under the exact opposite warp threads as the first row.
3 Repeat steps 1 & 2
Repeat steps 1 and 2 another time. If you beat the weft yarn closely together you will probably see small squares of alternating colors.
However, if the density of your warp thread is very high, you might have to repeat step 1 and 2 another time so get squares.
(Note that you could also repeat step 1 and 2 several more time to create vertical rectangles instead of squares.)
4 Weave two more rows with your first color
Now this is the most crucial part to weave a checkerboard pattern!
Instead of alternating your colors on every row, you want to weave two rows with the same color.
This creates and offset and changes the color of the new squares. So if your squares were black-white-black initially, it will now change to white-black-white.
5 Alternate colors every row again
Weave the next rows with alternating colors again to create the checkered pattern again, similar to step 1-3.
Keep weaving new rows until you feel like your squares are big enough and then weave two rows with the same color again to swap the colors again.
6 Keep weaving
Now that you know how to weave a checkerboard pattern you can keep going for as long as you want.
I hope you will give it a try and share your results.
