Tablet-woven brick patterns have intrigued me for a while. I like their texture. There are some in Lautanauhat by Maikki Karisto, and more in Tablet Woven Treasures by Maikki Karisto and Mervi Pasanen.
I've also been eyeing the cute little 2-hole patterns with colorful designs that are all over the 'net.
Well! Let's do it! (We'll ignore the siren song of Double Face for a little while longer. And 3/1 twill. And Sulawesi. And everything else. Eventually. Soon. Really.)
So this is my first band doing a 2-hole technique. It gives me a good introduction to working with 2 yarns/threads per tablet. It's not that working with 2 threads per tablet is inherently difficult, but I often see the warning that tablet management can be tricky because the tablets want to turn partway rather than being well-behaved.
The brick pattern I chose is pattern 6, p.113, from Tablet Woven Treasures. It looks like a good first pattern for this technique, and also I like it a lot. It is based on a belt for carrying a wide bronze knife sheath, from a Finnish Iron Age cemetery
It has a mere 10 tablets, which is good, since I want to use the small tablets I was given last year, and I only have 10 of them. It's all one color, warp and weft and everything. It's made from "thick two-stranded S-plied wool", which is close enough to Red Heart acrylic for my purposes. There's only turning forward, no reversals at all. This is a problem for people who use inkle looms for their tablet weaving, but since I do warp-weighted weaving, it's no problem at all -- I take out the excess twist when I advance the warp and rehang the weights. The tablet slant is a simple alternating S and Z. Or / and \, if you'd prefer, since my current convention is to use SZ for charting based on thread slant, and /\ for charting based on tablet slant. The chart I'm following uses tablet slant, and honestly, I like that better than charts with thread direction.
It has been mentioned that edge tablets can distort the weaving since there are 4 threads vs. the 2 threads in the center tablets. The solution offered is to turn the edge card when the weft is going through from that side, and to not turn it when the weft is coming through from the other side (or vice versa). Pattern 6 shows every card turning on every row, so that's what I'm gonna do. Maybe I'll try something different for the next band.
Tablet management turned out not to be too bad. I used a bamboo skewer. I put it in the upper hole closest to me. Throw the thread, turn the tablets, throw the thread. Hang onto the pack, turn the tablets, replace the skewer, and repeat. Every now and then I'd forget, and then, yeah, the tablets would spin like a children's toy. Since I used the cheat of labeled tablets and had them all lined up before I began weaving, it was fairly straightforward to get them back to where they needed to be.
I enjoyed this project and I really like how it turned out. The photo is of the unblocked band. I do hope some of the irregularities will disappear after blocking. Some of it, of course, is me -- slightly inconsistent width, mostly, along with what looks like a few errors where I caught (or didn't catch) a thread from the other side of the shed. I can also tell where I advanced the warp -- there are some slight tension irregularities, either from differences in thread tension or from where I clamped the already-woven band or both.
The band is long enough to use as a belt, yay! I have no idea how much take-up there was since I didn't measure too closely. The width is somewhat less than 1" though wider than the 12mm of the original archaeologic artifact. As usual with one-direction tablet-weaving, yarn lengths change by the end of the weaving as the twist either gets tighter or looser based on the tablet slant, plus there are textural differences in the differently-slanted tablets due to this tighter/looser effect. Some of the irregularity in the weaving might be due to that, too.
I should make more of these, in various colors and various weights of thread/yarn. Maybe I'll even try wool someday. A lot of these brick patterns have different colors rather than all one color. Those will be fun, too.
Next up is a different 2-thread pattern, a design in the Latvian tradition, in crochet cotton. Tablet management will be a little more complicated, hmmm, since some tablets will turn forward and others backward. I have more bamboo skewers and we'll see if that's enough.
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