Adventures in Historical Tabletweaving

Nancy Spies selling off her books

2012-03-10T09:59:00.002+13:00

Nancy Spies posted the following message to SCA-Card-Weaving yesterday:

"I don't mean to do a "business" message here, but I did want to let folks know that I am liquidating all remaining stock of "Anna Neuper's Modelbuch" and "Here Be Drolleries" by the end of April. "Here Be Wyverns" is now out-of-print, but copies of "Ecclesiastical Pomp" will still be available until sold out."

Ecclesiastical Pomp and Circumstance is THE book for brocaded tablet weaving and Anna Neuper's Modelbuch is also a great little book. Get in quick!

Siksälä Shawl- 13th-14th century Estonia

2012-02-28T08:46:00.000+13:00

Update: I had the shawl incorrectly dated to the 11th century-it's a bit later than that!

Maikki Karisto and the Tallinn University Institute of History have given me permission to share some photos she took last year of a shawl from Siksälä and specifically its tablet woven border.

This shawl can be found in the Tallinn University Institute of History archaeological collection under the major number AI 5100. It dates to around the 13th-14th century. The tablet weaving is about 1cm in width. It is in Baltic two-hole technique, or Hochdorf technique, depending on how you look at it.

More information on the finds from Siksälä can be found in the book Siksälä, a community at the frontiers, Iron Age and Medieval by Silvia Laul & Heiki Valk.

Hallstatt 2 hole

2012-02-18T20:03:00.000+13:00

Warp: White and green silk
Weft: Green silk
Pattern: Hallstatt Inv.Nr. 89.870
Cards: 12 pattern + 1 and 3 border
Width: 9mm
Length: Approx. 75cm

This band is covered in Bunte Tuche & Gleissendes Metall, Frühe Kelten der Hallstattzeit, and also "Tablet-woven Ribbons from the prehistoric Salt-mines at Hallstatt, Austria" - results of some experiments in Hallstatt Textiles. The former describes it as being in Hochdorf technique and the latter as being regular 3/1 broken twill.

I wove the pattern in Hochdorf structure, but rather than the alternating pairs of SS and ZZ I oriented the tablets all Z on the left and S on the right. This allowed the tablets to turn as a pack 2/3 of the time (border excluded).

Sorry the photo is a little blurry, but the end result is quite snappy in person especially considering its simplicity.

If you're wondering about the uneven border, this was present on the original.

Hochdorf

2012-01-21T15:51:00.000+13:00

Warp: White and blue wool
Weft: White wool
Pattern: Hochdorf find no. 39
Cards: 32 pattern + 4x2 border
Width:1.8cm
Length: Approx. 1m

This is my first go at the technique sometimes referred to as "pebble weave" due to the sort of dimples or "pebbles" of the contrasting colour that appear in the ground areas. "Pebble weave" can also refer to an Andean technique which is not the same thing.

Excluding the border tablets, tablets are threaded in two holes, alternating in pairs of SS and ZZ. Each pair is turned as a unit. To get the background area (white with blue dimples in my version), all rows do a quarter turn twice in one direction and then twice in the other. To bring the other colour to the front, do not reverse the turning direction of a pair.

In the pattern above right, each B or F represents 2 tablets turning backward or forward for 2 quarter turns. Originally I just had a "pattern" showing what the finished band looks like but I found it necessary to construct a pattern in this format because it was breaking my brain a bit having a warp where not all tablets were threaded the same way. Once I had worked out my own pattern, the weaving was easy going.

This pattern is "find no. 39" from the burial chamber of the Celtic Chieftain from Hochdorf. It was a decorative edge on a wall hanging, woven of hemp and badger hair (!) Find no. 44 is in the same technique. The band is covered in Lise Raeder Knudsen's article in NESAT V and in Johanna Banck-Burgess's Hochdorf IV. This grave site dates to the 6th century BC and contains several tablet woven bands including a variety of sophisticated techniques.

This is my 3rd band for my camping mattress but since Canterbury Faire is next week I guess I won't be making a 4th.

Check out Micky Schoelzke's version of this band, which I think is much prettier than mine!

Laceby

2011-12-05T18:37:00.001+13:00

Warp: White and blue wool
Weft: White wool
Pattern: Laceby
Cards: 12 pattern + 2x2 border
Width:0.8cm
Length: Approx. 1.1 metres

So you may have noticed, I'm kinda obsessed with two-hole patterns at the moment, and this is one that people mention a lot. It is described by Grace Crowfoot in Antiquaries Journal 36 (1956), in the article Anglo-Saxon sites in Lincolnshire by F.H. Thompson. The preserved fragment is only 3x1.1cm, found in the back of a 6th century brooch from Laceby, England. The original is made of linen.

Crowfoot posits two different ways of weaving the band, one using a heddle (ie not using tablets), and one using "six 2-hole tablets, with two threads in each hole". I'm utterly unable to explain how the latter system would result in the pattern reconstruction given (same as the one pictured) so I assume that the reconstruction was a bit of a stab in the dark. This reconstruction uses a tabby weave. You can see a similar (possibly identical) reconstruction on Phiala's website

I originally threaded this pattern up with extra border tablets in the hopes that I could use it as one of my mattress straps, but even with the extra tablets, it was way too narrow, so I ditched them.

The pattern is relatively fast but I found it easy to lose track of where I was up to, and I was too lazy to fix some of my mistakes!

This will probably be my last band for the year.

Neuper #32

2011-11-14T15:12:00.001+13:00

Warp: Thin white silk
Weft: Light green silk
Brocade: Yellow silk
Pattern: Anna Neuper #32
Cards: 27
Width:1.2cm
Length: Approx. 1.1 metres

I had some time to kill while I waited for some books and materials to arrive so I did another band from Anna Neuper's Modelbuch using colours I don't like very much. I'll donate it to something.

12th Century Latvian Band

2011-10-30T16:08:00.000+13:00

Warp: Wool (fibreholics)

Weft: Wool (fibreholics)

Pattern: from Latviesu Jostas

Cards: 20 pattern + 2x3 border

Width: 1.5cm

Length: 55cm

This technique came up on the SCA-Card-Weaving list recently and I was inspired to give it a go. The pattern is from Latviesu Jostas by Aleksandra Dzérvítis & Lilija Treimanis. Wonder of wonders, this book was in the National Library of New Zealand (Finding a book I'm looking for domestically is a minor miracle). The book is in Latvian and English. Mostly it covers traditional patterns but it also has some 12th century patterns, although information from an archaeological perspective is lacking. This one is described as "Stameriene, blue wrap".

The book is pretty emphatic about getting the colours to have the characteristic greenish tinge of local dyes. I gave this a crack by overdying my blue, red and yellow wools with green dye. It didn't really result in the right colours, but they are still quite striking together.

This technique is quite similar to that of the Swiss band I did recently. Both feature a two-hole weave where the weft sometimes passes above both threads in a card to form a brocade. This is the green in the pattern (with the exception of the green cards in the border). The main difference is that this band has warp twining, although not as sharply as in a four-hole pattern. Here's the back, where it's easier to see this effect.

If I was doing this again I'd make the green border tablet be on the outside, where it would mask the "blips" where the weft turns.

Evebo Band

2011-10-18T14:00:00.000+13:00

Warp: Blue (fibreholics) and white (Anna Gratton) wool

Weft: white wool

Pattern: Evebo band, pattern by Maikki Karisto

Cards: 22 pattern + 2x1 border(original has a wide border)

Width: 1.5cm

Length: 76cm (43 cm for 1 full repeat of pattern)

I had just strung up my inkle loom with the intent of weaving the Evebo band using this pattern - which I believe is based on Lise Raeder Knudsen's pattern which is the one in Hansen- when Maikki Karisto coincidentally emailed me with suggestions of bands I might like to try- including this one, which she offered to share her pattern for.

Maikki's pattern has 22 pattern tablets as opposed to the 23 in the GTT pattern. It also includes the partial 6th figure from the edge of the band.

The GTT pattern also does not include the zigzag region which occurs twice in the pattern. This region is particularly interesting because the tablets lose their offset to one another so that the zigzag is symmetrical.

This band was a lot more fun to weave than the Mammen 3/1 twill band I did earlier in the year, presumably because the figures are so much cuter! I had some trouble controlling the width of the band- it tended to inflate when I entered the plain areas.

I will use this band as the second of my straps for my straw mattress.

Two-Hole Plain Weave and Warp Floats

2011-10-14T12:03:00.000+13:00

Warp: Red, white, yellow and green silk (fibreholics) (original in wool)
Weft: White silk (fibreholics) (original in linen)
Pattern: St Maurice monestary, 8-10th century (Collingwood p. 156)
Cards: 18 pattern + 2x2 border (2x3 in original). 2 holes per pattern card
Width: 7mm (original 11mm)
Length: 78cm

This band is quite different to any I have done before. The pattern area is woven with 9 pairs of 2 tablets, each threaded in two holes. One tablet carries a red and a white warp thread, and the other a yellow and a green (note: these are the colours I used; discussion on the colours of the original below). The tablets are manipulated individually to form the pattern. The interesting point is that there is no warp twining: tablets "rock" from one colour to another but never complete a full rotation. In the pattern to the right, the coloured squares show the colour that is up. In the squares with the grey line through them, no colour is up, and the white warp thread passes on top of the band, as though it is a brocade thread.

The original band had a border on each side of 2 white and 1 red cards threaded in all 4 holes and alternately S and Z threaded; I somehow managed to misread this completely so mine has a 2-card white border (threaded in all 4 holes) threaded S on one side and Z on the other.

