Some idle thoughts

No tablet weaving is currently happening, alas.  My tablet weaving space is not currently available.  I've been doing other things but not tablet weaving.

I am thinking about a Next Project, though.  I'm thinking it's going to be the practice band for the tie-down technique, #50 in Tablet Woven Treasures.  Not because I specifically want practice, but because I rather like the motif.  Mervi Pasanen posted a pic of it done in different colors and that sent me looking...

Here's an instagram pic of it:  https://www.instagram.com/p/DMUzit3t7Kj

I do not plan on doing tubular selvedges at this point though it's possible I could change my mind.  I might do the wrapped/braided tassels, though.

I'm also considering some other potential tablet weaving projects.  Nothing I can remember offhand, but I do remember that they're all less fiddly techniques.  Eh, we'll see what happens once the tablet-weaving area is available again.

Speaking of Finnish Iron Age bands, Applesies and Fox Noses has been reprinted, yay!  It's available through a couple of different sources.

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I was going to be teaching some fingerloop braiding this weekend, but a conflict came up so that won't be happening.

I did do some impromptu teaching/demos a few weeks ago.  I showed/taught the 2-loop loop-exchange braid, the 4-loop loop exchange braid (in two colors, for a spiral), and then the 4-loop sinnet (the Skjoldehamn 4-loop braid), also in a two-color spiral.

Although I haven't done much other braiding recently, I was having fun going through some online museum archives and spotting the braids, whether or not I could get enough resolution to see what was going on or not.

One of them is the International Dunhuang Programme.  Here are a couple of links to braids in the collection, including a couple of slings!

https://idp.bl.uk/collection/D244E5464D954BE2855CEDF81EF4077D/

https://idp.bl.uk/collection/EE55C581E46942499DD8DAB5455B588A/

https://idp.bl.uk/collection/1B110B210B104CBC9AAE6E407CE0A7A2/

https://idp.bl.uk/collection/B7289C7590C441ABAA857511168C12A9/

https://idp.bl.uk/collection/48FF9807471C4CD896A5796DB6694AA9/ is a cute little purse that does have some cordage.  I can't quite tell from the photo if it's a twisted cord or a small braid, though my first impression is twisted cord.

The collection has some cool shoes and sandals, too, made from cordage and weaving/interlacing techniques.  There are a bunch of "strings" in the collection as well, most of which appear to be simple bast-fiber cordage.

Ack, there was some other site I'd been wandering through recently with either bands or braids or both, but it's slipped my mind for the moment.  What a reminder to me to keep good notes, perhaps even in this here blog!

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For some reason, I recently watched a few Youtube videos on World War I archaeology, which included a project where the bones of unknown soldiers were recovered.  What was interesting to me (in addition to everything else in the videos) is how badly preserved any textiles are.  It's only been a century (less than a century when some of the digs happened) and not much is left, and what is left is usually fragmentary and filthy.  That gives me a bit of perspective on the much older sites where textiles or textile fragments have been preserved, both the ones where anything left is in bad shape and ones where the preservation is excellent (such as the Dunhuang textiles in the above paragraph).  It also gives me a bit of perspective on the effectiveness of Our Microscopic Friends and how efficiently and effectively they go about their recycling work, and ditto for natural chemical processes.

Leather tended to be better preserved than cloth, or rather, boots often at least partially survived their long decades underground.  Some metal was preserved with a lot being very corroded.  No soft body tissues seemed to be present but bones were still in pretty good shape, some showing terrible injuries that no doubt contributed to the deaths of the people whose bones they were.

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I don't remember if there was anything else I wanted to write down.  I can always add to this post later.  Or write another.

Rib weave tablet woven band from Maksu, Humikkala (a 2-hole pattern from Tablet-Woven Treasures)

This one has appealed to me for a while.  I'm not sure why I decided to do it now, but that's fine.  It was a pretty straightforward project.

The band is in Tablet Woven Treasures by Maikki Karisto and Mervi Pasanen.  It's on p.131, 15. Maksu, Humikkala (KM 8656:H30:1).  They call it a rib-weave pattern.  It's a two-threaded pattern with all the threads in holes A and C, not offset like a lot of other 2-hole patterns.  There are 7 pattern tablets.  Each side has 3 four-threaded edge tablets which are tubular-woven.  (In other words, both sides have tubular edges and all 3 edge cards on each side are part of the tubular edge.)  That makes 13 tablets total, 6 edge and 7 pattern tablets.

It's pretty adorable!  Unblocked, it's about 7/16" wide and about 65" long.

A warp thread snapped in the middle, yikes!  I have no idea whether to blame the cats, the thread quality, or happenstance.  I'm glad I already have experience with this, and indeed, it was not an issue to attach a new warp thread and keep going.  There's one spot where apparently I forgot to do the tubular edge on one of the sides.  I tried to fix that, too, a bit less successfully.  It looks fine on the top but is slightly visible on the bottom if one knows it's there and looks at the right spot.  Or if one runs fingers along the band -- the repair spot feels a bit different, but that's also true of the unrepaired area before I tried to fix it.

The width varies slightly.  I really wanted the red on the edge tablet to show.  But I had to balance that against pulling the weft tight enough for the pattern to look right.  I'm a trifle disappointed that the red edge is not too visible most of the time.  Oh, well, it can be a secret, I guess.  Or I can use this as a strap since both sides of the band are very cute.  Or attach it at the very edge of something and/or attach it loosely so the red can be glimpsed.

I'm glad I did this band, but I think I'm tired of tubular edges for a while.

I have no idea what I'll do next.  Something, I'm sure!

