A few quick cords

 While I've been dithering over what to tablet-weave next, I cranked out a few quick cords.

The small cotton cords are two-strand chain sinnets, aka finger crochet aka zipper sinnets.  The variegated purple one is a two-loop finglooped braid.

The zipper sinnets are not true braids since the two strands are interlooped rather than obliquely intertwined, according to my understanding of current braid/cord terminology.

My tensioning with the fingerlooped braid isn't half-bad, all considered.  The strands were fairly long so I worked with shortened loops, letting out the additional length when needed.  It's not a perfectly-made braid, but that's OK.  It does spiral a bit, like it's supposed to.  I wonder if I should try to make one where I alternate which way I twist the loop?  If I did that, it would probably look like the same 4-strand braid one sees with free-end braiding and marudai-kumihimo braiding.  It's so fast and mindless the way it is now, though.  It's still worth maybe trying it as an experiment.

The two sinnets are made from random leftover crochet cotton, both roughly #10, though the blue/purple might be a little finer than that, maybe #20.  The green and yellow sinnet uses big-box crochet cotton (so a bit thicker than #10) which has a thin strand of tinsel/mylar wrapped around the cotton. Shiny!  I did roughly 3 meters (roughly 10 feet) of each cord.  The fingerlooped cord is made from leftover Red Heart acrylic.  The variegated yarn hides most of the irregulaties.  It is roughly 2 feet long.

I think I know what I'll be tablet-weaving, but I haven't yet warped it up.  So maybe there will be more quick cords until I'm ready to cut the yarn, thread the tablets, and start weaving.

Vague ruminations on easy-to-make cords

I've been thinking of doing a class on easy ways to make cords.  It's not so much a follow-up on the class I did for the Fill-the-Gap braid, but more of "one in a series of".  I like cords.  Narrow wares.  Etc. I'm not wedded to any particular technique, either.

So...  if I were to do a class on something like "Three Easy Cords"  (or four, or five, and yes, that's a slight riff on Five Easy Pieces), what would I include?  Some of it would depend on the length of the class.  Too many things would cause people's brains to shut down.  But all of these are easy, so might not be enough for one class per cord.  Though I did the Fill-the-Gap braid as a single (30-minute) class, and it requires less than 5 minutes to teach/learn.

The criteria to be included in this imaginary class or series of classes would be something easy with few or no tools needed.  Here are some ideas.

1.  Twisted cord.  This is so dead easy I'd hesitate to include it.  Except that some people truly haven't learned it, or at least it doesn't occur to them to use it when they need some cordage.  It's an easy way to make something useful and fun, and of course is the basis for things like making rope.  And heck, cordage, since this is basically making a 2-ply from some kind of single ply.

There's a second way to make it, which I see in basketry videos -- twist the cords, then kind of do a weird flip to wrap them around and equalize the twist somehow.  I'll have to go back through the videos and see exactly what it is and how to do it.  It seems useful for doing the twisted cord for a short segment at a time rather than the entire length of the cord.

Showing how to do this for the fringe ends after weaving/braiding/etc. could be useful, too.

2.  Two-loop fingerloop.  This is crazy fast and fun to make.  I still haven't quite mastered keeping the tension even, however.  It helps to have a second person, but there ought to be some other things I can do to keep things semi-even when a second person isn't handy.  Also, This cord tends to spiral, which some people might find slightly distressing.

There are a lot of other ways to make this particular structure.  Some of those would be preferable, especially when you want to keep your options open about how long the cord needs to be.  The fingerloop method is a lot of fun, though.

The 2-loop fingerloop braid is well-illustrated here: https://loopbraider.com/2019/12/28/spirals-and-2-loops/

It's also in one of the little booklets I have on Friendship Bracelets, though done freehand rather than with finger-looping.  And I'm pretty sure it's the same structure as one of the first braids in Rodrick Owen's book on Braids -- 250 patterns from Japan, Peru & Beyond.  The simple "worldwide" braids in his book can be made in the hand as well as on a disk or marudai.

