In a class last fall with Laverne Waddington of the wonderful Backstrap Weaving blog, I learned to use a temporary picking cross. I will nevah, evah, do anything else for manually picking patterns on a base of horizontal bars. I know that isn’t a technical name, but it’s like the basic pick-up described by Anne Dixon in her book, The Weaver’s Inkle Pattern Directory, where you warp your two colors in alternating horizontal bands, and then weave in the two basic up-down plain sheds, picking threads up as needed to create a pattern. It’s also the base structure that is in Laverne’s book, Complementary-Warp Pick-Up. It’s also the same basic structure from Heather Torgenrud’s book, Norwegian Pick-Up Bandweaving. She calls this structure “Type 1 Pickup.” In fact, the band below uses a couple of patterns from that book.

Anyway, y’all. This is a temporary picking cross I used on a band a few weeks back on my inkle loom. I did have to loosen the tension a little bit to get my fingers in there comfortably, but I am never looking back.