The pattern I used is from page 156 of Collingwood (2002 edition). Collingwood reconstructed the pattern himself. I flubbed a couple of squares but they don't make a difference to the appearance. Collingwood says the band has black where I have green. This band is also covered on page 171 of Brigitte Schmedding's Mittelalterliche Texitilien in Kirchen und Klöstern der Schweiz but there the colours are given as red, yellow, orange and dark blue wool, and white linen. The dark blue is definitely in place of the black (the text refers to "St Andrews Crosses) and I'm going to guess that the white linen takes the place of the white wool (Collingwood does say the weft is white linen). Not sure where the orange comes into it though.

(Aside: Look at that lovely clear photograph! I've worked out I can take detailed photos with my camera, I just need direct sunlight)

To weave this bands I punched holes in the middle of the top and bottom edges of playing cards. This gives a much greater stability to the orientation of your cards than having opposite diagonal corners threaded. When the weft passed over both threads in a card, I turned the card on its side. This made for a vey clear shed.

I think I wove this band a lot tighter than it should have been since the patterns were elongated.

One thing that was interesting (also, super annoying) about this band is that because the edge tablets were warp twined and the pattern tablets were not, the takeup on the edge tablets was way greater (about 10cm over the length of the band). I was weaving on my inkle loom and I had to keep resorting to ever more elaborate techniques to mitigate the effect. Would have been worse on the Oseberg loom though I suppose.

Also interesting is the back of the band. It appears as long floats of yellow and white, but if you "peel back" the floats you can see there are further floats of red behind the yellow and green behind the white.

Taplow

2011-09-20T18:35:00.000+12:00

Warp: Dark green silk (fibreholics)
Weft: Dark green silk (devere)
Brocade: Tambour thread (Hedgehog handworks)
Pattern: Taplow Barrow
Cards: 23 pattern + 2x2 border
Width: 1.2cm
Length: 85cm

This is just a quick brocade pattern I did while waiting for some other stuff to come together. The pattern caught my eye when it was executed by opusanglicanum not long ago. Since them I've also spotted a version by Gina-B which made me want to buy the metal strip she used on the spot. Unfortunately Benton and Johnson's website is under maintenance so I will just have to be patient.

The pattern is from page 45 of Crowfoot and Hawkes's Early Anglo-Saxon Gold Braids.

I used the tambour thread which I bought after having trouble with the cornering in the Mammen band. It's definitely more supple- whether it's supple enough I'm not sure yet because the fibreholics silk I used for this warp is about 5x thicker than the devere stuff I used for the Mammen band. I'll need to test on a band with a thinner warp and see how it goes.

I did my usual brocade-under-both-upward threads thing here and I think this is a case where it would have made a particular improvement to the band has I only gone under one. Oh well.

I have no use for this band so I think I'll donate it as a prize in the Canterbury Faire fighter auction tourney or something.

Mammen cuffs... again!

2011-09-03T16:36:00.000+12:00

Warp: Candy silk (devere) and sewing linen
Weft: Candy silk
Brocade: Spun silver (devere) and gilt passing thread (Hedgehog handworks)
Soumak: Red silk (devere)
Pattern: Mammen
Cards: 23 pattern + 2x7 border
Width: 1.5cm
Length: 80cm

I think this pattern is going to be my nemesis. As you may recall, I have already woven it twice, after New Zealand Post managed to lose it the first time. At the time, pretty much all my information on the band came from Hansen. However, since then I came across Lise Ræder Knudsen's article Brocaded Tablet-Woven Bands: Same Appearance, Different Weaving Technique in NESAT VII, which talks about this band and also some others in a similar style. She has a quite different idea about how the band is constructed:

Hansen says that all cards are threaded with silk and the band is executed with "card idling"- ie turn the odd-numbered cards in one pass and the even-numbered ones in the next. Knudsen says that all 4 holes were threaded, but that excepting the 3 tablets on each border that never show brocade, alternating holes were threaded with a vegetable fibre (probably flax) which has since completely deteriorated (leaving the remains indistinguishable from a 2-hole band- a theory put forth by Collingwood).

The cunningness of this plan is that your band ends up looking like it's made entirely expensive silk, when really a lot of it is just linen! Super cunning. There are some further steps you have to take to make this effect work:

The tiedown should always be one thread only (and always the silk thread of course!).
Brocade floats should always cover an odd number of cards. This means your tiedown will always be the right type of thread. My original Mammen pattern was mistranscribed from Hansen and had some floats over 4 cards, so I had to adjust it.
In areas where there are more than one adjacent tiedown (ie the border between the gold and the silver in the pattern) the tiedown that is of the wrong fibre can be hidden by covering the tiedowns with soumak. I've never done soumak before. There are some descriptions in Hansen and Collingwood but no pictures, and in Gertrud Grenander-Nyberg's artivle in NESAT V, Soumak Techniquie in Swedish Medieval Textiles, there is good information including diagrams on soumak in the context of (non tablet-) weaving. Hopefully I did it right. I can describe in more detail of anyone's interested (Conversely, if there's already a good description online I'd like to know)

So, here's the finished result! Generally speaking, I was amazed at how well these techniques combined. It really does look like the whole band is silk. And the band is very beautiful (sorry most of the scan is fuzzy! I tried!) But... and it's a big but... the proportions are all wrong. The band is the right width, but everything is far too stretched out along the warp. Those silver diamonds should be square.

I'm pretty sure the problem comes down to my choice in gold thread. I tried hard for this band to use high quality materials which is why I use the gilt passing thread. But it's just not nearly flexible enough. If you zoom in on the picture you can see that the gold thread always comes in pairs, two close together, then a gap. That gap is the inside of the loop where the gold thread turns around. It won't corner any sharper (without resorting to special tools or something, anyway). Passing thread appears to be completely the wrong choice.

I've bought myself some tambour thread, which is meant to be more flexible, and am going to have a test to see if that's any better. But it's quite thick, and I don't like my chances. It seems that if I want a dense weft I'm going to need to stick with naff synthetic spun gold.

So I'm going to need to weave this band one more time, once I've sorted out my issues with the brocade thread. I will leave it for a while though, in case some other article comes along with more insight into its construction :-)

Mouse Guard Pouch

2011-08-10T17:23:00.000+12:00

I do have something more interesting to write about, but work has been a bit draining recently, and I have really not felt like sitting in front of the computer during Fun Time. So in the meantime, here's a picture of a Mouse Guard pouch I made last week with tubular tabletwoven cords. There are 3 cords 80cm each, woven on 4 cards in wool. The spiral is against the twist so the end result does not look spiral-y.

Mammen 3/1 Broken Twill

2011-07-15T18:45:00.000+12:00

Warp: Blue and white wool (fibreholics)
Weft: Blue and white wool (fibreholics)
Pattern: Mammen band
Cards: 17 pattern + 2x2 border
Width: 1.5cm
Length: 80cm

This is the first "vanilla" 3/1 broken twill band I have done and it was a bit unexciting after Humikkala. I am generally pretty good at doing the same thing over and over again but I got quite bored with this one. I don't think it's the technique for me although I'm sure I'll end up doing more of it- I do want to try the Evebo band and at least pattern out that Chinese lion from Collingwood.

This band will form one of the straps that hold my straw mattress to my Oseberg bed. That means 3 other random bits of tablet weaving to do in the next 6 months.

Bird garters

2011-05-21T11:01:00.000+12:00

UPDATE: Those of you who wanted a higher-res picture, here is a sample.
Warp: Red silk (fibreholics)
Weft: Red sewing silk
Brocade weft: Anchor gold lame, green and good DMC cotton
Pattern: 13th century German, birds and zigzags. EPAC p.143
Cards: 18 (EPAC pattern has 16, original band had 17)
Width: 1.5cm
Length: 2 x 40cm

It's been an odd 3 months, with earthquake and moving house and other interruptions. This is the first project I've managed to finish in that time. It is a pair of garters to go with a pair of silk hose I made earlier in the year.

The pattern can be found on page 143 of EPAC and is from a 13th century band from Memmelsforf bei Bamberg. It depicts birds (eagles?) in two different colours of silk, separated by gold zigzags. That's 3 different brocading wefts- never more than two on the same line though, thank goodness.

I wove this band backstrap-style and it's somewhate uneven.

The hose are made of red silk lined with pink silk. They were so much more fiddly to make than woolen hose, I don't think I'll be doing that again any time soon! With less stretch they don't fit as snugly either, but I think they did OK in the end. The buckles on the garters are X-41 from Raymond's Quiet Press.

Sorry for the fuzzy photo, I no longer cohabitate with a scanner!

Still here

2011-02-24T09:13:00.000+13:00

Hi, just a quick note to say that I and everyone I know is fine after the quake on Tuesday. Our house is in a bad way and it may not be getting water again for some time so I am staying at my parents' right now and my work will be flying me up to Auckland for a couple of weeks when they can get me a seat. Blogging unlikely in the near future.

28 Feb: Enjoy some photos taken by my flatmate of our house:
http://insanitylooms.blogspot.com/2011/02/and-there-are-pictures.html

Humikkala H31:18

2011-02-20T10:15:00.000+13:00

Warp: Red, white and blue wool (fibreholics)
Weft: blue wool (the original was a plant fibre)
Pattern: Humikkala H31:18 -3/1 broken twill
Cards: 33
Width: 2.8
Length: 14cm

OK, here is my best effort at Humikkala H31:18. This band is covered in Hansen, and Hansen's pattern is converted into something that actually works by Guido (I think he tried to reconstruct the band based on the photo of the reconstructed band in Hansen, which differs from the actual pattern given). However after hearing from Silja Penna-Haverinen that there were some problems with Hansen's reconstruction, I really wanted to have a go at this band using other sources. Silja put me in contact with Maikki Karisto, who is working on a book which covers this band and many others, and who has examined the band closely.