3.  Finger crochet.  This is something in Montse Stanley's knitting book.  She calls it finger crochet, but I'm not sure exactly what other names it's known by.  It makes a nice cord that is somewhat square in appearance. 

After checking the Ashley Book of Knots, I believe that this might be a version of what he calls Idiot's Delight, knot 2896, p.477 -- also check out his other sinnets on nearby pages.  Also, after doing a bit of searching online, this seems to be known as a Zipper Sinnet in the paracording community.

4. Finger knitting.  Who needs a lucet or chain fork or knitting spool when you have fingers?  There are a lot of instructions out there for anywhere from 1 finger (which looks mostly like crochet chains) to at least 4.  Two fingers is pretty easy.  The structure is kind of loose if you don't pay attention to tightening the loop at each step.

5.  Three and four loop fingerloop braids, also found on the loopbraider.com website.  See this one as well as the one above: https://loopbraider.com/2012/08/02/easy-3-loop-braids/

6. Macrame.  Take two cords.  One makes half-hitches over the second, maybe alternating which one does the half-hitch and which is the holding cord.  Booklets and websites on friendship bracelets have many variations on this kind of theme.

7. Those scoobie-braids, the type kids make lanyards from in summer camp.

8. Paracord braids, some of which are fairly straightforward.

9. Plaiting and other braids.  The three-strand braid is known by just about everyone and is very historic.  I happen to love 5 strand plaits (aka rope braids), partly because they too are very historic.  Of course there are zillions of braids out there.

For some of the above,  you need some way to keep tension on the cord as you make it, and that may well require tying it or pinning it to something.  Others just need your hands/fingers.  Some need just one strand (or bundle of strands), while others use two or more strands or loops.  All would make smallish cords that would then be used for something else -- ropes, shoelace, tying packages, running through eyelets, simple bracelets, fringes, and so on.

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I'm still dithering about what tablet-weaving pattern to do next.  Something tubular?  I have enough wool yarn left for 16 strands.  So I could do a monochrome tubular braid from Tablet-Woven Treasures, with 8 tablets having 2 threads each.  Or I could do a 4-tablet tubular braid with all the holes threaded with alternating \ and / tablet orientation.  Or I could add another color.  Or I could try to do some kind of braid with the yarn instead of tablet weaving.  I'm kind of inclined towards the monochrome tubular 2-hole braid as what I'd like to tablet-weave with the yarn, but I haven't decided for sure yet.

Or, I could go back to cotton and/or colors and/or some other wool I have and do something else.  Another El Cigarralejo braid?  More brick-patterned bands?  Vestrum or Snartemo II?  The little 2-hole Antinoe grave band or another 2-hole that is mostly Xs and diamonds?  A checkerboard, either threaded-in or double-face?  The monochrome-ish 2-hole/diagonals Hochdorf wallhanging?  Some of the 8-tablet 2-hole patterns from Eva Sandermann Olsen's Tablet Weaving pdf?  Something else from Randi Stoltz?  Or something else entirely?  There are so many possibilities.

I may need to put away the tablet-weaving work area for a few days, so if I don't decide soon, the decision will be made for me -- i.e. no tablet weaving for at least a few days.

But while I'm dithering, I think I'll crank out some more cords and think about how to organize classes to show them to others.

Explorations in monochrome tablet weaving

I have been continuing to work with the wool yarn this week, exploring some new patterns.

First, I decided to play with structural stuff, where the tablet orientation makes the pattern.  I considered the plain part of the belt of Philip of Swabia -- it's a monochrome checkerboard pattern, more or less.  Here is one version of that texture pattern.  Here is another.

I finally decided that the wool is too heathery to really show the details of the checkerboard.  However, this textural pattern, consisting of vertical stripes rather than checkboards, seemed like it might fit my yarn better.

