Monotonous Monochrome tablet weaving (the Thin Blue Band)

Well, it's done.  Yay!  By the end, I was very tired of it.  I started with roughly 3 yards of warp and ended up with about 83" of band.  I could have eked out another few inches, but Yet Another warp thread had frayed and broke, and I was tired of replacing them.

The band's width varies from about 7/8" to about 15/16", which is a bit more than I like to see.  Hopefully some of that will go away when I block it.  Ditto for the wavy lines which are a result of how I tensioned it and advanced the warp.

As I wrote in the previous post, this is the pattern seen in the Museum of London band 449 (according to Grace Crowfoot) and also in the pre-Roman El Cigarralejo pattern (according to Aisling).  It consists of 4-threaded tablets that alternate orientations -- 3Z and then 3S (or vice versa).  I used 30 tablets.  My aim was to get it to be >1" but obviously that didn't happen.  It's a nice looking band anyway.

I used my Robin & Russ Handweaver tablets since I didn't know how many tablets I'd thread up when I started.  The thread is the same teal thin cotton 2-ply I've been using, as gifts for a friend.  The combination of large tablets and thin loosely-plied yarn was not a great one.  It was hard to turn the tablets and clear the shed, and eventually the thread started to fray and pill.  My weaving area has a thin layer of blue lint and cotton-plus-cat-fur pills under where the band was being woven.

I think the R&R tablets are going to be retired unless I'm doing a project where I don't have enough tablets of a smaller size.  Some are getting worn out, but the real reason is that I do truly prefer the smaller tablets.  I probably have a few Linda Hendrickson tablets around that have extra holes for Andean pebble weave, but those are special purpose tablets that aren't going to be in general use.  Plus I bought them to support one of the wonderful people who publicize and teach the various techniques of tablet-weaving.

I'm not sure what I'll do next.  The Mammen 3/1 twill band is calling to me (Aisling's chart, probably).  Or maybe I need to do more cords or the double-face Durham seal tag patterns.  Or play with the little 3D-printed rigid heddle someone gave me.  Or do more inkle weaving or backstrap weaving.  Etc.  I'm also gonna be doing a bit more spinning and knitting as the weather cools.

I might try to make more stuff from the teal and gold my friend supplied.  We'll see.  Right now I'm irritated at it, so it's all gonna be in timeout for a while.

I taught another class recently.  I wasn't sure what to teach so I took my cue from the attendees.  It ended up being twisted cords and the 7-strand Fill the Gap braid.  They had fun and so did I.

Gotland-style sampler tablet-woven band -- attempt #1

The tablet twisting techniques in a pdf contributed by Rasmus Twisttmann Jørgensen has been intriguing me for a while.  I can't remember where I found it, but probably one of the Facebook tablet-weaving groups.  It's called "Textured tabletwoven bands - A Viking Age technique from Gotland".  He goes through some of the possible variations and offers a few samplers and other designs.  He says that the guide is based on work by Lise Rædder Knudsen and Ulla Gerner Lund, so I specifically want to mention them, too.

I looked in Collingwood since he tends to be pretty comprehensive, and he mentions tablet twisting around the horizontal axis of the tablets to be a technique that changes colors (for non-monochrome bands), reverses the turning direction, and adds two quarter-turns of twist.  Later in the book he talks about mixing quarter-turns and half-turns and other fun stuff, including for textural purposes, so I can see how tablet-twisting would give some interesting textural patterns.

So I warped up 13 cards (9 two-thread pattern cards and 2 four-thread edge cards per side) and started to play.

Alas, it's a failure.  The guide does say that a tightly twisted thread is necessary to show the texture properly, and I guess that #10 Aunt Lydia's crochet cotton does not qualify.

Harumph.  The textures are there but they are way too subtle to be worthwhile with this thread.

Oh, well.  At least I got to try the technique and see how it works.

Jørgensen's charts use thread direction rather than tablet orientation.  Also, his default turn direction is towards the weaver.  He doesn't really give a threading chart but it's not like one is really needed.  His pdf is very clear and his exercises and sample patterns are fun to work through.

I might try this again someday if/when I get some tightly twisted and probably thicker yarn.  But this attempt is done.  I'll pick out the weft and the warp will be repurposed for something else.

I learned from this sampler so it's not really a failure even if I'm a bit disappointed at it not being a rousing success.  That's two tablet-weaving projects in a row.  I guess that's what happens as I work through the list of things I want to try because I haven't done them before.  It's all good new knowledge, both things to do and things to not do, and also learning a technique or thing I haven't done before.

Snartemo II and a 7-strand fingerloop braid sampler

Here's a little one-color 7-strand braid I was playing around with.  I tried different things along the length (with a few repeats).  Although the photo is pretty crappy, I will list the variations I tried.  Most were unorthodox braids.  I was working V-fell, where the pinky finger is the operator finger and the index finger of the other hand holds the traveling loop.  I mostly picked up the traveling loop from above, which reversed the loop (and not from below, which reverses it with the opposite twist).

I did the square/round braid when I wanted to separate braids that I thought would be too similar.  I also did a bit of the braid where you don't go through any loops at all, kind of a pigtail braid.  Then there were the unorthodox skip-a-loop-or-two braids.  Skip the loop next to the index finger.  Only go through the loop next to the index finger.  Go through the two loops next to the index finger.  Go through the pinky and middle finger but skip the ring finger.  Etc.

It was interesting seeing the slight differences.  In general, the more loops one goes through, the wider/looser/flatter the braid.  Sometimes there's a small groove down the center of the braid, while other times the middle stands high.  The depth of the groove on the backside was sometimes a bit deeper/shallower, too.

None are bad braids.  The two Crickmore variations (triangular and D-shaped) are distinctive from each other and from the other ones I tried.  Ditto for the Guajiro braids, though i don't think I did the version where you skip the pinky and middle finger but go through the ring finger loop.

I also warped up a new tablet-woven band.  This is Snartemo II, though of course I'm working in cotton (the usual #10 crochet thread for the warp and finer crochet thread for the weft) rather than wool, as the original probably was.  I also decided to weave it in blue and white rather than red and yellow.

I'm using the chart/description from Maikki Karisto and Mervi Pasanen, because of course I am.  Their version has 17 tablets.  The center 12 tablets are the pattern tablets, and they are 2-threaded.  There are 3 edge tablets on the left and 2 on the right, all 4-threaded.  The 3 tablets of the left edge are woven with a tubular selvedge.  The pattern is pretty simple -- 26F/26B, not counting the edges which are always turned forward.

Here is a description of how they determined that this was the probable technique used for the band.  They worked through some other possibilities and showed that the other ones probably weren't the techniques used and that this version, in their opinion, most closely matched the archaeological specimen.

Anyway, it's fun, easy, fast, etc.  I'm enjoying it so far.  The pic is of one of the first repeats.

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.