Brocade planning and other useless ruminations

Next up is brocade.  It's time!  And my tablet-weaving area is open, no other commitments, no need to pack things away for a while, etc., for the first time in months.  OK, the cute band I just finished was a bit of a spontaneous distraction, but that doesn't count.  I seem to have been writing about brocade for most of 2025; time to actually do something about it.

First up will be a sampler.

I think I'll use the usual big-box-store #10 crochet cotton for the warp, as usual.  Weft will be one of the leftover doily cotton threads, with no real attempt made to match the weft color.

Supplementary/brocade weft will be something thicker, of course.  I think I'll mostly use the dull-gold cotton perle #3 that I used for the Falun-pattern gift band a while back.  But I might also use some of the oddball/synthetic knitting stash threads, too.  Or whatever else I find.

I think I'll warp up 13 tablets in alternating S Z orientation.  That should give me enough tablets for some of the early Saxon bands, a few Birka bands, some of the Coptic bands (in Aisling's book), motifs from Wollny's Roslein und Wecklein transcription, plus a few others, depending on how much space I have and what I feel like trying.  I might try the motifs in both positive and negative versions to see what they look like.  I might try a few isolated motifs or a bit of soumak.  I might try a few different colors and/or different brocade-weft materials.  Or I might not.  I'll see if there's a difference for me between carrying the brocade weft to the same place on the band vs only where the motif is.  Etc.

There's a lot to learn.  The basics seem very straightforward.  But there will be lessons in tension and also in brocade vs background and base-weft thread thicknesses.  I expect the first sampler band to be very sampler-ish.

And as always, there's a chance I'll get distracted by something else and brocade will end up getting delayed yet again.

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Because I'm dithering and blithering, I decided to list most of the major tablet-weaving techniques I know about, whether I've tried them, what I think, what future plans are, or whatever else I felt like writing about them.

I'll start with the techniques in Claudia Wollny's Tablets at Work (though I might miss a few minor ones she discusses within other chapters).

Threaded in patterns -- check!  These are popular with modern tablet-weaving designers.  There are a lot of fun things that can be done with threaded-in patterns and all-pack forward/reverse turning.  I still do a lot of bands that fall under this category.

Double face -- check, though I want to explore more soon.  In particular, I haven't done much yet with the blocky/repp version where the tablets are all in the same orientation as opposed to alternating orientation.  Also, I'm pretty sure Wollny does 2F2B double-face for both SZ and all-Z double-face, and I'm curious about the "rotate 180 to change colors" version that's in Shelagh's pdf on double-face repp effect.

Double cloth -- this is on my to-do list.  It's high up there, but I keep doing other things instead.  Maybe this will be after brocade.  It looks pretty straightforward but I'm sure there are nuances that will be learning opportunities when I get there.

3/1 twill -- check, though I'm only at the beginning of exploring this method.  I haven't explored all of the variations that Wollny discusses in Tablets at Work and her Twill 1+1 book.  I really like this technique and want to do a lot more than I've done so far.  I want to learn better how to chart my own patterns (I can do some, but maintaining the twill line and avoiding long floats are still things I'm working on.)  I also like the Collingwood method for doing one-color twill as a two-pack method (as opposed to handling each tablet) and need to explore color changes and other motif developments with this style of card manipulation.

Diagonals -- check!  This is such a big category of modern patterns.  Also, there are a couple of variations I've tried though not everyone makes a distinction between them.  The Egyptian-diagonals modern method usually changes cards in groups of two tablets and two turns.  Finnish diagonals are more carefree.

Kivrim -- check!  These are fun and also popular with modern tablet-weaving designers.

Sulawesi -- check!  I really like doing Sulawesi.  I definitely want to make more bands, both with traditional and modern and self-designed motifs.  I need to learn the tubular strap method that often accompanies bands that are woven by the original/traditional weavers.

Floatwork -- check!  I've done very little so far, though.

3-hole -- check!  I want to do more of this.  I like how one can combine the textures of 3-hole with a bit of floatwork.  I also like how there are historic bands that apparently combine this with brocade -- that too is on my eventual to-do list.

2-hole -- check!  I love doing 2-hole designs.  This might be my current favorite technique.  I've also done 2-hole where the holes are next to each other and those are interesting, too.

Pebble weave -- this is on my to-do list, but I haven't done it yet.

Cablework -- check, though only a teeny bit to make sure I understood.  Heck, I do cable knitting; this is pretty much the same thing.  I did see some nice-looking cablework bands not too long ago, which has piqued my interest a bit.

Structure weave -- check!  I don't think Wollny talks about the Gotland bands, which might be made through flipping tablets around a horizontal instead of a vertical axis.  I've tried the Gotland method as well as regular monochromatic textural weaving.

Relief structure -- I haven't tried this yet.

Brocade -- as I wrote at the top of this post, this is almost certainly up next.

There are plenty of other techniques that aren't covered by Tablets at Work.

Pack-idling -- check!  I like this method.  Collingwood talks about a lot of variations, but even just the style used for Cambridge Diamonds and Felixstowe is perfectly nice.

Cordage/tubular bands -- check!  I've only really done 4-threaded cordage so far.  The 2-hole methods are on my to-do list.

Tubular edges -- check!  (these are in the Finnish bands discussed in Tablet Woven Treasures)

Double-turns -- check!  (also from the Finnish bands)

Tie-downs -- check!  (from several places, but probably best known from Tablet Woven Treasures)

Laceby -- I haven't done this yet.  Shelagh discusses the method on her website.

Soumak -- I haven't done this yet.  Since this sort of overlaps with brocade, maybe I'll do a little bit in my brocade sampler.

Tablet weaving around a core thread -- I haven't done this yet.

Tablets with a different number of holes (3, 6, etc.) -- I haven't done this yet.

Adding or removing tablets during weaving -- I haven't done this yet (though I understand the basics)

Turning or bending the band during weaving -- ditto.