Maikki is understandably a little cagey about sharing all her information, since a) it is still evolving as she researches, b) she would like people to buy her book when it comes out and c) the Finnish National Museum won't let her distribute photos of the original band anyway. So I had neither photos of the original band, nor an actual pattern to work from. She provided detailed textual information, some diagrams of the motifs, and a photo of an early attempt of her own at the band (although many elements of her analysis have changed since then). Although this is all still rather indirect, I'm optimistic that the result is closer to the original band than Hansen's pattern.

Maikki has asked me to include the following facts about the original band:

The finding place is Humikkala in Masku parish church yard in Finland. The find is dated to 1000-1100. Masku (nowadays a town) lies near Turku on the south-western part of Finland
The code is KM 8656: H31:18 which means KM is Kansallismuseo = National museum, the number 8656 has been given to the Humikkala finding, H means hauta = grave, 31 is the number of the grave, and 18 is the object number in the grave
The band was found near the waist on a woolen apron in a female grave. On the band there was hanging a knife sheath (due to the metal parts small pieces of the band had been preserved)
There are three pieces of the band, total length 26 cm. They are very badly preserved, because of the sour soil in Finland
The warp is wool, s-plied, thickness about tex 55x2 (1000m=110g) or a little thinner, weft is plant fiber, could be linen or nettle, of which only little had been preserved
The warp has three colors: natural white (or some pale color), blue and green – this is what you can guess/see with your eyes [Note: in more recent communication Maikki indicated that the colours were white, blue and red, as seen in Hansen]
The width of the band is 28 mm
The band has been woven with 33 tablets: pattern part had 25 tablets and edges 4+4 tablets. On both edges there is a tubular selvedge (this is a real speciality)

The picture on this post represents my effort at reproducing the band incorporating all the information about it I have. I also wove over a metre of band based on a pattern with several deviations from this pattern (some deliberate and some discovered after the fact) which I will write about separately.

Here's a rundown on the differences between this pattern and Hansen's (this gets a bit confusing, since Hansen's pattern and the photo of the reconstructed band in Hansen are different)

I suppose the biggest one is that Hansen's pattern is 27 tablets wide (it does not include the border) whereas Maikki's is 25.
The information Maikki has given me about the tooth motif indicates that it is a lot less regular than Hansen's pattern suggests (He does mention that this motif in particular has a lot of guesswork in it)
In the interlocking diamond section, Hansen's pattern made a fairly weird decision to make the twist of the warp go aganst the grain of the pattern (making jagged lines). I think this might be an error in the pattern since the reconstructed band photo doesn't have this issue Also, Maikki tells me all the internal coloured diamonds are actually the same size (true in Guido's pattern, but not the photo in Hansen or the pattern) and the pattern is asymmetrical along the weft axis (true in the pattern but not the photo)
Maikki's reconstruction of the toothed swastika motif is quite different to Hansen's (where it is not toothed), and much prettier I think.
There are some differences in the border motifs as well
Hansen does not mention the tubular selvedge (he indicates that each border contains 2 tablets not 4) or the use of the half-turns (Which I have cheerfully inserted everywhere they could possibly go- this may be overenthusiastic!)

Snartemo II

2011-02-12T14:26:00.001+13:00

Warp: Red and yellow wool (fibreholics)
Weft: red wool
Pattern: Snartemo II
Cards: 16
Width: 1cm
Length: 110cm

I haven't had much time to post recently; most of my time has been going into organising the meal plan for Canterbury Faire. But the event is now over (and went very well!) so back to blogging...

I wanted to have a simple-but-period band warped up for demonstration/teaching, and having just recently done Masku Humikkala, 8658:H17 I thought that Snartemo II would be good, since patterns where the cards turn as a pack are much easier for people to get their head around.

I finally got the band warped up on the Thursday, halfway through the event. As usual, a lot of people came over and opined that the band looked lovely, but they couldn't possibly do anything like that themselves. In fact the majority of the people brave enough to give it a go were children!

The band took form ridiculously quickly compared to other bands I've been doing recently. Strung up on the Oseberg loom there were not a lot of problems with the cards being threaded in 2 holes only. Remembering to do the reversals was the biggest issue!

Lacking any migration era garb (or knowledge thereof) I don't have any use for this band at present- although it is the sort of thing I wouldn't feel *too* guilty about putting on later garb, especially since there were very similar bands being made in Finland over 500 years later.

Masku Humikkala, 8658:H17

2011-01-05T20:17:00.000+13:00

Warp: Red, yellow and blue wool (fibreholics)
Weft: blue
Pattern: Masku Humikkala, 8658:H17
Cards: 14
Width: 7mm
Length: 110cm

Don't get too excited, this is not the well-known Masku Humikkala band covered by Hansen, but a simpler band from the same site. My information on this band comes from Maikki Karisto who is a weaving teacher from Finland. Her information comes from Seija Sarkki's 1979 thesis "Suomen ristiretkiaikaiset nauhat" which covers bands from the Finnish crusade period.

The diagram above is from Maikki but doctored by me. The original diagram was missing the outer tablet on each side. Sarkki was unaware of these tablets because the band has a tubular selvedge and as a result the outer warps were hidden on the reverse of the band.

The technique of the band is very similar to Snartemo II. The border tablets contain 4 threads of the same colour while the pattern tablets have two threads, diagonally opposite and alternating positions and threading (S vs Z) in each tablet. The cards are turned as a pack and if you reverse at the right stage the reversals are hard to spot.

The band started out narrow and grew to about 7.5mm over the course of the weaving. I think it looked neater when it was more like 5mm. The picture below shows the start and end of my weaving so you can make up your own mind.

This band also puts me in mind of the "Anglo-Saxon" band although that one used card idling rather than tablets threaded in two holes to achieve the effect. Since there are tablets in that one with three colours, the two-hole technique would not work there.

This band is very cute and as far as I'm aware about as close as one can get (along with other bands in a similar technique like Snartemo II) to a period threaded-in design more complicated than plain stripes.. It would be a good pattern to teach beginners who are afraid that period patterns have to be complicated.

The only thing to watch out for is that tablets threaded in two holes only are quite unstable- it's ok when they are at rest under tension but if you bump them or are fiddling with them to clear out the shed they will easily fall out of position. They need to be held or tied up.

The fylfot/swastika in tablet weaving

2010-12-11T10:46:00.000+13:00

I think anyone reading this blog is likely to be aware that the fylfot is a very common motif in Iron Age and Medieval geometric patterns. It is present in some of the brocaded Viking patterns I wove last year, such as the Mammen band and Birka 6. Before I started work on these bands, I asked my friends what they thought about including this motif in my weaving. People seemed to fall into two camps:

It would offend me, not because I think you are aligning yourself with Nazi philosophies, but because you are showing insensitivity to the fact that I may be offended. Don't do it.
It wouldn't offend me, but I still wouldn't do it if I were you because it would offend other people.

I am quite annoyed that the Nazis have gone and ruined such a perfectly good motif (I mean, obviously, in terms of Bad Thing The Nazis Did, this doesn't really rate, but you know what I mean). I also find the self-perpetuating nature of camp 1 to be somewhat frustrating. I don't mean to dismiss these people's feelings, in fact, merely finding out that some of my friends feel this way is enough to make me feel a little the same way myself (before asking this question I was guessing everyone would fall into camp 2).

For in the Birka designs showing fylfots, I amended my patterns to exclude this section. In the Mammen band, I replace the fylfot section with a different motif. However, in the Snartemo V band, which features no fewer than 6 fylfots (or in my case, 7, because I repeated part of the pattern), I left the pattern intact. This is because while the Viking bands were intended for wearing, the Snartemo V and is more of a "demonstration" piece (I will probably stick it in the A&S display at Canterbury Faire). I hope this compromise does not offend too many people.

Some answers on medieval Finnish bands from Silja Penna-Haverinen

2010-12-11T10:27:00.001+13:00

I have become interested recently in the medieval Finnish bands such as the Kaukola and Humikkala bands that appear in Hansen and the Kirkkomäki band described by Silja Penna-Haverinen in NESAT X. Imagine my delight when Silja herself commented on my previous post on the subject and said she would be willing to answer some questions I had. I thought I would share some information from her answers that might be of interest to people.

1. I feel a bit better about not being able to work out how the technique of altering the places of two adjacent tablets at the intersection of two diaonal lines works, because Silja says this research is out of date. Actually what was thought to be the two central tablets is only a single tablet (the pattern has an odd number).

2. Apparently there is no good source of photos of the Finnish bands from earlier than the 20th century (not even in Finnish publications), which is quite sad. There are some random published photos, but not any kind of compilation

3. Silja says that Hansen's 2 reconstructions of Finnish bands (Humikkala and Kaukola) were not based on a personal examination of the bands in question. He looked at some Finnish articles, and had help from a Finnish woman who might have seen the items in question in the National Museum through the showcase glass, but neither one of them have made any proper examination. Consequently they are very speculative and as someone who has seen the bands in person she can attest to the fact that they are not accurate. However, Silja knows someone who is working on a reconstruction of the Humikkala band, who has been able to study the original. I think I'll put my plans to create this band on hold until that comes out!

Snartemo V

2010-12-01T17:47:00.001+13:00

Warp: Red, yellow, green and blue wool (fibreholics)
Weft: green wool
Pattern: Phiala's Snartemo V pattern (6th century Norwegian)
Cards: 44
Width: 3.5cm
Length: 50cm

OK, so I said I'd do Snartemo V and here it is. It is from Phiala's pattern, with a few tweaks, and also a few points where I lost track of where I was up to and did the motifs in the wrong order!