I used 15 tablets, alternating threaded S and Z (or \ and /), 3 per orientation before switching to the other orientation.  All turns were forward, as I usually do, with no reversals.

Interestingly, and not surprisingly, the yarn was a bit stickier than with the two-hole patterns.  Nothing was felting or anything.  But the threads weren't always thrilled to slide smoothly past each other when opening the shed.  I had to help it along a little bit.

The pattern is subtle in this yarn but I still like it a lot.  This band is quite wide, 1.25-1.5", compared to the two-hole bands I've been doing.  It's also a bit shorter -- there was a bit more take-up, quite possibly because there are four threads per tablet.  I think this pattern would look really nice in a flat, non-heathery color, in a shinier yarn, maybe more tightly twisted.  So it was good for me to play with it and add this pattern concept to my idea bank for when I just want to crank out something simple.

Next up, I wanted to play around more with the idea of two adjacent empty holes per tablet, in the manner of Candace Crockett's Draft 14.  Peter Collingwood discusses this concept briefly in The Techniques of Tablet Weaving, on p.93-94 in my edition.  I charted up a simple chevron.

I was worried that the pattern wouldn't show up well in the heathery gray, so I tried it in some red vintage-store crochet cotton.  I like how it turned out, but I decided it was a bit too subtle for the heathery gray.  Also, the two sides are slightly different, in a more noticeable way than I wanted for the gray yarn.  I used the same red for weft as for warp, and I wonder what it would have looked like with a contrast color for the weft.  Another variation that mildly interests me is doing diagonal lines instead of chevrons -- doing a strip/stripe of the line going one way, alternating with strips/stripes of the line going the other way, with maybe a couple of tablets with 4 threads in between the stripes.  Hmm, someday.

Another interesting comment I found online about these patterns with two empty holes adjacent rather than diagonally opposite, from Phiala's venerable Stringpage site, in the section on two-hole tablet-weaving: "If the tablet is threaded through two adjacent holes, all possible sheds can be produced (both up, both down, one up and one down), making it possible to weave any structure possible with a four-harness loom!"

I'm going to have to think about that for a bit.  In addition, of course, there is Andean Pebble weaving done with tablets.  That uses two colors, but they are adjacent rather than diagonally opposite.  Linda Hendrickson has published some English-language stuff on this, Claudia Wollny discusses it in her book Tablets at Work, and I know there are other resources, in English and other languages, even though I'm not gonna list them all here right now.

Anyway!

Back to the monochrome brick patterns of Karisto and Pasanen!  This time I returned to Tablet Woven Treasures and chose the charming pattern on p.109.  I added a tablet to the left edge to make it symmetric.  Thus it uses 10 tablets.  The two tablets on each edge are threaded with four threads, and the six pattern tablets have two threads each.  The tablet slants alternate \ and /.  For the pattern tablets, the \ tablets are threaded in AC and the / tablets in BD.  The weft is the same as the warp.

I really like this one a lot!  The band turned out to be about 3/4" wide and about 62" long unblocked.  I will definitely make this one again.  As with the other brick patterns I've done, it could be expanded with more two-hole brick-pattern tablets, or by adding stripes and what-not (possibly in different colors) for the edges.

What did I learn?

Uhh....  I still like weaving with wool and no longer fear tablet-weaving with it.  I liked all of these new-to-me patterns and should do them again.  I'd like to explore more of the two-adjacent-hole patterns.  Doesn't the true pebble-weave structure done with tablet weaving use this technique, though of course that concentrates on the color patterns rather than subtle monochromatic structures.  Hmmm.

Cats are not particularly useful weaving assistants.  As always.  But they do like to keep an eye on what I'm doing even when they're not actively helping. I hope that the recipients (a few of these will be gifts) don't mind a bit of cat fur mixed into their bands.