Adding extra or ornamental warp or weft threads (such as making fringe or attaching to a loom-warp) -- I haven't done this yet.

I'm sure there are more things casually mentioned in Collingwood that are entirely new categories of techniques, but which at my current knowledge completely zip over my head.

I'm also pretty sure there are things I've either done or that I'm aware of that aren't on this list.

So far, I've liked all the techniques I've tried.

Finished: Band 41 from Tablet Woven Treasures

It is done!

You can see the waviness in this pic (given the way the light was, it highlighted this particular aspect of the band) -- that's pretty typical for patterns made using the diagonals technique.  It'll block out, especially if I iron the band.  I kind of like the three-dimensionality, actually.  Most of the time it's not that noticeable unless the light hits it just right.

Here's another view:

The band turned out well.  Occasionally the edges do pull in more than I had planned.  It required a bit of care to keep the width consistent while doing the tubular edges.  I eventually started using a chip clip just below the weaving zone to keep the band flat, and that helped keep it from curling inward.

I had thought I'd run out of weft partway through and need to switch, but I finished with about 6-8" to spare.  OK, maybe I could have eked out one last pattern repeat, but even the final one I did was kind of awkward.

The finished band is about 5/8" wide, give or take a bit (15mm) and about 65" long (164cm). I like the motif.  Even with a lot of individual tablet manipulation, it was fairly quick and straightforward to weave.

There are 52 pattern repeats of 16 rows each, 11 tablets (7 pattern tablets and 2 edge tablets per side), diagonals technique with tubular edges (both sides) and half turns, and including a few areas where 3/1 twill and double-face techniques are used to maintain the background colors.

Dunno what band will be next.  So many wonderful possibilities....  Plus there's the fingerlooping and other things on my want-to-do list.

Yet More about the Braid on the Knitted Sion Bag 269

I did a few more unorthodox A-fell 6-loop fingerloop braids where only the loop next to the traveling finger is gone through on the way to pick up the loop on the other hand, trying to understand the difference between loops taken reversed vs unreversed.  First I did 1 bicolor loop (yellow and blue) with the other 5 loops blue, to see the path that each half of the loop takes.  Then I did 2 bicolor loops (all with different colors) and 4 blue loops to double-check.  Each braid started with reversed loops and then went to unreversed.  For the first, I went back and forth, but I think I just did half and half for the second.  I also dropped loops at random intervals and sometimes moved them around, so don't pay too much attention to the exact order in which the loops occur.

Conclusions:

The general appearance of each is pretty similar.  They both have a D-shaped upper part with two Vs and an interlaced lower part.  I can't tell if one is flatter than the other.  Maybe?  But it also might be how I tightened the braid.  There were easy but slightly different ways to tighten the braid depending on how I picked the loop.  If that makes sense.  This is something I should maybe investigate with different yarn/thread, trying to stay consistent, to see if I can come to a more confident conclusion, and also to experiment with how the braid tensioning seems to affect it.

They are both quick and rhythmic to make.

There is a slight difference in the path of the strands which can be seen in the Vs.  The V is on one side of the braid and then the other (as it slowly travels around the hand).  If the left leg is Color A and the right is Color B, then it will still have the left leg as Color A and the right as Color B on the other side of the braid if the loops are taken reversed.  If the loops are taken unreversed, then one side will have the left leg as Color A and the right leg as Color B, and the other side will be symmetric, with the left leg as Color B and the right leg as Color A.

The above pic is a section where the loops were taken reversed -- you can see the yellow is on the same side of the V as the strand travels from one side of the braid to the other.

For this second pic, the loops were taken unreversed -- you can see that the yellow is symmetric (i.e. opposite) on the other side of the braid.

So....  if one can pick out an individual strand of yarn on the original Sion braid and follow its path, one can determine which method was used.  The spinning is irregular enough that it might be possible.  I'm a dimwit, though, and am easily confused when I try to follow individual strands.

Obviously the above info is useful when creating interesting color patterns in unorthodox braids using the same general pattern.  One can pick loops reversed or not in order to change things up.

Also, for the person who asked me about them, I think it will be sufficient to do the braid using either reversed or unreversed loops, at least until we can decipher the path of the braiding elements in the original.

I'll check again with the photos a few times to see if enlightenment will occur at some point.

The general braiding method for an A-fell 6-loop unorthodox fingerlooped braid in the manner of the 14th century Sion Purse 269:

Put loops on the middle, ring, and pinky fingers of each hand.

Hand 1  (I started with my right hand, but it probably doesn't matter if you start with your left):  Put your index finger through the middle finger loop and pick up the pinky finger loop on the other hand.  It's your call whether to take it unreversed or reversed.

Hand 2 (the left hand assuming you started with the right):  Do the same moves with the other hand.

Transfer the loops down (i.e. pinky picks up the ring finger loop, ring finger picks up the middle finger loop, and the middle finger picks up the index finger loops.  On both hands, of course.) to the initial set up and repeat.

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So, much ado about nothing, and probably taking the slow-boat route to understanding compared to more experienced braiders.  It keeps me off the streets, I guess.  Dunno how many more experiments and posts there will be before I get distracted by the next shiny object.

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My tablet weaving is still going well.  It's reasonably fun to weave and I like the motif.  I like how the band looks in the colors I'm using, even if it's not quite as contrast-y and striking as the colors in the book.  I'll probably choose different colors next time I make it, just for funsies.

I've consciously tried to loosen up my tension to keep the band flat and the edges roughly symmetric.  I'm also also use a chip clip across the pattern repeat below where I'm weaving to help keep it flat.  I do think that the interaction of tablet orientation and thread plying direction (and direction in which the weft goes) is mostly responsible for what I'm experiencing with the one edge rolling in a way that is different from what the other edge is doing.  I might only do one tubular edge next time.  Having only one tubular edge seems to be relatively common, and for this band, only one of the edges was preserved and no one knows if the other edge was tubular as well.