This is one of the few bands I have done where there is actually a decent pciture of the original (click through to a larger version). You can see that my own version is a lot more stretched out than the original which is if anything about shorter than square. I found it impossible to get the weft density up using sticky wool.

This is a popular band to try and it always looks great. Here are some other examples:

One nice this about this band is that because the eyes are drawn to the regions with long floats, the band looks quite good on the back as well as the front, with very clear motifs with yellow and red switched.

Wooden Tablets

2010-11-18T21:52:00.000+13:00

A local, Aelfric Branwelather, offered to make me some wooden tablets at Canterbury Faire this year, and I've finally had a chance to try them out this month. The tablets are about 5cm square and 1.5mm thick. I had to finish sanding them myself, but they are working very well.

Kirkkomäki-Inspired Motifs

2010-11-12T19:33:00.000+13:00

Warp: Dark green and white wool (fibreholics)
Weft: same as above (varying colour)
Pattern: I made it up
Cards: 15
Width: 8mm
Length: ~60cm

I had a band all strung up on my Oseberg loom that I had been using at String Day to demonstrate doubleface techniques. Most of it was still unused at the end of the day so I needed to find something to use it for.

I'd recently been reading Silja Penna-Haverinen's article in NESAT X: Patterned Tablet-Woven Band - In Search of the 11th Century Textile Professional, in which she hypothesises that bands from medieval Finland employed 180-degree turns. Her article focuses on a band found in the Kirkkomäki burial ground in Turku, but she mentions that the Masku Humikkala band uses the same techniques, and I think that the Kaukola band in Hansen falls into the same category.

According to the article, 180-degree turns occur in pairs on either side of a reversal, giving the appearance of a tighter corner. There is also mention of a 180-degree turn in conjunction with two cards actually swapping position, but for the life of me I can't work out how to execute that without making a mess.

Penna-Haverinen also mentions another technique found on the Kirkkomäki band: a tubular selvedge. My sample band had a border 2 tablets wide which isn't really sufficient to form a tube, but it was sufficient to hide the white weft I was using on the reverse of the band, so that was something. The tubular selvedge meant I had to pull the weft very tight which made for a higher warp density than my bands usually have. I don't think the half-turns would have worked nearly as well if it were looser.

The motifs I chose we not copied straight from the band since I had far fewer cards. They were designed to show off the half-turns to best effect. Penna-Haverinen specifically mentions its use in zigzag motifs where quarter-turns would mean the card at the centre of the zigzag just shows a straight line, rather than incorportating the corners.

You can see this to the left. On top is the band woven without half-turns. Beneath is the band executed with half-turns. You can see the more angular turns in the zigzag on the left half of the band. The tooth motif at right also looks a bit squarer.

I never know how to finish bands. I tried something a bit different with this one: I divided the warp threads into three groups and formed each one into a tube. It worked pretty nicely. No evidence that this is period though.

Warp Spreaders Revisited

2010-11-05T15:34:00.000+13:00

Lowrens has made me another warp spreader. The first one he made was in the style of Teffania's - a rod with hole drilled through it. This gels with what can be seen in the few manuscript pictures which show warp spreaders. There are about 7 manuscripts listed in EPAC (including the errata) which contain warp spreaders, out of a total of 33, so I suppose if there's one thing which can be concluded it is that use of the warp spreader is optional (possibly dependent on how prone the warp fibres are to tangling). Of those seven, I have managed to lay eyes on 4:

Book of Hours Duke John of Bedford, ca 1420-1430. Vienna, Österreichisches NationalBibliothek, ms. 1855, fol 25 (at right)
Book of Hours, ca. 1407. Oxford, Bedleian Library, ms. Douce 144, fol 19
Book of Hours, Paris, ca. 1400-1410, Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek KB 76 Fol 21
French tapestry in Rheims Cathedral, France, ca. 1507-1530 (below)

There are apparently another couple in Des Cleres et Noble Femmes but the picture of Arachne doesn't look like tablet weaving to me, and I can't even find the one of Penelope.

So anyway, these pictures all look consistent with a rod with holes bored in it. But it's been pointed out to me that with the perspective used in these pictures, another plausible interpretation would be a small wooden frame with sturdy thread wound tightly around it, creating slits for the warp threads to pass through. I'm not really sure I buy into this but it doesn't seem completely implausible. There are a few advantages to this setup compared to the rod:

The warp is well balanced (the rod is prone to leaning into vertical position... on the other hand, that's exactly what we see in the manuscript pictures)
Hypothetically (I haven't tried this) you could wind thread on spreader after warp is strung up. You certainly can't do that with the rod.
The twist builds up on far side of warp spreader because the warps do not need to converge in front of the spreader. This means you can go for longer without reversing turn direction or straightening out the threads.

Lowrens is happy to produce more such spreaders (and probably other things) if anyone is interested in purchasing them. If you need his email address, you can leave a comment to this post.

String Day

2010-10-28T20:53:00.001+13:00

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.

An Updated Kaukola Pattern

2010-10-22T15:18:00.000+13:00

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.

Snartemo - Phiala's demo pattern

2010-10-15T17:15:00.000+13:00

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 the reversals on the pattern because I find that helpful. I made a mistake swapping the blue and the green in the pattern and spent several repeats of the pattern wondering why I kept making the same mistake every time.

Due to the aforementioned absentmindedness, I failed to start weaving at the same point in the warp as where I tied the ends of the warps together, and therefore had to deal with knots in my warp partway through the process. I found that if you just cheerfully keep weaving, it's easy to make sure the tails of the knot end up on the back of the band rather than the front. It helps if the tails are long enough to grab hold of, but not long enough to tangle around adjacent warp threads. 1-2cm is good.

I don't really know what I'm going to do with this band. It has quite a few mistakes in it in the section I did first. I don't know if it's known what the Snartemo V fragments or any of the related finds were used for. If anyone out there can convince me that they're making 7th century Norwegian Viking garb, you can have it.

I will have a go at Snartemo V soon.

Continuous Warp

2010-10-12T19:37:00.000+13:00

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 warp took a loop route and cards were dropped only once per circuit. This works just as well. You tie the start of the warp to one of the dowels on the inkle loom, and when you have dropped off all the cards you untie it, and tie the end of the warp to the start. That way you can rotate the whole warp so the area you are working on is always in the same place.

There are a few situations in which a continuous warp is not appropriate:

All four of your warps need to be on their own spools so if this is impractical you're out of luck
If you are using rectangular tablets (eg playing cards) and your pattern is formed by offsetting each card by a quarter turn from the one before it, and the cards turn as a pack or in blocks, this is not the technique for you. Adjacent cards will end up a quarter turn off from each other making them impossible to turn together
If you're doing a pattern where not all cards are threaded with the same colours, this method isn't going to work. You can get around this though, by warping up however many cards use threading pattern A, then cutting off the warp threads, and tying to the end of each one a new warp thread of the appropriate colour for threading pattern B etc. When all the cards are warped up you can reorder them into the right places if necessary.
You can't use a warp spreader with this technique, unless it's one you can fit onto your warp after it's all set up.
If you're warping directly onto your loom, you can't untie your warp and comb out the twist in it, so a band where twist builds up in is no good, unless you have enough warp that you don't need to worry about the twist. If you're using a warping frame and then cutting the ends of the warp before fitting it to the loom, this isn't a problem. There can also be an exception if you're warping directly onto an Oseberg-style loom - if the twist builds up symmetrically, eg a chevron pattern, and you make sure that the cards build up from inside to outside (so on an 8-card pattern you drop them so they end up in the order 75312468), then pairs will untwist each other (eg the S twist on card one is undone by the Z twist on card two) and you can keep going in the same direction right along the warp. I hope that made sense!

Warp Twine Direction vs Ply Direction

2010-10-03T17:09:00.000+13:00

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.

Band spiral

2010-09-27T15:36:00.000+13:00

I've known since early on that a twill band will tend to spiral on itself when not under tension, and that the way to counteract this is to have a few cards going in the other direction. EPAC mentions it (p. 68), saying:

Generally, at least two tablets at each edge are threaded in the opposite direction, or alternating S and S, to compensate for the twisting of the band which is inherent in this type of weave.

I'm sure I read elsewhere that alternating at one end of the band only was sufficient but I can't find a reference for that now. That's what I did for the "scrolling vine" band which was my first foray into twill bands. I didn't have any problem with spiralling so it seemed that doing a SSSSSSSSSSSSZ weave was sufficient to avoid any problems in that area.

However, the plain (no brocade) band I've just finished, which was threaded ZSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSZ, had quite an extreme twist on it. It turns out that the "reverse the edges" plan is really only sufficient for brocaded bands, which have a lot of stiffness due to the stiff metal brocade weft (not sure how well one with a fibre brocade weft would hold up, somewhere in between I guess).

So, now I know, a non-brocaded band really needs to be a near-50% mix of S and Z threading. I won't make that mistake again (This doesn't apply to bands that are twill threaded but the cards turn backwards as well as forwards, as in 3/1 broken twill, of course) .

