Adventures in Historical Tabletweaving

OK, so it was almost a month ago, but I said I would mention String Day, so here we go. 4 weeks ago my flatmate Thordis and I hosted a fibrecraft-themed collegium type thingy at our house. There was weaving, tablet weaving, inkle weaving, bobbin lace, knitting, naalbinding, spinning and dyeing, all going on in an ad hoc manner. We got a great turnout, including a couple of people who flew down from Ildhafn to attend, and because it was hosted at our house, the event was free. I recommend the format. Mistress Katharina, one of the Ildhafners, took quite a few photos, which can be seen here .

Someone asked earlier today on the SCA-Card-Weaving list whether anyone had a pattern for the Kaukola band in Hansen. This prompted me to re-visit my pattern and check it against Hansen, since I've recently found instructions on how to read his mysterious patterns. It turns out the pattern I reconstructed by looking at his band was slightly off, so I've re-jigged my pattern to reflect that. The difference to the appearance of the finished band is pretty trivial. There are just a few extra reversals in column 4. They don't change what colour is up at any point, just the direction of twist. I did have this pattern marked up for half-turns but I've been informed this is incorrect so I've removed them.

Warp: Red, yellow, green and blue wool (fibreholics) Weft: same as above (varying colour) Pattern: Phiala's demo Snartemo pattern Cards: 18 Width: 1.6cm Length: 60cm The name "Snartemo" is given to a technique where each hole in a tablet is threaded with a different colour, and tablets are offset a quarter turn from each other so that turning them as a pack produces diagonal lines. Sometimes a card is turned repreatedly backward and forward, forming "floats" where a single colour appears on the top for several passes of the weft. The canonical Snartemo band is Snartemo V, from 7th century Snartemo, Norway. Hansen lists three other bands in a similar technique. This is the band I warped up while demonstrating how to do a Continuous Warp. It is the demonstration pattern (Excel format) Phiala gives showing how to construct a Snartemo pattern, with the green and blue warps swapped because that's how I absentmindedly warped it up. I've also marked...

At String Day one of the things I wanted to demonstrate was a continuous warp. If you haven't seen Linda Hedrickson's video on making a continuous warp, you should really go watch it now. She explains the concept beautifully. I will take issue with one thing she says: It doesn't really matter which colours go in which holes I'm sure this was accurate within the wider context of her DVD and this is probably obvious to most of you, but it can matter. If you're doing a doubleface pattern, the two warps of the same colour need to be in adjacent holes. If you're doing a snartemo pattern red-green-blue-yellow, you can't thread the cards up red-blue-green-yellow. I demonstrated the continuous warp on an inkle loom. Instead of the clamp arrangement in Linda Hendrickson's video (which works equally well warping directly onto an oseberg-style loom) where the warps pass from clamp A to clamp B and then back to clamp A, and you drop a card on each side, my ...

While I was weaving the "satin" band, I considered that the poor result might be due to the warp twining going in the same direction as the ply of the silk, so I tried reversing the direction to improve things. Unfortunately it turned out the warp twining was already going in the reverse direction to the ply, so this did nothing to help things! Later on once I'd given up on the card idling I also tried weaving in both directions. Above is a picture of the four different combinations: Warp twining opposite to ply twining, card idling Warp twining same as ply twining, card idling Warp twining opposite to ply twining, no card idling Warp twining same as ply twining, no card idling In retrospect the other one does look best, I think, and the last one definitely the worst.