Also, as is common with bands made using the diagonals technique, it's gonna need some blocking and ironing if I want it to lie flat.  I kind of like the three-dimensionality of it.

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I'm having fun with the braiding, too.  Relic purses, the Skjoldehamn braids, Ingrid Crickmore's fun explorations, L-M BRIC, paracord stuff,....  So much fun.

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Edited to add (because it's not worth another post)...

I think the circled area is one strand in this photo of the drawstring.  There's that one light-colored ply in the yellow strand which makes it distinctive. (Yeah, I know it's two strands of yarn.  But I'm using "strand" in the sense of "one side of the fingerloop".)  Maybe, because I can't 100% conclude that the other strand of the braid is different -- maybe the entire loop has that lighter ply.  Or maybe it's just this one short stretch.

But, if this is the same strand of yarn, and if it is different from the other strand, then the two Vs are symmetric, and thus the loops were taken unreversed.

Band 41 from Tablet Woven Treasures (from Kaukola, Kekomäki (KM 2489: parts 67-68, 107 (H1))

It's been a while since I've done a Karisto/Pasanen band.  I was flipping through Tablet Woven Treasures for inspiration and decided to do Band 41, which was the top edge of a skirt from Kaukola, Kekomäki (p.190-191).  This is a cute little 4-threaded band that uses the diagonals technique with half-turns (along with a little bit of 3/1 twill and double-face sensibilities) and has tubular edges.  I like the motif.

The book shows the band in blue, yellow, and red.  My cheap cotton stash is starting to get low, so I ended up choosing different colors that I had a bigger supply of.  Mine is aqua/teal, sage green, and burgundy red.  It's pretty reasonable, I think.  (The pic's colors are not quite right, but close enough.)  The weft is random leftovers, as usual.  Since this isn't necessarily going to be a gift, and since both sides have tubular edges, I'm not going to worry about possibly needing to change my weft thread partway through the band.

There are 11 tablets, 7 for the pattern and 2 on each side for the tubular edges.  One thing I'm noticing is that one side curls under a lot more than the other.  Hmmm.  Dunno if it's my technique and tension, or if it's something about how the tablet orientation interacts with the yarn twist and the path of the weft.  I'll try to loosen up a bit to see if it helps.  If it is tension, I'm not sure which direction is tighter than it should be.

It's going pretty quickly.  There's nothing very difficult about it, but I do have to pay attention.  I like it so far.

Mostly unrelated:  There's a book that's been around for a while on Anatolian tablet weaving  (Tablet Weaving from Anatolia and the Ottoman Court).  Sarah Goslee's review (https://www.archaeologicaltextiles.net/pages/anatoliaTW.html) mentions kivrim aka ram's horn style motifs on some of the bands, and that these motifs weren't found on bands (in the book's photo section) that were pre-17th century.  So there's an approximate date for when kivrim patterns were known to exist.  They go back to at least the 17th century in that part of the world.  So there.

Zigzags with a Red Stripe

 I guess I'm into zigzags this month....

My weaving area is available again.  I wanted something quick.  Some of the easy four-threaded forward-and-back patterns in Tablet Woven Treasures have been calling to me.

So that's what I made.

This is the 27. Kaukola, Kekomäki band.  I liked the red, yellow, and blue of the pattern in the book, so that's what I chose to use, too.  Well, my colors are the nearest equivalent in my cotton stash, not natural-dyed wool, but other than that...

It was easy and I like the results.  I think this would look good in other color combinations, too.  Maybe green instead of red?  And with purple diagonals on a white background?  Also, I'm not sure the tubular selvedges add that much to the design.  Maybe next time I'll drop the edge tablets to two each and skip the tubular part.

I warped up about 3 yards, and ended up with about 85" (207cm) plus fringes and what-not before blocking.  The width is roughly 12mm (with a few spots being closer to 11 or 13 mm).  The weft was some fine crochet cotton that happened to be on my shuttle.  It ran out about 2-3 repeats before the end of the band and then I finished with something comparable though not exactly identical.  I'm glad it's all used up now since it likes to kink up and twist back on itself, sometimes on the edges or underside of the band without me noticing, sigh.

I'm not sure what's next.  I'm thinking about doing another even simpler threaded-in pattern that is based on another archaeologic find.  Also, someone asked me if I'd done any of the Hallstatt patterns.  No, not yet.  Everyone weaves them, and although they're adorable, there are other patterns that I find more alluring.  I hadn't remembered that one of them is now thought to be a two-hole pattern.  Well.  It's a lot cuter as a two-hole design!  Maybe I need to weave that one, quite possibly in the same colors as I used for this pattern.  The original has a greenish and a brownish section.  The green could be replaced by blue, and the brown by red.  The light-colored motifs could be white or, more probably, yellow.  Maikki Karisto and Mervi Pasanen have a good chart I can work from, and so does Sylvia.  I think Elewys does, too.  Or I could re-chart it myself.

And of course it's always fun to continue making two-hole brick-patterned designs.  So I can't say for sure what the next few bands will be.

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.

Explorations in monochrome tablet weaving

I have been continuing to work with the wool yarn this week, exploring some new patterns.

First, I decided to play with structural stuff, where the tablet orientation makes the pattern.  I considered the plain part of the belt of Philip of Swabia -- it's a monochrome checkerboard pattern, more or less.  Here is one version of that texture pattern.  Here is another.

I finally decided that the wool is too heathery to really show the details of the checkerboard.  However, this textural pattern, consisting of vertical stripes rather than checkboards, seemed like it might fit my yarn better.