Card idling "satin" ribbon

2010-09-08T12:39:00.000+12:00

Warp: Green silk (colourmart)
Weft: Green silk (colourmart)
Pattern: card idling monochrome twill
Cards: 17
Width: ~1cm
Length: ~1m

I decided a while ago that I wanted to have a go at the "simulated satin effect" band from Þóra Sharptooth's Three Tablet Weaving Recipes page. So I did- but it seems I did every imaginable thing wrong in the process! Here's a list:

No loom: because I was taking this band travelling with me, I did it backstap style. This is the only band I have woven without two fixed tension points (whether it be 2 chairs, my Oseberg loom, or an inkle loom), excluding the tubular cord I did around Christmas. The tension of this band was all over the place
Using a new type of silk: This was the first outing of the silk I got from colourmart. The silk from colourmart is great value and the customer service is very friendly, but this silk turned out to be a lot stickier than what I was used to (closer to how wool behaves) which didn't help anything
Failure to read the instructions: Well actually, I did read the instructions just fine, several months before I started on the band. Then, 10 cm in, when I was unimpressed with the result, I managed to confuse the "satin effect" band with the "monochrome twill effect" one directly above it", and decided the reason it wasn't working so well was because it was supposed to be twill. I switched to twill and continued that way for the rest of the band.
Overestimating how satiny the result would be: see above. I think my expectations of this band were too high which led to me getting pretty frustrated with it.
Warp density too low: My flatmate Sonya tells me the band would have looked better if it had been narrower
Band spiral: I will cover this in another post but in summary: yeah, once I switched to the twill, the band took on a pronounced spiral. I didn't notice until I had finished because I was winding the band around my belt as I wove it.

The end result of all this is that I tired of the band very quickly and ended up giving up on the card idling just so I could get the damn thing finished. Because I was so bored with it I didn't take much care when weaving it and the whole thing is very ugly and uneven (the backstrap weaving will have contributed to this. I have used the finished band as garters on a new pair of hose, where nobody will see them.

Victoria and Albert Museum "membership"

2010-09-01T11:05:00.000+12:00

I don't know if this is common knowledge and I'm just out of the loop, but a friend recently pointed out to me that it was possible to get wonderfully high-resolution (specifically, 2500 pixels on the wider axis) photos of items from the V&A if you become a "member". It goes like this:

Go to https://collections.vam.ac.uk
Click the "Log in" button at top right.
Fill out the "Or Register" form on the right-hand side of the page. You are now a member.
Search for the item in the collection you fancy and click on the thumbnail of the one you like.
At the right of the page, below the summary information, there is an "Order this image" button. Click it.
You'll be taken to the "Manage your orders" which is kinda like your shopping cart. You can add up to 30 images to a single order.
When you're done choosing the images you want, click the the "Place order now" button. The first time you do this you'll be asked to fill out some more details like your address and your reason for wanting the images.
You are taken to a page that says that in 15 minutes your order will be ready. If you wait that long and then refresh, you will be given a zip file you can download.

Enjoy!

Brocaded Collar

2010-06-17T17:13:00.000+12:00

Warp: White silk
Weft: Really thin white silk
Brocade weft: #5 Kreinik jap
Pattern: brocade
Cards: 42
Width: 2.3cm
Length: 44cm

This band is for my friend Kotek. He wanted a band that looked something like the one in the pictured below, which is from Leonhart Fuchs's De Historia Stirpium There's no particular reason to think this band was tabletwoven; it could well have been embroidered. But there were tabletwoven bands around at the time.

I designed a pattern that looked like it would be at home in Anna Neuper's Modelbuch. It didn't really turn out with as much brocade showing as I wanted because I failed to take into account the way that alternating under-over-under with the brocade just looks like it's under all the time (I guess it would have looked better if my pickups had been under one strand only). But it still looks very pretty.

I wove the whole thing at the Lindisfarne encampment held by Ordo Cygni over Queen's Birthday weekend (5-7 June). I had to weave like a mad thing to get it done in time but I made it!

Brocade Ergonomics

2010-06-09T12:52:00.000+12:00

Ok, so remember how I said that although the illuminations show weavers sitting facing their band looms directly, I had to sit sideways to my Oseberg loom when I was weaving, because the crossbeam was at knee-height? That was true, but it wasn't the whole truth.

At Canterbury Faire I was weaving the Baltic S-motif, which is not a brocaded pattern. When I got home and set up my loom there, I realised I could turn my chest seat on its side, which would make it low enough for my knees to fit under the bar. I set up the loom so I was weaving from left to right, and I wove the rest of the band doing a passable job of sitting face-on (no pictures, sorry).

However, when I tried to do the same thing with a brocaded pattern, it just didn't work. When the band went from left to right, so the tiedowns were picked up to the left of the cards, I couldn't work out an efficient way to hold my hands. And when the band went from right to left, I just found myself gravitating to the old side-on posture. The turning the cards, passing the weft and beating were all fine face-on, but picking up the tiedowns was awkward any other way.

I'm not at all sure whether the way I'm weaving is optimal, or whether it just seems that way now from force of habit. I'd really like to hear from other people doing brocaded tablet weaving, whether they position their hands the same way I do, or whether I'm doing something freakish. You can't tell from any of the illuminations I've seen whether the weaving is brocaded (although the picture in the Hours of Catherine of Cleves seems to show two bobbins worth of weft) so there are no clues there.

It's a bit hard to explain exactly what my hands are doing so instead I've taken a short video of a couple of picks. This isn't meant to be an instructional video- there are some of those out there on YouTube though, well worth checking out- I was weaving at full speed to make my movements as natural as possible. But I'd really like to hear from any other brocaded tablet weavers out there, how my technique differs from their own.

Oseberg Loom

2010-06-02T20:34:00.000+12:00

Here's the long-promised post about the Oseberg loom made for me by Iarnulf. Here's a link to Plate 13 from Osebergfunnet Vol. 2 with line drawings of the loom. Iarnulf has copied the dimensions closely. The wood is spruce and macrocarpa while the original was beech. The loom stands about a metre tall and is just under 2m in length. Here's a photo, taken before it was oiled.

It feels great to be weaving on a documentable loom. Because it breaks down into pieces it's also very convenient for taking to camping events. The goodly length means you can go for a long time without having to reverse your twine direction (As I've mentioned before, it does make it very inconvenient for setting up in the living room!).

If I had one complaint it would be that the crossbar is right where my knees want to be when sitting on my chest seat which means I can't have my lap directly below where I'm weaving so the bobbins can drop there when not in use. This could easily be fixed with a lower or higher seat of course (the chest seat does OK when turned on its side). It does show the upside of the overhead crossbar as seen in many 14th and 15th century illuminations such as the picture at right from a festal missal of Savoy, ca. 1460 (The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KB 128 D 30).

I'll end with a picture of me using the loom; as you can see, in contrast to the ladies sitting at their looms in illuminations who are facing more or less perpendicular to the loom, I am sitting at an oblique angle due to the knee-high crossbeam. There seems to be no consensus in illumnations as to whether the weaving progresses from right to left as in this photo, or from left to right. I'll touch on this topic more in a later post.

Knotwork belt

2010-05-30T13:38:00.000+12:00

Warp: Red silk
Weft: Really thin red silk
Brocade weft: 3x Anchor lame gold
Pattern: Knotwork brocade, based on 11th century Swiss pattern
Cards: 67
Width: 3.5cm
Length: 2m

This band is a belt for Sinech, a local SCAdian who does beautiful embroidery. Her persona is 8th century Irish but lacking documentation for tablet weaving going on around there we decided on a knotwork pattern based on a band from 11th century Riggisberg, Switzerland. It's on page 170 of EPAC. The original had 146 tablets but I created a dumbed down version with only 67.

I wove this band on the inkle loom, like the last one. Here's a picture of it in progress. Brocade weft coverage is not great but the pattern is still quite striking. Since this is a belt I put slits in the blank areas of the pattern in the middle section of the band. This worked a lot better than it did on the "Anglo-Saxon" belt from last year- the slits are pretty much invisible. This is more an artefact of the weaving technique and materials (much denser warp) than any improvement in my weaving I think.

It occurred to me recently that since we have a scanner I should really be scanning my bands with that rather than bugging my flatmate with the fancy camera to photograph them all the time. So here's a scan of this band. Obviously the downside of this plan is you can only see 30cm of it. You can get it in quite high resolution if you click on it though.

Hopefully I'll eventually get a picture of the finished belt- I'm leaving the sorting out of the buckle (and belt tip if she wants one) in Sinech's hands.

Hello my Polish friends

2010-05-26T22:33:00.001+12:00

I turned on Google Analytics recently and have discovered that Poland is right up there with New Zealand (where I live) and the US in terms of number of visits to this blog, over 3x more than Australia and Denmark which are tying for 4th place. Additionally, Poland makes up over 40% of my worldwide direct traffic! Not that it isn't great to have you around but I am curious as to what led you here. Would anyone like to offer an explanation in the comments?

A bonus fun fact is that over 80% of all my visitors are on Windows but only 12% are using Internet Explorer :-)

Wooden Bobbins

2010-05-22T20:25:00.000+12:00

Here are the different types of wooden bobbin I have been using recently. All three are made by local artisans. The top one is made by Ronan Mac Brian and is inspired by the reel in The Medieval Household- the same one pictured in this post in Haandkraft. This bobbin wasn't designed for tablet weaving and the wide section is just a little top wide for passing through the shed. It works very nicely for reeling thread onto, which is handy for when you want to do a continuous warp and need to have the same colour on more than one reel.

The second one is one of three is by Lowrans Wilyamson and along with the warp spreader he made me was payment for the bands I made for his Lady earlier this year. He made them after a discussion we had about the bobbins in the Hours of Catherine of Cleves although as you can see they aren't that similar. Lowrans wasn't at all sold on the bifurcation- partly because I couldn't think of a good reason for it, and partly because it would have been a pain to turn on his lathe.

These bobbins are a bit painstaking to reel because of the narrow stem so Lowrans has made me some more of the third type above. These ones were inspired by finds detailed in Craft, Industry and Everyday Life: Wood and Woodworking in Anglo- Scandinavian and Medieval York" by Carole A. Morris (right). The point makes it easier to find the shed.

