It is finished.
I ended up doing all of the 12-tablet charts in the 3-hole chapter of Tablets at Work. The photos show the entire length of the band, with a lot of overlap from photo to photo to make sure I didn't miss anything. I'm not showing the backside because it's kind of irrelevant, even though parts of it actually look kind of cool.
As you can see, I used 2 strands of white and 1 strand of teal per tablet. There are 12 pattern tablets (3-threaded) and 2 edge tablets (4-threaded) per side, for 16 tablets total. All the pattern tablets had a / tablet orientation (S-threaded) except for the edge cards, which were / \. The weft was the same color and thickness as the white background threads of the warp.
The chapter (and my band) started out with a bit of the basic background pattern, which is pretty similar to the Sulawesi background pattern (in its 3-hole variation).
Then there were a few diagonals-type patterns that showed the interest added by the line of missing holes.
Then Wollny goes into what she calls "waffling", which is when the hole orientation of the tablet is turned back and forth to keep the hole on top of the band (the reverse side shows a float). It ends up looking like those parts of the band are woven cloth rather than tablet-woven. She also goes through the floats that can be added by waffling the pattern color and then each of the background colors.
Then she shows a tacking stitch, which is when two adjacent tablets either turn slightly forward or slightly backwards to bring up the pattern color for just that one throw of the weft. She shows this as turning the tablets 1/8 turn. I found that awkward. So, for one tacking stitch set, I can use my fingers to manipulate the threads on the two tablets, one up and one down or vice versa. Or, because that becomes annoying with more than one of these, I can do an extra quarter-turn of each of the cards, through the weft, and then return the cards to their former orientation before the next pattern row. This is pretty similar to the Finnish half-turns that are in some of the Finnish diagonals-type patterns.
The next two motifs have two more fill patterns -- one is the background pattern that we started with, and the other is also a double-face type pattern but with the pattern thread and one of the background threads showing instead of only the background threads.
And that finished the charts shown in the teaching/demonstration part of the chapter. (Yes, I read the text, too.) On to Wollny's pattern charts!
I didn't know how much room I'd have, but it turned out that I was able to do every single 12-tablet pattern in the chapter. I used a few transitional rows between some of the charts, and I had room for one variation of my own devising (only a little bit different from one of Wollny's charts).
For charts that showed pattern repeat blocks, I tried to make sure that at least two pattern repeats were part of my sampler. For one long chart, I divided it in half, doing the first part, then another pattern, then the second part. I didn't do a second repeat of that chart, though.
My edition (the first) has an error in the chart on the upper right of p.508. It looked really strange when I got to it, so I looked it up. Yup, mistake.
In no particular order, I did charts from the following pages of the 3-hole chapter (which has a dark blue heading and is on p.476-523 of Tablets at Work by Claudia Wollny):
482 (all 3 charts), 485 (charts B and C; A is boring), 488 (all 3 charts), p.490 (A; the other two are not suitable for this band since I didn't want to add brocade), p.498 (the charts that are not repeats of other charts), 506 (tablet set-up and background repeat), 508 (upper and lower right; watch for the error in the upper chart rows 5-6), 509 (upper, middle, and lower left), 510 (upper and lower right), 511 (upper and lower left), 512 (right; I did the first part, did another motif, then the second part), 519 (upper left, upper middle, and upper right), 521 (upper left, upper middle, upper right).
And that's all of the 12-tablet charts I saw in the chapter. There's one more at the beginning of the chapter but it's roughly the same as one of the other early ones I did.
It's not a particularly difficult technique, but as with anything else requiring a lot of individual tablet manipulation, can be a bit fiddly. I did a certain amount of unweaving...
My conclusions and thoughts and what-not:
My favorite patterns and tablet manipulations are the very textural ones -- waffling holes plus or minus floats of the threads. These are what I had thought of as the Icelandic Missed Hole technique.
The ones that are more like traditional diagonals patterns are nice enough, with the little line of holes adding some textural interest.
A lot of the patterns use ideas about modern diagonals -- tablets moving in sets of two, two tablets and two rows at a time.
Three hole feels very different from two hole, though some of that might be because I like weaving the Latvian two hole designs and these three hole designs feel like they are coming from a different designing/weaving tradition.
This technique has some similarities with Sulawesi as well as, of course, diagonals. And float patterns. And double-face. Heck, the more tablet weaving I do, the more connected everything feels to everything else. All of the techniques are variations of other techniques. Or so it sometimes feels like.
Wollny gave a very simple/universal/general tablet setup, suitable for anything. Depending on the design, it might make more sense to have the tablets in a long V formation (the tablets on the left half of the pattern set in one orientation, either / or \, and the other half set the other way) for symmetric designs. Or set them Sulawesi style, with two tablets set / alternating with two tablets set \. Or maybe this way ends up working best for bands that will have floats and hole waffling.
I'm glad I did the sampler. I have some ideas for my own designs, for the next time I do this technique.
And at some point, I'll start adding brocade, since that seems to have been a fairly common element of these bands in the archaeological record.
All of the above are subject to change as I think about it more and gain more experience and knowledge.
What's next? I'm not sure.
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