I used 15 tablets, alternating threaded S and Z (or \ and /), 3 per orientation before switching to the other orientation.  All turns were forward, as I usually do, with no reversals.

Interestingly, and not surprisingly, the yarn was a bit stickier than with the two-hole patterns.  Nothing was felting or anything.  But the threads weren't always thrilled to slide smoothly past each other when opening the shed.  I had to help it along a little bit.

The pattern is subtle in this yarn but I still like it a lot.  This band is quite wide, 1.25-1.5", compared to the two-hole bands I've been doing.  It's also a bit shorter -- there was a bit more take-up, quite possibly because there are four threads per tablet.  I think this pattern would look really nice in a flat, non-heathery color, in a shinier yarn, maybe more tightly twisted.  So it was good for me to play with it and add this pattern concept to my idea bank for when I just want to crank out something simple.

Next up, I wanted to play around more with the idea of two adjacent empty holes per tablet, in the manner of Candace Crockett's Draft 14.  Peter Collingwood discusses this concept briefly in The Techniques of Tablet Weaving, on p.93-94 in my edition.  I charted up a simple chevron.

I was worried that the pattern wouldn't show up well in the heathery gray, so I tried it in some red vintage-store crochet cotton.  I like how it turned out, but I decided it was a bit too subtle for the heathery gray.  Also, the two sides are slightly different, in a more noticeable way than I wanted for the gray yarn.  I used the same red for weft as for warp, and I wonder what it would have looked like with a contrast color for the weft.  Another variation that mildly interests me is doing diagonal lines instead of chevrons -- doing a strip/stripe of the line going one way, alternating with strips/stripes of the line going the other way, with maybe a couple of tablets with 4 threads in between the stripes.  Hmm, someday.

Another interesting comment I found online about these patterns with two empty holes adjacent rather than diagonally opposite, from Phiala's venerable Stringpage site, in the section on two-hole tablet-weaving: "If the tablet is threaded through two adjacent holes, all possible sheds can be produced (both up, both down, one up and one down), making it possible to weave any structure possible with a four-harness loom!"

I'm going to have to think about that for a bit.  In addition, of course, there is Andean Pebble weaving done with tablets.  That uses two colors, but they are adjacent rather than diagonally opposite.  Linda Hendrickson has published some English-language stuff on this, Claudia Wollny discusses it in her book Tablets at Work, and I know there are other resources, in English and other languages, even though I'm not gonna list them all here right now.

Anyway!

Back to the monochrome brick patterns of Karisto and Pasanen!  This time I returned to Tablet Woven Treasures and chose the charming pattern on p.109.  I added a tablet to the left edge to make it symmetric.  Thus it uses 10 tablets.  The two tablets on each edge are threaded with four threads, and the six pattern tablets have two threads each.  The tablet slants alternate \ and /.  For the pattern tablets, the \ tablets are threaded in AC and the / tablets in BD.  The weft is the same as the warp.

I really like this one a lot!  The band turned out to be about 3/4" wide and about 62" long unblocked.  I will definitely make this one again.  As with the other brick patterns I've done, it could be expanded with more two-hole brick-pattern tablets, or by adding stripes and what-not (possibly in different colors) for the edges.

What did I learn?

Uhh....  I still like weaving with wool and no longer fear tablet-weaving with it.  I liked all of these new-to-me patterns and should do them again.  I'd like to explore more of the two-adjacent-hole patterns.  Doesn't the true pebble-weave structure done with tablet weaving use this technique, though of course that concentrates on the color patterns rather than subtle monochromatic structures.  Hmmm.

Cats are not particularly useful weaving assistants.  As always.  But they do like to keep an eye on what I'm doing even when they're not actively helping. I hope that the recipients (a few of these will be gifts) don't mind a bit of cat fur mixed into their bands.

It was slightly difficult to maintain even tension for a few of the bands.  I need to think about that for a bit.  Is it because I didn't put even weight on each card?  Is it because of the slight effort needed in making a shed?  Is it because some cards were \ and some /, some two-hole and some four-hole, and thus there was different take-up when combined with the ply of the yarn?  If so, would weighting individual tablets rather than the entire bundle make that better, worse, or no change?  Will most of it go away with blocking/steaming/ironing/weighting/using?

What's next?  I'm not sure!  I might re-do the wool bands using cotton.  Or I might resume multi-color tablet-weaving or even knock out a few inkle bands.  I'm still enamored with two-hole patterns, so that seems most likely.  But you never know.  Some braids are still calling my name -- that Whitehorse Hill cist burial braid (which seems to be a 13-strand plait which can be done freehand or using fingerlooping) and a 6-strand braid from the Hedeby apron, which has an online site showing it done freehand, but I suspect fingerlooping might have been involved in the original.

More two-hole brick-patterned belts/bands -- in wool!

 OK, I've now tablet-woven using wool.  It was nowhere near as dire as I'd been warned.  Whew!  I used wool yarn that was on cones, intended for weaving.  I believe that it is less elastic than knitting yarn and also probably has a coating/sizing on it to help it flow better.  Whatever the reason was, I had no trouble at all.  I think doing a two-hole band might have helped -- I noticed a bit more stickiness with the band where the threaded vs non-threaded holes were aligned compared to the band where the threaded vs non-threaded holes were diagonally opposite.  (In other words, more stickiness for the band where the threaded holes were all AC and empty all BD, as opposed to the band where some were AC and some were BD.

While weaving, the tension flattened out the pattern.  It showed up better once tension was released.  After the bands were finished, I gave them a long soak and then hung them to dry.  They shortened up and fluffed up a bit more.

The patterns are subtle but I like them.  I like weaving with wool, too.

