Brocade sampler, second post

What I've done since the last post:

After I did the zigzag, I did an improv diamond.

Then I started in on other people's patterns.

The first three patterns are from Crowfoot's Saxon/Kentish paper.  (Early Anglo-Saxon Gold Braids by Grace Crowfoot and Sonia Chadwick Hawkes, Journal of Medieval Archaeology, 1967).

For the first, I've done 3 pattern repeats.  The middle one has the brocade thread going from edge to edge (well, edge of the pattern, not edge of the band).  The other two are like the bands in the paper, where the brocade thread zigzagged from row to row rather than entering and leaving the band in the same spot for each row.

I can't tell if there's much difference in appearance of the motif or the band in general.  It does look like the brocade threads are less parallel with the close-to-motif method -- the edge brocades are more likely to be at an angle.  But the difference is slight and might well be due to other factors.

Here's a closer look:

The second one has one repeat, and the third has 4 repeats (of a 3-row sequence).  The first two are 7-tablet patterns and the third is a 9-tablet pattern.  All are Anglo-Saxon 6th-ish century and from Kent.

All of the Saxon patterns I did are also charted out in the pdf on the Saxon Rabbit website, saxonrabbit.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/saxonweavingdiagramskent2.pdf

Then I did one of the patterns from Anna Neuper's Modelbuch.  It's pattern 87, on p.52 (right column).  The brocade thread went from edge to edge of this 7-tablet pattern.

I'm still slow, of course.  I am not great at keeping tension consistent from row to row, especially where the brocade goes over one tablet vs more than one.  I'm also not great at keeping all the threads parallel from row to row.

The shuttle holding my brocade thread is not working well for me.  So that's something to change for future patterns.  I might try a different shuttle to see if it does better.  Something narrow-ish and pointed-ish and smooth-ish and vaguely flexible would be good.

But the pattern is clearly visible, yay!

I'm not sure what I'll do next.  Continue to do random motifs, I guess, so that I can work on the muscle memory and figure out how to improve.  I'm not yet feeling the need to change out the brocade thread or add additional brocade threads.

This feels a bit like knitting, especially stranded-color knitting.