Experiments with worsted weight acrylic

My stash of 5/2 cotton is getting low.  So, in desperation, I tried some of the cheap acrylic we have around the house.  What kind of band would it make?  I had used acrylic for some early tablet weaving experiments many years ago.  Those tended not to go well.  But whatever, because I wanted a tablet weaving fix.

It's not that bad.  In fact, it's pretty decent.  The band is of course very thick, but it feels and looks reasonable.  Whew.  I can weave even when the weaving-yarn stash is running low.  It's definitely a different feel from weaving with finer cotton yarn, though, and not necessarily in a good way.

I found the pattern on pinterest, no attribution or original source attached.  I re-graphed it in GTT to make sure I understood what was going on.  Yep.  I changed the direction of the border cards and that was about the only change I made.

This pattern slowly accumulates twist.  So it's not quite as fun as the one I did last time.  It was still pretty fun and also easy to weave.

I did find a place within 50 miles from me that had some cheap crochet cotton for sale.  I bought some so I can make the belts that I have been commissioned to make (well, requested to make by friends and family members, nothing professional in spite of using fancy words like commissioned).  I think I will need to do some mail order to replenish my supplies with better materials.  Either that, or take a road trip to some weaving supply stores that are around 100 miles away and do some serious shopping.

In other exciting news, a friend saw my bands and wanted to learn how to tablet weave.  I made some charming cereal-box tablets and a pizza-box shuttle and showed him the basics.  He has previous loom-weaving experience, so found it a fairly easy transition.  He has completed his first band!  I am so proud, even though all I did was point the way and he did the rest.  Now a few other friends want to learn.  They have their own cards, but haven't had the chance, or maybe the courage, to give it a try.

My friend did a basic zigzag using a pattern draft in Candace Crockett's book on Card Weaving.  Sigh.  Yet another drafting convention to learn.

For Candace Crockett, the left-facing arrow is S threaded (Z card orientation) and the right-facing arrow is Z-threaded (S card orientation).  She writes something about how things are threaded front-to-back or back-to-front when the cards face left.  We did that, and of course the pattern then appeared on the bottom of the band instead of the top.  No problem -- flip the deck and keep working.  Anyway, I'm not sure if her version of front-to-back, back-to-front is different from mine (as in, which end of the thread is supposed to be closest to the weaver?) or if I mis-read what she was writing.

But anyway, now I know how Crockett's pattern drafts are written (I think).  Cards face left, lettered clockwise, going from card 1 on the left with higher-number cards on the right, starting to weave with AD on top, and the arrows as mentioned above (left arrow is S-threaded, right arrow is Z-threaded).

For the teaching band, we cut warp threads and threaded each tablet individually.  I thought it would be good to do the most tedious warping method first, so that future warping would be easier.  With the pattern my friend chose, we could have done a continuous warp.  However, we would have had to rotate cards both horizontally and vertically to get everything in the right orientation before weaving.  I thought it would be easier to have everything in the weaving orientation, so that the pack of cards all looked the same.  It would make it easier to keep track of things and notice errors.

Cereal box cards work really well.  I was pleasantly surprised.  Given the dimensions of the box I used, we ended up with 12 cards that were 3" square.  We used a hole punch for holes that were about 1/2" from each side,  I didn't round the corners, punch a center hole, or anything else fancy.  Pizza-box shuttles work just fine, too.  As soon as we had another empty cereal box, I made another set of cards, just for fun.  I'll probably weave a band with them soon.  I left the original cereal-box tablets and pizza-box shuttle with my friend.

My friend weaves like the women seen in some of the old paintings.  I had brought over the PVC loom.  Instead of using it in a backstrap orientation, with the weaving side close to him and the far side away, he sat so he wove the band from left to right instead of from near to far.  It was interesting.  That might have been due to the space we had available to work, of course.  Again, it's something I am going to try just to see how it differs from the usual orientation I've been using.

I am not sure what I will weave next.  Probably one of the belts that I've been requested to do.  One requires a bit of charting before I start.  The other will be from a draft I found on pinterest.  It is great to have all these random GTT charts showing up on pinterest, but dang, I would love to know where they came from.  Someone is or was very prolific, and it would be cool to know who it is.