The white (or natural) band (shown above) is done with some kind of old tapestry wool I found lurking in my stash, from who knows where.  I've been slowly using it for natural dyeing experiments.  It's a cabled construction -- three plies of yarn, with each ply being a two-ply strand.  The pattern is the one from Tablet-Woven Treasures, p.113, from an archeologic find that was used as a belt for a carrying a knife sheath.  I do like that pattern.

The gray wool is Harrisville Designs Highland in Oatmeal, a heathery light gray.  I did the same belt pattern from Tablet-Woven Treasures (see photo above).  Then I did another Medieval belt pattern, the same one I had done in tan acrylic a while back (see photo below).  I like this pattern a lot, too.  The wool doesn't show the ribbed pattern as clearly as the acrylic, but it's still very nice.  I haven't had a chance to soak it yet so maybe that'll help.

I wonder if I should try using less tension to see if I can do a tighter beat, and if that makes a major difference in what the finished belt/band will look like.  As it was, I didn't use a huge amount of weight, but it did stretch out the yarn a bit while I was weaving.

All of the belts are roughly 5 feet long (they were about 5.5 feet when straight off the loom -- they shrunk after soaking) and about 3/4" to 1" wide.  The pattern from Tablet-Woven Treasures uses 10 tablets, and the one from the Facebook page uses 12.

I'm glad that wool turned out to be reasonable to weave with.

I have my eye on a 12-strand braid pattern to make from this wool.  Someone showed me a video, though it's a pretty straightforward pattern.  The braid is from an armband, made from cattle hair and studded with little tin ornaments, from the Whitehorse Hill cist burial.  Sally Pointer used her locally-gathered bast-fiber cordage to braid a belt.  I'm just going to use wool.  It's interesting that the strands and braid have a lot of two-over and two-under moves -- it makes me thing of things like finger-looping and finger-weaving, and, I suppose, some kinds of basketry.  I do not plan to add tin ornaments even though they do look very charming on the original armband.

There are other interesting braided belts out there.  I also have my eye on the 12-strand (also with double strands, as with the Whitehorse Hill braid) Skjoldehamn belt.

For tablet-weaving, I'm still entirely enamored with two-hole tablet weaving.  There are so many possibilities that I've actually had to start a list.  I'm not sure which one I'll do next.  At some point, I do want to explore another technique.  But not just yet.

More fun with 2-hole brick-patterned bands

 This one was a ton of fun to make and I very much like the results.

The chart is from Lautanauhat by Maikki Karisto, p.101, band #3.  I don't read Finnish so I have no idea what the text says about the band.  I looked at the pictures and followed the chart.

This is very similar to one of the brick-patterned bands in Tablet-Woven Treasures (by Maikki Karisto and Mervi Pasanen), except that it doesn't have tubular edges.  It's also similar to (or the same as) as some of the bands that have showed up in their Facebok page.

It's a brick-patterned band -- two threads per card for the pattern cards, with alternating AC and BD orientations in a pattern, alternating tablet set, and a couple of edge tablets.  I can see from the book photo that they do not appear to be tubular selvedges.

I used thrift-store vintage #10-ish crochet cotton.  Knit-Cro-Sheen, Aunt Lydia's, etc., are all a bit thicker than #10 Cebelia, so it's probably closer to #7 or #8, not that it matters.  The colors are purple and white.  I used leftover #30 DMC Cebelia white or off-white crochet cotton for the weft.

I didn't bother to do reversals or anything.  I just wove until the twist was too tight, which was around the time I needed to advance the warp anyway.  I worked out the twist as part of advancing the warp.

It took a little while to get used to not doing tubular selvedges since I've done them on the past few bands.

Fun fun fun.  And I really like how it looks, with the little blips of purple on a brick-textured white ground.  I will make more of these in various colors.

What's next?  Probably more two-hole patterns, whether another one of these or something else.  At some point I will want to explore another technique.  But for now, I am entranced by these two-hole techniques, both the brick patterned bands and the Latvian/Estonian/etc.-style bands.

Yet Another Brick-Patterned Band (2-hole tablet-weaving)

 The original was the starting band on the hem of an apron.  It was done in thin wool and had a tubular selvedge on one side.

This one has tubular selvedges on both sides, because why not?  It's in acrylic, yet again.  I'm pretty sure it's Red Heart this time, in a golden yellow color.

The pattern is small but kind of adorable.  It's band 1, p.103, from Tablet Woven Treasures by  Maikki Karisto and Mervi Pasanen, with two more tablets added to the right side to have tubular selvedges on both sides of the band.

This is my first time doing tubular selvedges.  Not that they are difficult or anything, but I simply haven't felt like doing a pattern that called for them yet.  I have to pull the weft snug enough to make sure the edges roll properly.  It's not perfect when the band is under tension.  But after the tension is off and the belt relaxes a bit, it looks fine.

This will make a good strap for something.  The edges are sturdy and the center is thin.  It's very three-dimensional.  It would make a perfectly reasonable belt, too.

If I were to do this again in the future, I might do 2-tablet tubular selvedges instead of 3-tablet.  And/or I might use more pattern cards for the center.  And/or maybe just go back to one tubular selvedge, or none.

What did I learn?

Tubular selvedges, I guess!  I hadn't done them before.  They're very similar to attached I-cord from knitting, so I wasn't particularly intimidated.  Indeed, they are very straightforward to do.  I don't have a preference between this and non-tubular selvedges.

I'm not sure what will be next.  I want to do another colorful Latvian-style 2-hole band.  But maybe I'll do something simple for a quick break.  Or maybe I'll succumb to another brick pattern.

Another Belt Pattern (2-hole)

Here's another belt from the Lautanauhat Facebook page (the people who did Applesies and Fox Noses and Tablet Woven Treasures), this one from a description in a post from  August 16, 2016.  Here is the link to the photo plus written description.  The pattern is described as a "medieval tablet woven band in wool."  It is a monochrome two-hole (or two-thread) pattern that is similar to the brick patterned belt I posted about roughly a week ago.

