Monday, August 12, 2024

Cambridge Diamonds

This is a famous historic band from England.  It uses pack-idling, as does the also-from-England Felixstowe band.  There's some question about whether it's Saxon or Medieval, but I don't care.

Cambridge Diamonds has been on my to-do list for a while.  So finally I did it.  There must be something in the air, since I think I've seen mention of at least 3-4 other people either doing the same band or recently finishing it.  It's one of those patterns that most people eventually weave.

I chose blue, white, and green for my colors, and I think it's a good color combination for this pattern.




For whatever reason, this band gave me more trouble than it should have.  It would go along well for a while, then suddenly start giving me uneven color lines and missing bloops and color peek-throughs and what-not.  I believe that the threads were catching on tablet edges even though I tried very carefully to make sure that the shed was doing what it should be doing before I put the weft through there, and this both messed up the tension and caused various threads to end up in the wrong shed.  I had to unweave several times, once because a couple of tablets actually had caught badly enough for the two tablets to switch places.  I knew something was quite wrong but it took a little while to figure it out.  I was also using less weight than I often do for a pattern with this many threads, and maybe that too contributed to the threads catching on various tablet corners.

I hope some of the uneven spots settle down a bit with my usual wet blocking.

I used Shelagh Lewins' chart, both the one in the pdf in her website here: https://www.shelaghlewins.com/tablet_weaving/Cambridge_diamonds/Cambridge_diamonds.pdf and the twisted threads chart here: https://twistedthreads.org/pattern/nQZCXTQdxTaZZgbzd

The unblocked band is 63" long (162cm) and about 1/2" wide (1.25cm).

I'm not sure what I'll do next.  Do I need more practice in multi-pack patterns to improve my shed-clearing abilities?  Or do I want to do something different because this band was kind of annoying at times?  I don't want to swear off of pack-idling patterns because I think they're all kinds of cool, but I don't think my next project is gonna involve pack-idling.


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