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.
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