As usual, I substituted acrylic for wool for this first attempt.  It worked, but undoubtedly wool would have been better.  I really must start using wool instead of acrylic for tablet weaving.  I'll need to learn how to handle wool since everyone warns me that it's sticky, which I assume is a polite term about the threads trying to felt to each other from all the twisting.

The acrylic was rather stretchy.  My guess is that it's not Red Heart, which tends to be scratchier but less elastic.  Since I wove under tension, it'll be interesting to see if/how the band changes as it gets a chance to relax and I block it.  (Well, wet block it.  I know that synthetics don't truly change much unless one uses an iron to change their texture.)  I used the same acrylic for both warp and weft.

The band is pretty cute.  I do not like the reversals much.  They're too obvious and messy.  So...  for the next time I make this, I'll probably work out the twist and keep going forward.  If I flip the cards to reverse again, I'll try to space them out regularly and then put something on the belt in that area to hide or distract from the reversal, to make it seem intentional rather than messy.

I think it would be fun to use two different colors for this pattern to make another series of horizontally-striped bands, this time in 2-hole tablet weaving rather than simple inkle weaving.

I take rather terrible photos, alas.  The weaving is actually consistent (horizontally and vertically) except for the little bloops at the reversals.  Any weirdness is due to a quick photo taken with the band not being carefully flattened and posed and my shadow (of course) in the photo.  That's true for most of the photos I take, alas.

What did I learn?

I like two-hole patterns.  I like these simple belt patterns.  I like brick patterns (which are two-hole patterns that I am using to make belts).  I like a lot of these little throwaway patterns in the Lautanauhat Facebook page (in addition to their fabulous gift patterns, of course).  There are several more of them, often simple little belts and cords and the like that have only a brief written description to go along with the photo or video.  I'm happy that I can work with the description and don't necessarily need a charted pattern.

I don't like flipping tablets.  I don't like reversals that are done merely for the purpose of removing and reversing built-up twist.  I am fine with reversals for other purposes, of course, including historical accuracy as well as for pattern-development purposes.

I used my regular cards (from Robin & Russ Handweavers, so you know they're old/vintage!) since I didn't have enough of the little ones.  They work fine, of course.  I kind of prefer the little ones so I'll have to see if I can find a source for more.

The cats slept through most of this band so weren't available to act as weaving assistants.

What's next?  More two-hole and/or more belt patterns, possibly.  Or maybe something simpler.  We'll see.  I'm eyeing some straightforward diagonal-ish patterns, but also thinking that one of those threads can clearly be removed, with a contrasting color used for the weft to highlight the missed hole.  As usual, we'll see.

Small Estonian Style Band (2-hole)

I have been admiring this little pattern for a long time.  So finally I decided it was time to do it -- a 2-hole (or 2-thread) pattern in the style of those narrow Estonian/Latvian/etc. bands.  This one has 6 pattern cards, and 2 edge cards on each side.

The draft is from the Lautanauhat/Tablet Weaving Facebook page.  They posted this pattern in March, 2016.  I think this is the link, though I don't know what will happen for those who avoid Facebook.  I don't see it posted elsewhere, though I haven't looked too hard yet.  They call it a "small Estonian style pattern."

Mine isn't nearly as cute or well-done as theirs, but that's OK.  I used leftover crochet cotton, probably #10 or so.  The weft is also white, probably #30 crochet cotton.  I gambled on the purple being dark enough to show up well against the white, but in reality, the white is more obvious.  I still prefer the looks of the purple side.  On the reverse side, the white looks a bit fuzzy, no doubt partially due to the white weft and probably also the whole reverse-side reverse-twist thing (is that a thing in this technique?).

This was a lot of fun to weave!  The first repeat was a little rough, but then the internal logic of the pattern became clear, and the rest was fairly straightforward.  The ABCD labels on the tablets kept me where I needed to be and helped me get back on track when things got funny.

I wasn't able to beat it hard enough to make it as compact as the original pattern.  I tried dropping the weight a bit but it made little difference.  I did turn the edge tablets every time, and I've seen the warning that this will elongate the pattern.  Maybe next time I'll do the thing of only turning one edge at a time, except that I kind of like how compact and tightly twisted the edges look.  Maybe wool vs cotton plays a role, too?  Oh, well, I still like this a lot.

The band ended up being roughly 8-9 feet long and maybe 1/4 inch wide.  I did 8 full repeats and then 2/3 of the 9th repeat, to end at a good stopping point.

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Cats are not terribly useful weaving assistants, though the one lying on my neck was less disruptive than the one sitting on the warp and the one playing with the skewer that was holding my tablets.

My warping process went like this:

1. Cut lots of warp yarn, trying to keep it under control so it doesn't tangle.

2. Untangle yarn.  Thread tablets.

3. Drop tablets.  Untangle yarn.

4. Set up everything and do my test run (4 turns forward, using skewers, to double-check orientation and threading).

5. Realize that all the cards are threaded backwards, since I had threaded them as if the side away from me was the beginning, when of course it was the side closest to me.

6. Dither for a few minutes about possibly just flipping and re-arranging the cards.  Decide to re-thread each card.  (I am SOOOO glad I did that.)

7.  Re-tension the tablets.  Play around with weights as if I'm Goldilocks with the three bears.  (This continued for the first two to three pattern repeats, when I finally decided I was OK with what I had.)  Re-do the pattern/orientation testing.

8. Start weaving.

9. Realize after about an inch that I've made grievous errors and I can't easily figure out where I am in the chart.  Undo the weft and return to zero.  Or rather, to the skewers, since they make a nice horizontal surface to start the band against.