It was slightly difficult to maintain even tension for a few of the bands.  I need to think about that for a bit.  Is it because I didn't put even weight on each card?  Is it because of the slight effort needed in making a shed?  Is it because some cards were \ and some /, some two-hole and some four-hole, and thus there was different take-up when combined with the ply of the yarn?  If so, would weighting individual tablets rather than the entire bundle make that better, worse, or no change?  Will most of it go away with blocking/steaming/ironing/weighting/using?

What's next?  I'm not sure!  I might re-do the wool bands using cotton.  Or I might resume multi-color tablet-weaving or even knock out a few inkle bands.  I'm still enamored with two-hole patterns, so that seems most likely.  But you never know.  Some braids are still calling my name -- that Whitehorse Hill cist burial braid (which seems to be a 13-strand plait which can be done freehand or using fingerlooping) and a 6-strand braid from the Hedeby apron, which has an online site showing it done freehand, but I suspect fingerlooping might have been involved in the original.

More two-hole brick-patterned belts/bands -- in wool!

 OK, I've now tablet-woven using wool.  It was nowhere near as dire as I'd been warned.  Whew!  I used wool yarn that was on cones, intended for weaving.  I believe that it is less elastic than knitting yarn and also probably has a coating/sizing on it to help it flow better.  Whatever the reason was, I had no trouble at all.  I think doing a two-hole band might have helped -- I noticed a bit more stickiness with the band where the threaded vs non-threaded holes were aligned compared to the band where the threaded vs non-threaded holes were diagonally opposite.  (In other words, more stickiness for the band where the threaded holes were all AC and empty all BD, as opposed to the band where some were AC and some were BD.

While weaving, the tension flattened out the pattern.  It showed up better once tension was released.  After the bands were finished, I gave them a long soak and then hung them to dry.  They shortened up and fluffed up a bit more.

The patterns are subtle but I like them.  I like weaving with wool, too.

The white (or natural) band (shown above) is done with some kind of old tapestry wool I found lurking in my stash, from who knows where.  I've been slowly using it for natural dyeing experiments.  It's a cabled construction -- three plies of yarn, with each ply being a two-ply strand.  The pattern is the one from Tablet-Woven Treasures, p.113, from an archeologic find that was used as a belt for a carrying a knife sheath.  I do like that pattern.

The gray wool is Harrisville Designs Highland in Oatmeal, a heathery light gray.  I did the same belt pattern from Tablet-Woven Treasures (see photo above).  Then I did another Medieval belt pattern, the same one I had done in tan acrylic a while back (see photo below).  I like this pattern a lot, too.  The wool doesn't show the ribbed pattern as clearly as the acrylic, but it's still very nice.  I haven't had a chance to soak it yet so maybe that'll help.

I wonder if I should try using less tension to see if I can do a tighter beat, and if that makes a major difference in what the finished belt/band will look like.  As it was, I didn't use a huge amount of weight, but it did stretch out the yarn a bit while I was weaving.

All of the belts are roughly 5 feet long (they were about 5.5 feet when straight off the loom -- they shrunk after soaking) and about 3/4" to 1" wide.  The pattern from Tablet-Woven Treasures uses 10 tablets, and the one from the Facebook page uses 12.

I'm glad that wool turned out to be reasonable to weave with.

I have my eye on a 12-strand braid pattern to make from this wool.  Someone showed me a video, though it's a pretty straightforward pattern.  The braid is from an armband, made from cattle hair and studded with little tin ornaments, from the Whitehorse Hill cist burial.  Sally Pointer used her locally-gathered bast-fiber cordage to braid a belt.  I'm just going to use wool.  It's interesting that the strands and braid have a lot of two-over and two-under moves -- it makes me thing of things like finger-looping and finger-weaving, and, I suppose, some kinds of basketry.  I do not plan to add tin ornaments even though they do look very charming on the original armband.

There are other interesting braided belts out there.  I also have my eye on the 12-strand (also with double strands, as with the Whitehorse Hill braid) Skjoldehamn belt.

