Pick your first band weave: tablet vs inkle vs Baltic pickup

From the bench · November 2026

Band weaving is the coziest way into fiber crafts: a narrow strip of cloth, warp yarn in two or three colors, and something solid at the end — a strap, a bookmark, a belt. The app (and the drafts gallery) carries three kinds of band. They are not three difficulty labels on one craft; they are three different hand motions. Here's the comparison from the app's own starter drafts, so you can pick one before you warp.

The three, side by side

	Tablet weaving	Inkle (plain weave)	Baltic pickup
The hand motion	You turn a deck of square cards	You alternate two sheds, down and up	You pick pattern threads up and down per chart row
The starter draft	12 cards in Indigo, Natural and Madder, threaded for diagonals, with 8 forward picks	39 ends in five runs: 4 teal, 2 rust, 27 cream, 2 rust, 4 teal	9 pattern threads on 16 rows, Natural background, Madder pattern threads, Charcoal border
Default yarn	8/2 cotton	5/2 cotton	5/2 cotton
First band looks like	Smooth diagonals from the colors stepping one hole over per card	Clean, honest stripes	A pictured motif — letters, creatures, any chart you draw

Which one is your first band?

Warp it today: inkle stripes. There are no cards and no pickup — plain weave over alternating sheds (the app labels the two as the down shed and the up shed, and the steps tell you which one is on top). Every even warp end is heddled and every odd one hangs open, starting heddled on the left.
For turning logic with your hands: tablet. The starter draft is 12 cards, and the app keeps bands between 2 and 80 cards, with repeats from 1 to 160 picks — four holes per card, colors stepping round as you turn.
For a picture in the band: Baltic pickup. Write a chart, and the app reads it into left-to-right pick-up and drop instructions — "pick up 1, drop 6" style steps — plus it measures the longest float a pattern thread takes on top or underneath, so the slinky-float surprise is on the chart before it's on your loom.

Recolor everything

The app carries 37 named yarn colors (they're screen approximations, not brand matches), and any custom color is welcome — hex codes work. Every draft is yours to repaint before warping.

The whole gallery — all 165 drafts, filterable by craft and level, from a first stripes band to advanced double-face pickup — is on the drafts page, each rendered from the app's engine. The start page pairs each band craft with its best clips and tools, the guides carry the step-by-step, and the tablet card sim lives in the Studio. Or go straight to the app from the pill up top.

Happy warping. — the bench crew