10. Start weaving, take two.

I used a bamboo skewer through one of the corner holes on the tablets after each turn so that they didn't rotate or flip or otherwise get frisky.  That proved to be both easy and very helpful.  The skewer went into the upper hole closest to me on the first turn of the 2-turn pair of turns, and the upper hole farthest from me on the second.  I think it really helped to ritualize as much as possible so I would be less likely to make mistakes if I lost concentration, or a cat batted around my row marker, or whatever.

Having labeled cards also proved to be helpful -- I could tell at a glance where I was in the pattern (within reason) and also if the cards were where they needed to be.  I can sort of tell by looking at the thread and the band, but it takes more effort than glancing at the printed letters.

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Here is one of their blog posts (from the Swan River Crafts blog) where they talk about this style of pattern and how to create them.

Eva Sandermann Olsen has a bunch of these little motifs in her pdf booklet Tablet Weaving, p.36-37 along with how to create them.  I think this is a link to the pdf file.

Recently a band from Iceland in this style was posted in various places with re-created charts, including this version from Silvia Aisling Ungerechts' website.  She has other 2-hole patterns on her site.  The various people who post on the various Facebook and other tablet weaving forums have contributed other charts and patterns.

Claudia Wollny's Tablets at Work has a section on 2-hole patterns, though the patterns she included in the book are more elaborate than this narrower Estonian/Latvian style of band.  She too has instructions on how to make your own patterns.

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I'm very glad I decided to try this pattern.  Now I feel comfortable weaving these types of patterns.  I'm also very tempted to start creating my own designs in addition to using motifs created by others.

So....   what's next?  More of these adorable little 2-hole bands?  More 2-hole brick patterns?  Double-face?  An easy threaded-in pattern with minimal individual-card manipulation?  Back to the inkle or tape loom, or make a bunch of braids?  We'll see.

Brick-patterned belt (2-hole tablet-weaving)

Tablet-woven brick patterns have intrigued me for a while.  I like their texture.  There are some in Lautanauhat by Maikki Karisto, and more in Tablet Woven Treasures by Maikki Karisto and Mervi Pasanen.

I've also been eyeing the cute little 2-hole patterns with colorful designs that are all over the 'net.

Well!  Let's do it!  (We'll ignore the siren song of Double Face for a little while longer.  And 3/1 twill.  And Sulawesi.  And everything else.  Eventually.  Soon.  Really.)

So this is my first band doing a 2-hole technique.  It gives me a good introduction to working with 2 yarns/threads per tablet.  It's not that working with 2 threads per tablet is inherently difficult, but I often see the warning that tablet management can be tricky because the tablets want to turn partway rather than being well-behaved.

The brick pattern I chose is pattern 6, p.113, from Tablet Woven Treasures.  It looks like a good first pattern for this technique, and also I like it a lot.  It is based on a belt for carrying a wide bronze knife sheath, from a Finnish Iron Age cemetery

It has a mere 10 tablets, which is good, since I want to use the small tablets I was given last year, and I only have 10 of them.  It's all one color, warp and weft and everything.  It's made from "thick two-stranded S-plied wool", which is close enough to Red Heart acrylic for my purposes.  There's only turning forward, no reversals at all.  This is a problem for people who use inkle looms for their tablet weaving, but since I do warp-weighted weaving, it's no problem at all -- I take out the excess twist when I advance the warp and rehang the weights.  The tablet slant is a simple alternating S and Z.  Or / and \, if you'd prefer, since my current convention is to use SZ for charting based on thread slant, and /\ for charting based on tablet slant.  The chart I'm following uses tablet slant, and honestly, I like that better than charts with thread direction.

It has been mentioned that edge tablets can distort the weaving since there are 4 threads vs. the 2 threads in the center tablets.  The solution offered is to turn the edge card when the weft is going through from that side, and to not turn it when the weft is coming through from the other side (or vice versa).  Pattern 6 shows every card turning on every row, so that's what I'm gonna do.  Maybe I'll try something different for the next band.

Tablet management turned out not to be too bad.  I used a bamboo skewer.  I put it in the upper hole closest to me.  Throw the thread, turn the tablets, throw the thread.  Hang onto the pack, turn the tablets, replace the skewer, and repeat.  Every now and then I'd forget, and then, yeah, the tablets would spin like a children's toy.  Since I used the cheat of labeled tablets and had them all lined up before I began weaving, it was fairly straightforward to get them back to where they needed to be.

I enjoyed this project and I really like how it turned out.  The photo is of the unblocked band.  I do hope some of the irregularities will disappear after blocking.  Some of it, of course, is me -- slightly inconsistent width, mostly, along with what looks like a few errors where I caught (or didn't catch) a thread from the other side of the shed.  I can also tell where I advanced the warp -- there are some slight tension irregularities, either from differences in thread tension or from where I clamped the already-woven band or both.

The band is long enough to use as a belt, yay!  I have no idea how much take-up there was since I didn't measure too closely.  The width is somewhat less than 1" though wider than the 12mm of the original archaeologic artifact.  As usual with one-direction tablet-weaving, yarn lengths change by the end of the weaving as the twist either gets tighter or looser based on the tablet slant, plus there are textural differences in the differently-slanted tablets due to this tighter/looser effect.  Some of the irregularity in the weaving might be due to that, too.

I should make more of these, in various colors and various weights of thread/yarn.  Maybe I'll even try wool someday.  A lot of these brick patterns have different colors rather than all one color.  Those will be fun, too.

Next up is a different 2-thread pattern, a design in the Latvian tradition, in crochet cotton.  Tablet management will be a little more complicated, hmmm, since some tablets will turn forward and others backward.   I have more bamboo skewers and we'll see if that's enough.