For tablet-weaving, I'm still entirely enamored with two-hole tablet weaving.  There are so many possibilities that I've actually had to start a list.  I'm not sure which one I'll do next.  At some point, I do want to explore another technique.  But not just yet.

Two more two-hole bands

Someone wanted to see what I could do with sport-weight cotton (or cotton blends), with an eye towards wider bands that were quicker to make.

The first band is the same spot pattern (from Maikki Karisto's Lautanauhat) I've been making this month, this time in white with black spots.  It's about 5/8" wide.  That is wider than I get with #10 cotton, but still not all that wide.  I'd like to do this again, but add a couple of edge tablets on each side, to probably make vertical stripes.

The second band is monochrome.  I picked a two-hole pattern (Draft 14) that was in Candace Crockett's Card Weaving. It's interesting in that the empty holes are adjacent to each other, rather than being diagonally opposite holes like the other two-hole patterns I've been doing.  The pattern itself is sort of like the letter W.  The outer legs are not symmetric with the inner legs (i.e. this is a W, not the bottom halves of two diamonds).  The entire pattern is 18 tablets -- 4 edge tablets with 4 threads each, and 14 tablets with 2 thread each.

For the weft, I used leftover purple #10 crochet cotton, in hopes that the color of the weft would be a nicely visible contrast with the warp.

The band ended up being about 7/8" wide.

I like the band.  The texture is a bit subtle -- it's very visible from some angles and not too noticeable from others.  The purple blips of the weft are definitely visible and rather charming.  It reminds me of simple brocade except of course it's the absence of warp rather than a supplementary weft making the pattern.  The two sides are similar in their now-you-see-it-now-you-don't texture even though their overall appearance is slightly different.

Peter Collingwood mentions this kind of 2-hole pattern, where the two empty holes are adjacent instead of diagonally opposite, in his section on missed-hole techniques in The Techniques of Tablet Weaving.  He says that "such simple diagonal grooves and chevrons are known on bands from Egypt and Syria" and that "two woolen belts from the Iron Age finds at Vaalermoor and Dätgen are said to show this technique."  Hmm, those are described in some kind of obscure German reference from 1911.  I wonder how hard that would be to find so that I can see the belts for myself?

I'm not so sure about the cotton/acrylic blend I used for the pink belt.  The yarn is a cabled construction, several plies that are each thin 2-plied yarn.  By the last foot or so of the band, some of the thin 2-plies were shredding and making a bit of a mess.  Luckily it's not enough to affect the appearance or strength of the band.  But it was annoying to deal with, and I'm sure it would have continued to get worse if my warp had been longer.  It is possible that the breaks were where the cats had been helping -- they grabbed the yarn a couple of times as I was warping and/or advancing the warp.

Both yarns (the black and white yarns, and the pink yarn) are soft and look like they'll be prone to pilling.  We'll see!

What's next?  Wool, I think.  I haven't tried tablet-weaving with wool yet.  Also, I've seen some interesting monochrome braided bands/belts that could be fun to make.  But you never know what will catch my fancy.

A Motif from Oseberg Fragment 2 -- done!

And it's done!  Seventy pattern repeats, not quite 6 feet long, roughly half an inch wide.  As usual, I might have been able to get one or two more pattern repeats done if I'd really struggled, but I decided not to.

I am not sure what I'm going to do with all the small bits of leftover thread that are accumulating...  Probably throw most of them out since they're short, but maybe a few can go into the braiding stash.  Or get used as skein ties.  Or something like that.

I really like this band.  By the end, the pattern was mostly in my muscle memory, so the weaving went a bit more smoothly and more quickly.  I still had to unweave a few mistakes here and there.

Two-hole tablet weaving is a lot of fun.  I can see how it relates to other tablet-weaving techniques such as double-face and diagonals.

What did I learn?

Well, most importantly, what I wrote in the previous post -- for this band, it really helped to loosen the weft.  That made the little pebbles show up quite clearly and made the motifs seem less elongated.  (Not that I mind if they're elongated, but obviously if a diagonal has the same length but a different width, it changes the apparent elongation.)  I had to pay some attention to just how loose -- loose enough to see the pebbly bits, but not so loose that the weft was clearly visible.