Evebo Animal Frieze

2010-05-20T10:20:00.001+12:00

I recently noticed that I am the #1 hit on Google for 'evebo pattern' (and second for 'evebo "tablet weaving') which has made me feel a little guilty since there's no such pattern to be found here.

However, there is a pattern to be found on the web- you need to join the SCA-Card-Weaving yahoo group to access it, but the group has all sorts of interesting discussions and if you're keen enough on tablet weaving to be into 3/1 broken twill, you'll probably enjoy being on it anyway. If not, you can set the group to not send you any emails, or join it just long enough to get the file. The pattern is in the Files section, in a file called "Evebo creatures.zip". It is in GTT format. You can download GTT from here.

Hopefully that will alleviate my guilt!

"Middle Eastern" band

2010-05-16T20:26:00.000+12:00

Warp: Dark green and yellow silk
Pattern: Egyptian diagonals, based on middle-eastern emboridery
Cards: 56
Width: 4.5cm
Length: 65cm

Lacking any actual tabletwoven bands to base the pattern I was weaving for my friend Maheshti on, we ended up deciding on a pattern from a medieval middle-eastern embroidery sampler. Unfortunately I forgot to note down the name of the book or any more specific information- I will ask Maheshti and see if she remembers!

The pattern is very diagonal-centric, so I decided to use Egyptian diagonals for it. As mentioned in my previous post, this is even less documentable than other techniques such as doubleface and brocade, but it fits the pattern well, Maheshti didn't seem bothered, and I'll be honest, it's not like I have much excuse to make Egyptian diagonal bands for my own uses so I may as well take what chances I get.

This is the first band where I have created the pattern myself. Luckily it's pretty easy to do with this technique.

I decided to weave this band on my flatemate's inkle loom. Although I love my Oseberg loom (which I will blog about soon, promise!) a six foot loom isn't really practical for using in front of the TV in the living room, which is where I like to do most of my weaving. The inkle loom is not period, but it is very portable and doesn't dominate the room.

The reversals in this pattern are not too frequent so the weaving went quite quickly. As with the Finnish S-motif band I did earlier in the year, I flipped the cards rather than dividing them into forward- and backward-turning packs. And as with that band, this was really hard on the cards! As the band progressed, the cards began to fall apart (mostly by having the holes rip out) and I kept having to sellotape them back together. By the end, almost all the corners (except for the border cards, which were never flipped) were taped up, and the tape was catching on things, and the whole thing was a bit of a nightmare. You might think this was an argument against using playing cards with this technique, but I think actually it would have been a lot harder to flip more rigid cards. I think if I was doing it again I would stop halfway through and re-thread with a new set of cards.

(Flimsy) Evidence for Tablet Weaving in the Medieval Middle East

2010-05-01T20:24:00.000+12:00

Happy AS 45, everone.

A friend of mine recently asked me to do some Middle Eastern tablet weaving for her. I set to work, looking to see what I could document. Result? Nothing. I don't know whether they weren't doing tablet weaving in period, they were but the evidence doesn't survive or isn't widely available in English, or if I'm just looking in the wrong places. My friend wasn't going to let that get in the way of some pretty trim, so I changed my focus from "What tablet weaving did they do in the Middle East?" to "What is the least implausible technique to use for tablet weaving in the Middle East?" The answer I came up with was brocaded or doubleface. Please note that I am NOT suggesting that I have evidence that these techniques were practised in the Middle East in period. All the examples I could come up with were a) created either outside the Middle East or out of period and b) made by Christians (My friend's persona is Arab). It's just the best guess I could make with the information I have.

There are 2 brocaded bands from Israel mentioned in EPAC: a piece of 7th century trim from Coptic Egypt, and a medieval fragment from a Crusader church. A doubleface band from Coptic Egypt (10th century) features on p. 172 of Collingwood. There are also the Jerusalem Garters, which date from the mid-17th century onward, pictured on p. 169 of Collingwood.

If anyone out there knows of any tabletwoven bands from the Medieval Middle East, I would love to heard about them. Meanwhile, what technique did I use for my friend's band? Egyptian diagonals. Well, the pattern she wanted was just crying out for them, and it's not as though I'll have much opportunity to make Egyptian diagonal bands documentable to my own persona. The writeup of that band will follow shortly.

Period bands in Collingwood

2010-04-11T20:24:00.000+12:00

Peter Collingwood's The Techniques of Tablet Weaving is probably the most comprehensive book out there on tablet weaving in general. It also contains a lot of information on (SCA) period bands. However since the book is organised by technique and not by time or place, it can be hard to track these details down. Below for my own reference and that of other people is a list of items from the SCA period that I have found from skimming the 2002 book. If you notice something I've missed (and I'm bound to have missed something!) please let me know.

p108, 208, plate 167 Maniple of St Ulrich, diagonals and brocading
p109 Egyptian diagonals including medieval Finnish bands
p114, 217 12th century Sicilian Orphrey, diagonals and brocading
p117 12th century belt of Philip of Swabia, checkerboard effect with warp twining
p119 9th-10th century Germanic (Augsburg and Speyer) bands, lettering with warp twining
p122 "Anglo-Saxon" belt with card idling- more recent research suggests this belt is probably from the medieval period
p132 hunting horn belt of Herzon Julius van Braunschweig 1580-90, six-hole three-thread pattern
p137 Snartemo V
p 148 Danish bronze age hopsack
p149 9th-10th century Speyer, hopsack with warp floats
p152 late medival Icelandic antependium, hopsack with floats and warp twining
p155 early medieval St Maurice Switzerland plain weave and warp floats
p165 Iron age Dätgen, Germany, 2/1 twill
p196 12th century English/Scottish seal tags, doubleface
p199 Girdle from Iron age Dätgen, Germany, half turns between picks
p208 Viking (Evebo, Snartemo, Setrang) and other sources double faced 3/1 broken twill (Evebo pattern is on p221)
p212 picture of 12th centry stole from Arlon, Belgium, 3/1 broken twill
p219 12th century German "Aardvark pushing a lion mask" 3/1 broken twill + brocade
p233-235 Mammen, Denmark 3/1 broken twill
p239 Section on brocade begins, loads of period stuff
p258 Evebo tapestry
p278 12th century Durham, transposed warp

Finnish band- Egyptian Diagonals

2010-03-28T21:23:00.000+13:00

Note: This pattern doesn't match exactly what's in Hansen; you can see an updated version here

Warp: White and light green silk
Pattern: Kaukola 'S' motif
Cards: 15
Width: 1cm
Length: 1.1m

I wanted to try a non-brocaded pattern at Canterbury Faire and this seemed like a pretty gentle introduction. This is the band from Kaukola mentioned on page 109 of Collingwood. It is from 11th-13th century Finland. It is covered in Hansen, pattern included. This is the first time I've tried to follow a non-brocade pattern out of Hansen. People had warned me that Hansen's patterns are not the clearest but this was my first personal encounter with them (It didn't help that I was working from the Danish version of the book). In the end I abandoned the pattern and just worked it out from the picture of the reconstruction. The pattern is only 7 tablets wide so it wasn't too hard to work out and would have been trivial if I'd done any patterns with Egyptian diagonals before. Here is my diagram of the pattern, a la Phiala's Snartemo patterns. The red and blue horizontal lines indicate flipping the cards, or changing the direction in which they turn, if that's your preference- but I think flipping them is much easier to keep track of with this sort of pattern.

Once I'd worked out what I was doing the band went quickly at about 20cm per hour. I didn't know what I was going to do with it at the time.

Near the end of the event, I was wearing my blue T-tunic. It's the oldest piece of garb I still possess (so old it's machine sewn!) and it also happens to feature my very first piece of tablet weaving. It was an 8-card chevron pattern just like I was teaching at Canterbury Faire this year, and I didn't have a clue what I was doing, and consequently screwed it up quite regularly (I don't think I even had it threaded properly now I look at it). When I came to sew it on to the tunic I didn't quite have enough where the pattern wasn't a complete disaster so at the back of the neck I tried to piece the shorter better-looking pieces together. Here's a picture of the shameful result. I always do my best to cover up the back with my veil or headrail, but a comment from a certain gentle at Canterbury Faire about how she "liked the way" I had hidden the dodgy areas finally alerted me to the fact that this wasn't working very well.

The tunic is still doing fine so it now bears this new band. In terms of authenticity I'm not really sure whether a band in a technique only documented to the Baltic region is an improvement on the chevron that was there before, but it looks much prettier.

Name Change

2010-03-24T21:24:00.000+13:00

Well, I think the time has come- the next two bands I will be writing about are not brocaded. So I've changed the name of the blog to "Adventures in Historical Tabletweaving". There will be more brocaded bands, but they probably won't be in the majority any more.

More Tablet woven bands in Sakrale Gewänder des Mittelalters

2010-03-21T15:10:00.000+13:00

Here are the details on the further tablet woven bands I found when going through Sakrale Gewänder des Mittelalters. In addition there were a few that mentioned tablet woven bands without giving any details on their composition, and many more that mentioned "gold bands" which I assume were probably tablet woven.

