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.
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