Another thing, which I probably already knew, is that when the weaving shed gets fairly short, turning the cards in the tight space causes the band to spread out.  That of course affects its width and the distance between picks.  I can mitigate some of it but not all of it, because it affects a few rows of weaving, not just the most recent.  That was part of the reason I stopped the band when I did, since I was already starting to see that effect and it would have only gotten worse.  Smaller cards would have been better -- maybe it's time to buy or make some since I only have ten of them and a lot of bands use more cards.

I also gained a bit of confidence in my ability to take the diagonal lines of a pattern and convert it into a tablet-weaving chart.  Thank you to Randi Stoltz for providing the diagonal-line chart so I didn't have to do it myself from Sophie Krafft's drawings.  I also appreciate Stoltz calling attention to this interesting collection of motifs.  Maybe I'll do some of the other motifs from the fragments that Stoltz has called attention to.  Some look like good ones for two-hole while others would work well with regular 4-hole diagonal or kivrim-ish or other techniques.  As far as I know, a lot of the Oseberg tablet-woven bands were made using brocade techniques, so that too is another possibility for playing with the motifs and/or re-creating some of the known bands.

If I make this band again, I'll be sure to change the color of the border.  The yellow zigzag is the most obvious element, and it's only when one gets closer that the red net-like motifs start to stand out.  I know this -- that the lightest color is often the one that is most noticeable, but I keep thinking that the darkest/brightest color might be different this time.  Duller colors (gray vs white, for example) can reduce the effect, but it does depend on the pattern and on the actual colors used.

As usual, cats are terrible weaving assistants.  Good thing they're cute.

I wonder what technique was used when creating the item that contained original motif?  I might have to do some research to find out, if it's even been reported.  It does lend itself quite well to two-hole tablet weaving, though.

What's next?  I guess I'll find out!  But probably more two-hole patterns until I get bored or until the lure of the Next Thing gets too hard to ignore.

A Motif from Oseberg Fragment 2 -- in progress

I found the motif and the chart on Randi Stoltz's page.  Here is the full listing of patterns and here is the pdf of the chart.

The motif is on one of the textiles found with the Oseberg ship burial (Norway, 9th century).  Sophie Krafft made sketches of the textiles.  This motif is on fragment 2.  I have no idea if the original is a tablet woven band, or something embroidered or tapestry woven or something else entirely, nor any idea what techniques were used to make it.  The motif looks like it would be very suitable for two-hole tablet weaving, which is how Stoltz charted it.

I decided to rechart the pattern, using the diagonal line drawing on page 2 of Stoltz's pdf.  That way, I would understand the pattern better and thus more easily be able to weave it.  Also, that way I could use the charting conventions that are currently more intuitive for me.  Since I'm mostly weaving 2-hole patterns charted by Karisto/Pasanen, I used that approach.

Yay, it worked!

I forgot to fool around with the edge tablets (color, pattern, etc.) until after I'd warped up the band, so they are the same red as the motif.  It probably should have been yellow.  Or some other color completely.  Oh, well; it looks good anyway.

I'm still using vintage thrift-store Knit-Cro-Sheen in red and yellow, with off-white DMC Cebelia #30 for weft.

The first few repeats weren't too inspiring.  The yellow zigzags dominated and the red areas were very solid-looking.  But then I loosened up on the weft tension.  And now the red net-like motifs are showing up nicely.

So that's something I learned with this band -- sometimes it helps to play around with weft tension.

It's relatively slow to weave compared to the last few brick-patterned bands.  I have to pay attention.  But it's very satisfying to watch the motifs develop.  I love the 3D pebbly effect of the little yellow blips showing up under the red network.

I've done over a dozen repeats so far, with several dozen left to go.

As always, cats are terrible weaving assistants.