I was poking around the internet, re-visiting some of my favorite tablet-weaving sites. One of them is this old (but still wonderful) page from Thora (Carolyn Priest-Dorman): https://www.cs.vassar.edu/~capriest/3recipes.html. These are 14th-15th century tablet-woven braids found in London that were described by Grace Crowfoot. The middle one (Braid 450) I recognized as the one Mervi Pasanen (I think it was Mervi) was weaving in a Facebook post (with video!) in the Lautaunat/Tablet Weaving page on Facebook on December 30, 2018. She even credits it as a "medieval silk belt, 14th century London," so I'm pretty sure she's using the same instructions. It's here: https://www.facebook.com/Lautanauhat/videos/2241382072561960
Hmm. The belt is described by Grace Crowfoot in this reference: Crowfoot, Elisabeth; Pritchard, Frances; and Staniland, Kay. Textiles and Clothing c. 1150-c. 1450. Medieval Finds from Excavations in London, 4. London: HMSO, 1992. Which, thanks to the miracle that is the Internet, I was able to find.
Crowfoot describes the braid thus (I'm including the photo that is Fig 100B, too):
In the text near the braids photographed as Fig. 100, she describes the braid as a "lozenge pattern," that was "possibly monochrome." The braid next to it, Fig 100A, is also described as a lozenge pattern "with at least two colors." That braid, Braid 143, is later described as a "double-faced weave with lozenge pattern" in the paragraph above Braid 450's description.
Staniland 1975, 167 is in the bibliography as this:
Which, amazingly enough, I also found online. Here is the entirety of references to tablet weaving on p. 167 in the "excavated textiles" section:
I have not yet figured out if there are further references, nor how the numbers (e.g. 594) compare to the number Grace Crowfoot uses. I haven't yet found the braid online in some Museum of London database, though I might still go deep-diving for more info.
Anyway.
The double-face surface appearance of braid 450 can be achieved much more easily than Crowfoot specifies. If one just sets the tablets with alternating S and Z orientations, it is regular double-face -- FFBB.
Also, it looks similar to some of the two-hole brick-patterned bands I've been making.
So, I have questions. Is this genuinely a four-hole pattern? I suppose one can count the fringe ends and be fairly certain of it --16 vs 32 ends. And, how did Crowfoot decide that it was made by alternating FFBB tablets with BBFF tablets instead of being straight double-face? Elsewhere in the same section of the reference, as I quoted above, she actually calls out some double-face tablets, so she knows what double-face is, for sure.
I charted up both possibilities. For Crowfoot's band, the FFBB threads are twisting around the weft in an ABCD order, while the BBFF ones are twisting in a DCBA order. In a monochrome band where all the threads are the same, it makes no difference. For a colorful band (or one with threads that have different textures), you can get the exact same order of threads by how you thread the tablets. It would be rather a pain, but it's not hard. Maybe doing it this way leads to subtle differences in the band's appearance? Or is a way of balancing out irregularities in the threads while keeping the warping simple?
Obviously some real-world experimentation was called for.
I haven't really played around with double-face yet, so this was a good opportunity to do so. Also, while I was being all monochromatic, I might as well see what the other two bands on Carolyn Priest-Dorman's page are like. One of them (braid 449) has the same structure of the El Cigarralejo band I recently did, and I thought it would be fun to see what it looked like in a flat-colored smooth yarn instead of the heathery and slightly fuzzy wool. The other one (braid 423) uses two staggered packs that alternate being turned and being idled. Well, that's a new trick to play with, so sure, why not? After that, I'd see what I felt like doing.
As far as I can tell, there is little or no difference in the appearance of these two methods of making a band with a double-face surface. Setting the tablets in alternating SZ and doing FFBB looks identical or nearly identical to setting them all as Z (or S) and turning the odd tablets as FFBB and the evens as BBFF. Any slight difference could be due to the hassle of either dealing with multiple packs of tablets, or, as I did in another experiment, manipulating each tablet individually, as opposed to turning everything as a single pack. I really do not see a "diagonal twill effect" that is any different in any version I tried.
