Narrow two-hole brick patterned band in red, yellow, and blue

I showed a pic of this band shortly after I started it.  Here it is after I finished, though before soaking/blocking.

I included an American quarter and an American dime in this pic, for scale, to help the recipient visualize the actual dimensions.  The band is 7mm wide and roughly 2.4m long (a bit more then 1/4" wide and 95-ish" long).

It's pretty adorable!  As always, I love the texture of the 2-hole brick patterning.

I've started a companion band for the same recipient, in the same colors but a different pattern.  It'll be a threaded-in design, 4-threaded rather than 2-threaded.  The design will be simple, paying homage to some specific existing historic patterns.

Both bands are meant to be plausible for Anglo-Saxon cultures that are post-Roman but pre-Conquest.  Sure, they're cotton rather than wool, silk, or bast fiber (linen/hemp/nettle), but I wanted the dimensions and patterns/techniques to be consistent with the actual evidence.

The one I started takes some ideas that are consistent with the Coppergate/York band, as well as having motifs that are found in other western and northern European cultures of that approximate time.  Well, OK, that approximate time includes a good many centuries and a good many cultures, but I don't need to be too precise here.

The one in the pic above uses a structure and motif from the Finnish Iron Age finds.  There are Anglo-Saxon bands from various cemetery and other archaeological finds that do use this two-hole tablet-weaving technique even though color has not remained and/or wasn't analyzed.  An interesting variety of tablet-weaving techniques were used by the Anglo-Saxons, and they weren't too picky about the material they used, either.  Chances are that people in general just used what was easily available/affordable to them, but given how rare it is to find well-preserved textiles, very little evidence remains, and it is skewed by various preservation biases.  Anyway, given that two-hole tablet-weaving has been documented in Anglo-Saxon tablet-weaving, and given the dyes known and available to people at that time, my little dotted band seems plausible to me.

Brocaded bands show fairly simple motifs ("steps, crosses, and chevrons" according to Nancy Spies).  Also, the Anglo-Saxon metal-brocaded bands tended to be very narrow bands that were either used as headbands or to edge veils, according to how the evidence has been interpreted.  The band I'm starting is not brocaded, but the brocade patterns do give a sense of the kinds of motifs that were popular at the time.

A few of the non-brocaded bands that have remnants of color (shades of mostly decomposed dark brown and darker brown, mostly, with some exceptions) show chevrons or diamonds or blocks, maybe.  The York band clearly had some kind of threaded-in color pattern in a design that was probably fairly simple, whether it was stripes or diamonds or chevrons or zigzags.

Sure, more complicated techniques were known, and wider bands were made, but I'm not trying to re-create something that would have been worn by the wealthiest or highest status people.  (I finally found the papers I'd been looking for by Grace Crowfoot and Penelope Walton Rogers, yay!)

I also looked at a few illuminations.  They show that clothing probably did have patterned borders.  But the designs aren't necessarily ones that are easy to make with tablet-weaving.  So it's either artistic license (since the motifs match motifs on other items in the illumination) or a variety of techniques were used to decorate the clothing borders (such as embroidery or some other kind of weaving or fabric stamping/painting, or maybe these are meant to be tablet woven brocade).  Or both or something else entirely.

The motifs on the illustrations I saw included circles (with a dot inside) and spiral motifs (which would look something like the S on the famous Finnish Iron Age bands, or would look like Kivrim patterns even though those are mostly documented from a much different place and time).  They also showed (in general, not necessarily the clothing) lots of fun interlacements and other ornamental doodlings.  I need to double-check to see what centuries these are from, because it might be from later centuries rather than earlier.  Also, I'm still quite ignorant about all this, so all of the above might be hogwash.

There's also the embroidery evidence, especially in the later centuries.  I don't remember the exact reference but there's some stuff about going towards more flowing and botanic motifs in the later years.  I don't know if that would carry over to the simple bands that edged clothing.  Those motifs would be achievable with 3/1 twill, double-face, Sulawesi, brocade, and some other techniques.  All except Sulawesi are techniques that were known to the Anglo-Saxon tablet-weavers, and there is one band that actually has a Sulawesi-compatible tablet orientation (/ / \ \ / / \ \ etc.) so it's not completely impossible.  I don't want to do anything too time-consuming for this band and I don't want it to be monochrome, so I'm going with a threaded-in 4-holed pattern that uses the 3-and-1 color scheme that the York band does (the York band has several tablets with 3 red and 1 probably-unbleached-linen thread along with tablets that had other color mixes) and is consistent with the kinds of simple threaded-in geometric patterns found throughout that part of the world.

Anyway.

I'm not really trying for true authenticity.  But hopefully the band will be reasonable attractive and will be at least somewhat consistent and/or compatible with  Anglo-Saxon aesthetic mores even though neither of the bands will exactly match a known historic/archaeologic specimen.

And I seem to use lots of parentheses in my bloviating.