5. Two fragments of a cingulum (Augsburg, Diocesan Museum, late 9th century)

a) Red tablet-woven silk band with narrow, yellow-green edges. Inscription, created through different directions of the warp strands: IN NOMINE DOMINI AILBECUND VE ... VXPI (Christ) IHEV (Jesus) NOSTRI IN NOMINE DOME (Domini). The end of the band is bound with gold bands. In the middle of the band are sewn on little silver frames (5x4cm), in which under glass one finds a piece of silk (probably little bits of the sewn-on stripes from b). On the back side of the silver frame, seal impressions. Length 123.5cm, width 3.8cm. Materially and technically belonging together with Queen Hemma's girdle. German, late in the 9th century. Originally formed together with b) a cingulum or a stole. Mounting from the 16th century.

b) Silk band like a). Inscription: .OMINE DOMINI NO(stri). On this band is sewn on a narrow, tablet-woven band of red, blue, white and green warp strands with mythical animals in rectangular fields. One fragment of this stripe is bound in a silver application from a). At the end of the silk band a silver closure of the 14th century - length 35.5cm, width 3.8cm

South German, late in the 9th century. Originally formed together with a) a cingulum or a stole. Sewn-on stripes from the same time or a bit later, possibly Islamic. Mounting from the 14th century

7. Maniple of St Ulrich (Andechs, Pilgrimage church, treasury, 10th century)

Band of linen and silk, white with brown edges. Pattern: Two crosses repeat beside one another, alternatingly filled with a lion and a bird. In between leaf tendrils. In the border stripes yellow zigzag lines with axes (?). At both ends diagonal stripes of lilac silk and with knotted on silk fringe in dark violet, pink, white and brown. - Length 124cm, width 4.5cm. In a statement of the Andechser Heiltüm of 1457 a "Hand fan" of St Ulrich is included. The maniple may actually date from the 10th century. Pattern and material show similarities with a stole in St Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg, that is likewise connected with the name of St Ulrich.

This is NOT the Maniple of St Ulrich with the Hand of God on it (That's the one at St Ulrich and Afra) but I assume it is tablet woven despite the description not saying so.

It's a pity there is no picture of either of these!

Catalogue of Sakrale Gewänder des Mittelalters

2010-03-21T09:24:00.000+13:00

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, here's a list of the contents of Sakrale Gewänder des Mittelalters, in case it's of use to anyone. If anyone happens to be interested in one of the items here let me know and I'll provide the text and/or picture(s) of the item in question. It's a bit long so it's after the jump. Sorry for any oddities in the translation. Items in italics come with pictures.

While writing this up I found a few more mentions of tablet weaving, which I'll write up separately.

1. Hunting materials (Nuremburg, Germanisches Museum, Persia around 600)
2. So-called cloak of St Alexander (Ottobeuren, Benedictine abbey church, 6th-7th century)
3. Reliquary materials (Regensburg, Cathedral treasury)
a) Two silk fragments (8th century Syrian-Egyptian)
b) Red silk with gold-brown pattern (Islamic, 8/9th century)
c) Seven fragments of silk (East Iran, 8th/9th century
4. Cingulum of the Bishop Witgarius of Augsburg (Augsburg, Diocesan Museum, 9th century)
5. Two fragments of a cingulum (Augsburg, Diocesan Museum, late 9th century)
a) Red, tablet-woven silk band
b) Silk band like a)
6. Eagle flight of Alexander the Great from the Wurzburg cathedral treasury (Wurzburg, Mainfrankisches Museum, probably 10th century)
7. Maniple of St Ulrich (Andechs, Pilgrimage church, treasury, 10th century)
8. Chasuble of Augsburg Cathedral (Augsburg, Dicoesan museum, 13th century)
9. Chasuble of Augsburg Cathedral (Augsburg, Dicoesan museum, 10th/11th century)
10. Book binding (Munich, Bavarian City Library, around 1000)
11. Chasuble of St Willigis of Aschffenburg (Munich, National Museum, around 1000)
12. Chasuble of St Gotthard (Benedictine abbey church, Niederaltaich, Sacristy, around 1000)
13. Cingulum of St Gotthard (Benedictine abbey church, Niederaltaich, Sacristy, German, start of the 11th century)
14. Pontifical shoe of St Gotthard (Benedictine abbey church, Niederaltaich, Sacristy, German, start of the 11th century)
15. Panniselus (?) on the abbot's staff of St Gotthard (Benedictine abbey church, Niederaltaich, Sacristy, headpiece German, flag islamic, start of the 11th century)
16. Chasuble of St Wolfgang (Regensburg, St Emmeram, 11th century)
17. Chasuble of St Albuin (Brixen, cathedral treasury, 10th century)
18. "Choir mantle of St Kunignunde" (Bamberg, cathedral treasury)
19. Star mantle of Emperor Heinrich II the Holy (Bamberg, cathedral treasury)
20. Tunic of Emperor Heinrich II the Holy (Bamberg, cathedral treasury, before 1127)
21. Silk material, from the Bamberg cathedral treasury (Munich, Bavarian National Museum, start of the 11th century)
22. Silk material, from the Bamberg cathedral treasury (Munich, Bavarian National Museum, start of the 11th century)
23. Silk material, from the Bamberg cathedral treasury (Munich, Bavarian National Museum, Islamic)
24. Riding cloak of Emperor Heinrich II the Holy (Bamberg, cathedral treasury, 11th century)
25. Cloak of St Kunigunde (Bamberg, cathedral treasury, before 1127)
26. Rationales (?) (Bamberg, cathedral treasury, 11th century)
27. Regalia of Pope Clement II from is grave in the west choir of the Bamberg cathedral (11th century)
a) Chasuble b) Pluvial c) Dalmatic d) Pontifical hose e) Cingulum f) Stole g) Gloves h) Pallium i) Mitre
28. Girdle of St Kunigunde (Bamberg Cathedra, South Italian or Spain, 11tth/12th century)
29. Stole (Andechs, Pilgrimage Church, treasury)
30. Fragment of the skirt of St Elisabeth (Andechs, Pilgrimage Church, treasury, 11th century)
31. So-called stole of Johannes Evangelist (Andechs, Pilgrimage Church, treasury, 11th/12th century
32. Lion fabric (Passau, cathedral treasury, Mesopotamia, 11th century)
33. Rug of St Gereon in Cologne (Nuremburg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Cologne, end of the 11th century)
34. Chasuble of the blessed Hartmann (Brixen, cathedral treasury, 12th century)
35. Mitre of the blessed Hartman (Brixen, cathedral treasury, 12th century)
36. Gloves of the blessed Hartmann (Polling, former Augustine choir, 12th century)
37. So-called mitre of St Otto (Bamberg, St Michael's, 12th century)
38. So-called stole of St Martin (Aschaffenburg, monastery church treasury, German, 11th/12th century)
39. So-called stole of St Aureus (Aschaffenburg, monastery church treasury, German, 12th century)
40. So-called mass robe of St Peter (Andechs, PilgrimageChurch, treasury, Egypt, 12th century)
41. Stole (Andechs, Pilgrimage Church, treasury, 12th/13th century)
42. Maniple (Andechs, PilgrimageChurch, treasury, German, 12th century)
43. Reliquary bag (Nuremburg, Germanisches Museum, Byzantine, 11th century)
44. Reliquary bag from the Augsburg Cathedral (Augsburg, Diocesan Museum, German, end of the 12th century)
45. Chasuble of St Willibald (Eichstätt, cathedral, 12th century)
46. "Mitre of St Otto" (Bamberg, cathedral treasury, 12th century)
47. Components of the regalia of Bishop Otto II
a) Dalmatic of white silk b) Pontifical shoe of silk
48. Pontifical glove (Brixen, cathedral treasury, around 1200)
49. Components of regalia (Passau, cathedral treasury, end of the 12th century)
a) Tunicella b) Dalmatic
50. Alb (Munich, Bavarian National Museum, German, beginning of the 13th century)
51. Mitre from the abbey Seligenthal b. Landshut (Munich, Bavarian National Museum, English, early 13th century)
52. Pouch, unstitched (Passau, cathedral treasury, South German, start of the 12th century
53. Reliquary pouch, unstitched (Passau, cathedral treasury, start of the 13th century)
54. Mitre of St Wolfgang (Regensburg, St Emmeram, South German, middle of the 13th century)
55. Chasuble (Munich, Bavarian National Museum, German or Italian, 13th century)
56. Antependium from Lüne Abbey (Hamburg, Museum for Art and Craft, Regensburg, middle of the 13th century)
57. Half silk material (Augsburg, St Ulrich and Afra, Regensburg, 13th century
58. Altar fronal of Bishop Heinrich von Rotteneck (Regensburg, cathedral treasury)
59. Reliquary box (regensburg, cathedral treasury, South German, middle of the 13th century)
60. So-called Heinrich's garments (Regensburg, old chapel, around 1300)
a) Chasuble b) Dalmatic c) Tunicella d) Chasuble e) Tunicella f) Dalmatic
61. Rationale (Regensburg, Cathedral Treasury, Regensburg, middle of the 14th century)

Viking Bobbins

2010-03-08T22:23:00.000+13:00

As mentioned in the previous post, theses bobbins were part of the payment for the Birka 6 bands I'm making for Bjorn. They are based on an item in the Swedish Historical Museum (pictured below). In addition, they look a little like the bobbin in the picture at the end of this post, which a scene of the annunciation from a Festal Missal of Savoy (Den Haag, KB 128 D 30, fol. 37r, c. 1460).

The bobbins work well for tablet weaving, having a wide neck making them quick to wind thread onto, but a narrow profile making them easy to pass through the shed. However, lacking any notches or other way to stop them from unravelling, they do tend to unwind when in use which can be a bit annoying.

Birka 6

2010-02-25T22:08:00.000+13:00

Warp: Dark green silk
Brocade: Spun sterling silver (Devere)
Pattern: Birka 6
Cards: 21
Width: 1.2cm
Length: 2m

This band is for Bjorn, in return for the replica Viking beater in the previous post, as well as a bone pickup stick and some antler bobbins which I will blog about shortly. It is very similar to the other Birka patterns I have done.

