Small band from a Finnish Iron Age pattern

 It's small but very cute.

I couldn't decide what pattern I felt like weaving next when this caught my eye.  It looked simple enough and seemed like it would be fun and relaxing to weave, so on the loom it went.

The original is a grave find from Ravattula Ristimäki grave 8/2015, which makes it a Finnish Iron Age tablet-woven band.

The find is described, photographed, charted, and re-created on March 11, 2017, in this post from Mervi Pasanen and/or Maikki Karisto.  The band is also shown in this Facebook post from January 29, 2018.

The original was woven using wool.  I used cotton.  The Swan River Crafts band is done in madder red, woad blue, and natural white.  I used red, white, and blue #10-ish crochet cotton (probably something like Aunt Lydia's or Knit-Cro-Sheen, most of which are closer to #7-8 even though they're labeled as #10) with white or off-white #30 crochet cotton as weft.  I like the intensity of the red against the white and blue.  Ominously, the tablets show a bit of red around the edges.  I am going to be quite disappointed if the red cotton has loose dye that affects the white cotton!  I didn't think that was common with mass produced crochet cotton, though of course some of my weaving cotton comes from thrift store finds of unknown vintage.

The pattern is a simple asymmetric 4F4B threaded-in design with tubular-edged borders.

My finished band is around 6-7mm wide and roughly 2m long, give or take a bit.  It really is quite cute.  I am not sure how wide the original was.  The Swan River Crafts version is 6mm wide.

I tried again to unobtrusively flip the edge tablets sometimes to see if I could improve my technique.  It's less noticeable than in the previous thicker-yarn band but still somewhat visible.  It would of course be less visible if I matched the weft color to the edge color.

At some sections along the band, the triangles are longer than at other sections.  I am not sure what caused the difference in pick consistency, since I was under the impression I was beating the weft down with the same force and ditto for pulling the weft tight.  Some of it might relax out now that I don't have tension on the band, but some of it is probably me being careless about something.  Or it's something about weaving close to my body vs farther away (i.e. related to when I am advancing the warp).  Or whether I spread out the warp on the loom or let it bunch together (which happens when I get close to where I've tied it off to hang weights from).  Or something else I haven't figured out yet.  I'll have to watch out for this issue in future bands.

It is harder to weave when a cat sits on the loom and the warp and then tries to play chase with the shuttle and its wound-on thread.

I should weave this again using wool someday.

What shall I do next?  There are several 2-hole patterns that look pretty tempting.  Or maybe something else entirely while I dither about the 2-hole possibilities.