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.