So that's interesting. Why did Crowfoot determine that the band was made with this very laborious method vs the much easier method of turning the entire pack of cards the exact same way? I will see if I can find out any more info online, and then maybe ask some of the more experienced tablet-weavers out there.
One more question -- Was the band all warped up at the same time, with all the tablets in the same orientation, and then half the tablets were flipped (and then rotated as necessary) to give alternating orientation before weaving? It's not quite the same if the four threads are different colors, I don't think, but it is for two colors. Maybe it is for four colors as well, but I'm not wrapping my brain around it properly and I'm not going to warp it up right now to double-check. I will keep this possibility in mind as I look online, too.
While I was playing around with these two forms of creating a double-face type of appearance, I also experimenting with the effect of weft tension and a bit with warp tension. As I expected, a looser tension enabled me to keep the weft threads closer together. That made things a little closer to square, though consequently the weft bleps were a little more obvious. So... for future projects when I want to do double-face, I can control some of the technique's characteristic motif elongation to some extent, though I'll also want to consider how contrast-y the weft color is.
So that's braid 450, plus some exploration of double-face with alternating SZ tablets. I forgot to do some regular FFBB double-face when I had the cards all in the same orientation, oops, but that's a fairly minor thing.
Then it was playtime. Braid 423, with two packs, half of which idle per turn, was kind of fun. It's a bit slow and fiddly, but not at all difficult. So now I can confidently tackle the Cambridge Diamonds pattern if I ever want to do so, which I might very well because it's kind of cute. Again, the appearance of this band is not dissimilar to the appearance of some of the two-hole brick patterns described by Karisto and Pasanen. I did not mess around with weft tension, which could prove interesting.
While I was perusing Collingwood Chapter 10, on the subject of some tablets idling or getting extra turns, I tried out some of the ideas he presented about idling tablets. That was OK. I would have needed to do larger areas to bring out the textural differences and/or use a thread that was shinier and more tightly twisted to make the contrast more obvious. It can also be a bit fiddly to do. It's a fairly intriguing idea, though. I do want to explore it again someday -- chapter 10 is full of crazy-complex stuff.
I later did a few sections where I'd change the directions of different tablets to make shapes that were defined by S or Z tablets. That works, for sure. A lot of people (such as Claudia Wollny) seem to use the term "structure weave" for this latter technique, which is mostly a diagonals-type technique in one color.
I also wove a bit of Braid 449 (monochromatic rather than two colors) just to complete the trifecta of braids on Priest-Dorman's website. Yup, I like making this braid, and perhaps I should make it in two colors someday.
I had some space left, so it was time to do a bit of 3/1 twill since I haven't done that before, either. To my delight, it's very straightforward whether the twill lines climb to the left or the right. It, umm, works better if all the tablets are oriented the same rather than alternating SZ, at least for the charts and explanations I was using. But to learn that was also educational.
I can't remember if I did much else. The band itself is not particularly attractive, but that wasn't its purpose. I learned a lot from doing it. I now feel confident about doing double-face or 3/1 twill patterns whenever I want to, knowing that the underlying structure is something I have already done. I'm ready to do the Cambridge diamonds pattern whenever I want, and also to play around with other ideas involving idling tablets. And I have some questions about Braid 450 and thus some research to do. Even so, I know I can make something that looks like that band whenever I want, whether or not my method is the one Crowfoot claims it is.
A couple of other cool things for the future: There are several other cords in the Crowfoot article, with tubular tablet weaving, finger-looping, and plaiting. Fun times! She also describes tabby-woven narrow wares, an interesting decorative trim for garters, and of course other tablet-weaving techniques for the narrow wares (such as brocade).
The article from the Staniland reference shows some knots a few pages earlier! They're all in leather, from the section on Medieval Leather by Jennifer Jones.
I'm not sure what I will be doing next. More two-hole? More samplers? Something besides tablet-weaving? We'll see... The tablet-weaving area has been disassembled for the next week or so, requiring some improvisation if I want to do tablet-weaving.
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