It's been busy, but I did get a little bit of tablet-weaving in. It was a reward I promised myself that I could do after the busy-ness subsided.
It was a fun band to weave. It looks like little spirals, and it's reversible, too. I've seen it on pinterest (as a gtt chart) and elsewhere. I used this Twisted Threads chart, obviously changing around the colors and edges. I used 20 tablets, 14 pattern tablets and 3 edge tablets (always turning forward) on each side. The pattern tablets alternate threading of AC dark and BD light with the opposite (AC light and BD dark).
I did speed-warping aka continuous warping for the pattern tablets and it went fairly smoothly. The trick, as I had suspected, is to make sure the thread sources do not tangle, especially the part between the tablets and the source. In other words, keep the bobbins or skeins or whatever in a fairly fixed spot so they can't roll around and otherwise be unruly. I'd tried a few other things that also helped a bit (such as running the thread around the warping path and then dropping a tablet instead of running all the tablets around the warping board along with the thread, changing the orientation of the warping board and thread and me, etc.), but it was still somewhat aggravating to untangle everything. So that was good to confirm, that I indeed understand the concept of how to do it and mostly need to streamline the process. Transferring the warp from the warping set-up to my warp-weighted loom set-up without getting everything tangled again took a bit of time but on the whole wasn't too aggravating. I'll continue to refine the details in hopes of making this quick and easy and hassle-free.
In spite of its apparently complexity, this pattern is dead simple. Several tablets go 3F3B while others go 3B3F. After the 3 turns (either the forward or the backward), the entire pack either goes all forward or all back. If that makes sense. It's twist-neutral except for the edge tablets, and of course even the edge tablets can be occasionally reversed to keep them neutral. Anyway, this was a very straightforward thing to weave.
I don't much like my version, though.
I used 8/2 cotton rug warp (I think). It has a matte rather than a shiny luster. And, well, it's OK. Just OK. My craftsmanship also had issues -- floats on the backside where apparently I didn't catch certain threads in the correct sheds. The spirals are sometimes elongated to varying degrees, though some of that has to do with how long the cotton was under tension (and stretched out) when I was weaving. Sometimes the spirals look more like feathers than spirals. I was beating pretty hard while not pulling the weft too tight but maybe I was inconsistent or something.
Maybe I'll like it better after blocking evens things out.
I'd make it again, simply because it was fun, but I'd use some other material.
I'm still dithering about the next band. Two-pack 3/1 broken twill? Something double-face? A two-thread/two-hole band? Or something else completely? Hmmmm....
I have been knitting, spinning, and weaving baskets while I dither. I'll be doing some leatherwork and dyeing this week, too. Plus various other things. But none of those are narrow wares, so they don't get recorded on this blog.
