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.

Felixstowe Tablet-Woven Band (chevron stripes and pack-idling)

It is done!

I successfully re-charted it and then was able to weave something that looked like it was supposed to look.  Interestingly, the right half of my chart matched Crowfoot's chart but the left half was different.  It's still entirely possible that I don't understand Crowfoot's charting style.

I did add a 14th tablet.  As Collingwood points out (and experience had already shown), one needs an even number of tablets for this pack-idling technique.  Rather, one needs the left edge and right edge to turn at different times in order to catch each edge tablet's threads with the weft. That can be done with an even number of tablets, or by having one of the odd tablets join the evens or vice versa, or by adding edge tablets that turn all the time.  With an even number of tablets, the chevron turns out to be slightly asymmetric, but that's OK.  The chevron points are nice and sharp and the asymmetry is not all that obvious unless one looks for it.

To re-cap, this is a re-creation of the Felixstowe band, which is a short piece of tablet weaving found inside of a belt buckle of probable late Medieval age in England.  It is described, sketched, and charted in Crowfoot, Grace M. "A Medieval Tablet Woven Braid from a Buckle found at Felixstowe." Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology  XXV:2 (1950): 201-204.

Crowfoot sketched and charted thirteen tablets while noting that the band's edges are not well-preserved.  I'm not sure what was done to successfully weave a replica using the chart she gives.

She is pretty sure that the band is woven from linen or possibly from hemp.  I, as usual, used cotton.  I'm pretty sure I used cotton rug warp, probably 8/4 but I'm not sure.  I had two cones each of the light and dark purple so it was easy to warp up using a continuous method.

I really like how the band turned out.  It has a nice heft and would be very suitable as a belt -- thick and sturdy, flexible, not too elastic/stretchy, the same pattern on both sides, and a very well-defined pattern at that.  Mine turned out to be about 1/2" wide (14mm) and a bit more than 5' (155cm) long.  The first inch or so is a bit wonky, but I can hide that if/when I stitch that end to a buckle to turn this into a belt.

I'll probably weave this again in the same and different colors/thread.  I may also play around and design a few patterns of my own.  There's also the Cambridge Diamond pattern, which is another historic band that uses this pack-idling technique.

Oh, wow, bless the internet and generous museums -- I found the Felixstowe belt online, yay!  Or at least the buckle and the woven replica of the actual band.

I think this link goes to the entry at the Norwich Castle Museum.  If that doesn't work, try this: https://www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/collections/collections-object-page?id=NWHCM+%3a+1894.76.697.  Its accession number is NWHCM 1894.76.697.

Here are the pics of the buckle alone (or more specifically, the copper alloy decorated strap fitting and strap end), and of the buckle with the band replica displayed in the museum.  I can't get a high enough resolution on the belt pic to see how the replica weaver dealt with having an odd number of tablets, but it kind of looks like he/she slid one of the odds to the evens pack or vice-versa.

What did I learn?

Continuous warping went quite well, though that's not really anything new.  I didn't bother to label the tablets before warping, which meant that I had to use the tablet slant and thread position to know where I was in the weaving.  Not that this is a new thing for me or that it's a problem, but it does take slightly longer to keep track of accurate positioning of the tablets during weaving than it does when the tablets are numbered and labeled.

Pack-idling makes for an interesting texture and interesting color possibilities.  Again, I already knew this to some extent.  This is my first full band using this technique and it won't be my last.

A couple of things I noticed during the weaving: The pack that is forward vs backward makes a small difference since, for me, the tablets were more likely to tangle one way vs the other.  (I ended up having the / cards closer to me and the \ cards farther from me.)  I'm not sure why it made a difference, but it seemed to.   Another thing I noticed: It's easier to keep the packs from tangling after there's a bit of twist in the warp.  When I worked out the twist, it took several turns of painstakingly separating tangled cards before things started to behave better.  More tension helped but didn't eliminate the problem.  Also, things were a bit uneven for a few turns when I started weaving again after advancing the warp.  My guess is that it's impossible to precisely match the tension for each card after working out the twist and re-hanging the weights and there's also a slight difference in tension between the woven band and the unwoven warp.  I think that most of that will relax out and/or block out, though, plus it's not all that obvious unless I go looking for it.

I learned a lot more about pack-idling by doing this weaving.  Things that were sort of theoretical became a lot more understandable with my hands on the actual warp and weft.  I also gained some confidence in re-charting (or designing) this style of pattern.

Something that is interesting:  After Collingwood describes this style of tablet-weaving on p.121-122,  he goes on to describe how to do it with two threads per tablet.  He writes that the two-strand version of four-thread pack-idling "can be worked with all of the tablets in one pack".  I'm pretty sure his description of how to do it matches the technique for the two-hole brick patterns I have been weaving so often lately.

Cats are terrible weaving assistants.  Furthermore, during shedding season, they will happily contribute fine floof to the weaving that is almost impossible to eliminate.  I did not bleed on the band nor did any feline chew through any threads nor put tooth-marks into any tablets.  I count that as a win.

I'm not sure what I'll make next.  I guess it'll be obvious by the next time I post here.  My tablet-weaving area will need to be packed up for a while so a new post (and band) might not happen right away.

I'm also thinking it's time that I organize my handwritten notes and charts.  I've done several dozen bands in the past few years and I often repeat patterns and/or give away the bands.  I have a nice graph-paper-lined composition book that I'll start using to record bands and also various ideas and plans, though I'll probably keep the loose sheets I've done so far in the folder they're already being kept in.  I already use hand-written notebooks like that for knitting projects and other things.  There's already a notebook that has kumihimo stuff recorded (mixed with natural dye experiments, doily and other knitted lace pattern charts, stranded colorwork patterns, etc.), but it's getting rather full.  So... a new notebook it is.  Yes, I use the internet (such as this blog), but I like the redundancy of low-tech no-electricity paper.

A monochromatic sampler band (plus a few comments and speculations)

 

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.