Two Decks (Running S Band)

Another band has been woven, with another bad photo to share.

I found the pattern draft on a Finnish website.  It's the second draft from the top.  The person uses \ and / to indicate S and Z threading direction.  The draft shows ABCD going from bottom to top.  I did it with cards facing left, numbered with 1 at the left and 10 at the right, and AD at the top when I began weaving.

I did this with a continuous warp.  It only has two colors, so I used both ends of each ball of thread.  That turned out to be a giant hassle.  The two ends of course wind around each other, and eventually this creates a tangle that has to be undone.  Ugh.

My cat was there to assist, as usual, and was less than helpful, again as usual.  He would pop a thread or two off the warping posts (i.e. clamps) every now and then.  He sat on the threads.  He batted around the cards.  And so on.

But I finally got it done.  After a lot of very careful checking and card-re-arranging, weaving finally commenced.

So far, when I've done a continuous warp, I've woven on the clamps that the warp is wrapped around.  I tried that, but things kept popping off the clamps.  Also, the tension wasn't quite as even as I liked.  Apparently, it's fairly easy for me to vary the tension while warping, which of course leads to uneven tension when weaving.  So I took the weaving off the clamps and draped it over my little loom.  After that, the weaving went smoothly.  I do like using weights on the warp instead of having the warp fixed (either on clamps or on an inkle loom).  (Hmm, I should re-try backstrap weaving at some point to see how that compares to having the warp tied to weights that are draped over something.)

The above photo (the second one for this post) shows the band after two motifs have been woven.  Isn't it cute?  I really like it!

I use the bamboo skewers at the beginning to make sure I've threaded and arranged all the cards properly.  It also gives me a good beginning to the band so that I can start it with a consistent and reasonable width.

This pattern seems related to the kivrim-style patterns and also to diagonal-type patterns in general.  It is easily done by splitting the deck into two packs that turn independently of each other.

The weaving was rhythmic, pleasant, and quite fast.  Each pack had an 8F-8B turning sequence, with one pack offset from the other by 4 rows.  I like how complex the band looks considering how very easy it is to set up and weave.  There's the purple spiral meandering through the center of the band, separating the orange into S and h motifs.  I don't really have a name for the band, but Running S seems as good a name as any.

The band width is fairly consistent throughout.  The weft spacing is less so, unfortunately.  I don't know how much is my frustration with the first few motifs while I was still weaving between the two clamps.

What have I learned with this band?

I really like this style of pattern.  It has a simple threading sequence.  It has two (or more) blocks that turn in different ways to generate a more-complex-looking result.  It is neutral in twist, with equal amounts of forward and backward turning.

I like using a weighted warp.

Continuous warping can be a pain to do under the wrong circumstances, no doubt due to operator error.  It seriously would have been faster to cut warps and then thread each tablet individually.  When I buy more thread, I should make sure I have multiples of the cone/skein/ball so I can use one cone/skein/ball per tablet hole if/when I next do continuous warping.

Mostly I learned that this band was a ton of fun and I want to do more patterns using these kinds of techniques.

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My other tablet-weaving trick this week is to finally download Guntram's Tablet-Weaving Thingy (GTT), a well-known tablet-weaving design software.  I wasn't sure it would work with Windows 7, but thought it was worth a try.  I've seen so many interesting patterns on the 'net that are shown in a gtt format.

It took a little while, but I'm now able to get the program to do stuff.  It turned out that the secrets of how to get it to work could be found in the manual.  Who knew?  For fun, I am using the program to re-draft the patterns I've been doing.  I'm also playing around with my own ideas.  We'll see if anything comes of it besides a bit of fun.

Soon I should start a collection of links for this blog, hopefully more comprehensive and better organized than I am finding elsewhere.  There's a lot out there, and I find more every time I search.  I like a lot of the non-English-language sites, too.  Maybe I should also add a list of tablet-weaving terms in various languages to aid in our searching.  And ditto for other narrow wares.  But not today.