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.