Bjorn supplied me with some 28 gauge sterling silver wire to use for the brocade, but I couldn't make it turn corners sharply enough. You can see my attempt to use it at left in the picture below. When that failed I turned to Devere's sterling silver metalic thread around a cotton core. It is very nice to work with, my favourite brocade thread so far. I used it double stranded.

Bjorn liked the band, originally intended for cuffs around his tunic, enough to commission more of the same- this time to go around the neck- in return for a chest, so I'm about to start on a second metre of it.

Beaters

2010-02-21T21:49:00.000+13:00

To the right are the items I have been using as a beater. The ruler is provided not for scale, but because I used it as a beater for all my projects last year. It works very well.

Above it is a bone folder. I'm told it can be bought at any craft store and is used for things like bookbinding and paper crafts (it was a gift). It also works very well, and looks unobtrusive doing it.

The top item is based on an object found at Visby which is thought to be a beater. It is pictured below and you can read about it at ArkeoDok, although apparently since that page was written the item has been more firmly identified as a tablet weaving beater.

All these items look somewhat similar, but they are quite different from the tablet weaving warp beaters depicted in 14th/15th century manuscripts. These are of wood and resemble swords or knives (or sometimes, seem more like baseball bats or popsicles- see the lineup I have assembled below). Eventually I will get myself one of these.

Tablet woven bands in Sakrale Gewänder des Mittelalters

2010-02-18T21:10:00.000+13:00

Every now and then I get a little excited about some book just because it has some passing reference to something I'm currently researching. Sakrale Gewänder des Mittelalters (Hirmer Verlag Muenchen, 1955) piqued my curiosity a few months ago due to being cited by a few people in relation to the Girdle of Witgarius. It happened to be on offer cheap second hand on Amazon at the time and I couldn't help myself. So, what does this book say about the Girdle (my translation from the German)?

Red, tablet woven silk band with narrow, yellow-green edges, in the middle cut into two pieces and sewn together. At both ends trapezoidal end pieces sewn on. Brocade in gold thread forms the field for the inscription in red relief: "WITGARIO TRIBVTI SACRO SPIRAMINE PLENVM x HANC ZONAM REGINA NITENS SANCTISSIMA HEMMA x. On the end pieces, in red and white, the warp creates the pattern: Eagle white on red, correspondingly on the back side red on white, in which on both sides the white is covered in gold thread. The warp is collected at the ends in ten bundles, bound tightly with white silk and finished in each case with a bead. Above and beneath the eagle are diagonal stripes, which were originally studded with pearls. Only 15 such pearls remain. - Length 138cm, width 3.8cm, end pieces 5cm.

It then goes on to talk about similar bands found elsewhere. Not a lot of detail, but still some stuff of interest, so I thought I'd post it here in case anyone else is researching this item. There is also a picture of the side where the lettering is red, but it is no better than the one in Collingwood. Information on this item can also be found on p.237 of EPAC which dates it to between 860 and 876.

There is another tablet woven "belt" pictured in this book so I will include the translation for that as well. It is the Girdle of St Kunigunde:

Tablet woven band of red and blue silk with gold. Probably woven as a stole. Neck piece with checkerboard pattern in blue and red. Both end pieces with doubled brocade of gold thread, patterned with angular tendrils and sparse leaves. At the ends square applications of gilded silver with engraved representations of the evangelists' symbols. 14th century. -Length 142 cm. Cut at the ends. Width 3.8cm.

There is a picture, but all that can really be made out are the "evangelists' symbols" which appear to be an eagle on one end and a winged goat? on the other. This band is on p.238 of EPAC but the information there is just based on the above passage.

In addition to these two tablet woven articles, this book contains many lovely pictures of woven and embroidered ecclesiastical garments from medieval Germany. In retrospect it was a great purchase! In particular it has a picture of the buskins of Pope Clement II, clearly showing they have a separate sole piece, which is a question I was wanting the answer to a while back.

Although not really relevant to this blog, I think I may soon write out a list of the contents in a separate post, which may be of interest to people who a) are thinking of buying the book or b) are madly googling some item that happens to be in it in the hopes of finding a source of information.

Chalton Shuttle

2010-02-16T20:09:00.000+13:00

There is a line drawing of a shuttle on page 36 of Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon England. AD 450-700 by Walton Rogers described as "a bone band-weaver's shuttle, around which the weft would have been wound, from a 7th century settlement at Charlton, Hampshire".

There was some effort a few years ago on the SCA-Card-Weaving list to track down the original object, but details surrounding the 1970s dig seem to be lost to the mists of time.

At Canterbury Faire earlier this month, I had a discussion with a gentle I hadn't met before about this picture. He was a woodworker and spent quite a bit of time over the event working in our encampment, where we had various crafty things going on. Near the end of the event, I came back from somewhere or other to find the below item beside my loom. I didn't see him again to thank him! It's things like this that make Canterbury Faire really special.

This shuttle is wood rather than bone. It is about 10cm long. The flat edge can double as a beater (although the item does not have a lot of heft to it). I have not had a chance to use it yet.

Finished Items

2010-02-14T20:40:00.000+13:00

I finally got some photos of a couple of items I finished long after the tablet weaving for them was complete, and thought I'd share. They are the Kentish band on metal strips on purple silk, which has been turned into the neck and bicep trim in my new day bliaut, and the "Dogs and Flowers" cingulum.

The cingulum lay unfinished for a long time because I couldn't work out how to finish it. I wanted it to look like the one below, which is one of the figures from Chartres cathedral. The dangly bits are tied loosely in a reef knot and the length of them seems to have many horizontal lines. I haven't managed to find any theories on how exactly this was achieved. Obviously the resulting dangly bits must be quite heavy for the knot to stay open like that.

In the end I just bound the length of the ends in (cheap, synthetic) piping. Obviously the materials are way off, but the look is pretty good I think. The knot stays in place no problem, and the weight also means that the centre of the belt stays nice and high around my waist, which I understand is something some people have problems with.

The bliaut is made of purple wool (looks much bluer in these photos than in reality). It has triangluar sleeves, although you can't see them here.

The lacing method is new to me- it is an attempt to recreate the lacing seen on one of the statues on Angers cathedral, where a spiral laced cord passes through gaps in a cord binding at the side opening. The cord binding is made of lucet cord which has itself been luceted. I don't recommend this; it takes forever.

I intended to make the sides narrow enough that the sides would gape as on the statue, but apparently I am squishier than I thought because the gaps closed completely.

Handout on tablet weaving tools

2010-01-26T22:07:00.000+13:00

I'm giving a talk on tablet weaving at Canterbury Faire next week and part of it will be on the tools used. I've made up a short handout on these so I thought I'd put it up here. Sorry- it was too big to convert to Google Docs format, so it's in .doc format, and it's laid out terribly in the Google Docs viewer. Looks alright if you download it.

Warp Spreader

2010-01-18T19:45:00.000+13:00

Pictured is the warp spreader made for me by Lowrens. Also included are the cute bobbins he made me, but I haven't had a chance to use them yet because I made the mistake of sticking the holes in my latest batch of cards too close together which made butterfly bobbins the tool of choice.

My warp spreader is based on Teffania's one, which was designed to look like the items in those 14th and 15th century manuscript pictures. It has 42 holes. I have used it on two bands so far, one with 32 tablets and the other with 33.

Tthe main purposes of the warp spreader are to keep the twines evenly spaced and to stop adjacent cards and their threads from getting tangled. It did both of these things very nicely. It is so nice to be able to stick your hand in the shed next to the weaving and push it towards the warp spreader, and watch all the twist smoothly move down to the far side of the spreader. I recommend using one of these. So now of course I'm going to talk at length about the downsides of them...

1. Your warp threads need to be longer to get through the same amount of weaving. Without a warp spreader, your "working area"- where the shed exists- stretches between the end of the weaving and the ends of the warp threads. With a warp spreader, it stretches from the end of the weaving to the warp spreader, so the thread on the far side of that is additional. Also, if you move the cards too far from the end of the weaving, they become splayed and difficult to manipulate as a pack. You can compensate for this in two ways- by moving your cards closer to the weaving than usual, and by having a greater distance between the end of the weaving and the warp spreader, so the splay increases more slowly. This motivates you to have longer warp threads to play with.

2. As you move the warp spreader up and down the warp (or as the woven portion of the band increases, affecting the proportions of the unwoven section), it affects the tension of the central warp threads compared to the ones near the edge. This means you have to be careful how you adjust the warp spreader.

3. With only 32 or 33 holes in use, the warp spreader was not very stable and kept rolling into a vertical position.

It's possible to mitigate all these factors by instead of having the warp spreader perpendicular to the warp, pulling one end of the warp spreader closer to the weaving than the other. This narrows the the spread of the warp. I *think* this is what Teffania is talking about when she says she "could tilt the whole warp up and down the loom on a gentle diagonal"- I'll have to check with her. It doesn't solve any of these problems completely though.

Despite all this, as I said, using the warp spreader make the weaving more pleasant- and neater! I would quite like to have them in a range of sizes, with different numbers and spacing of holes. We'll see how persuadable Lowrens is!

Photos of the warp spreader in use will come when I manage to get some decent ones.

Cloak trim

2010-01-13T21:57:00.000+13:00

Warp: Blue silk
Weft: Blue DMC embroidery cotton
Brocade: Spun gold (Anchor)
Pattern: 11th-12th century chasuble
Cards: 31
Width: 2cm
Length: 60cm

This is part 1 of the weaving I did for Enith. The pattern is from EPAC, page 180. There's nothing exciting about it except that it was the first brocaded piece I did with the warp spreader (worked very nicely) and I used three strands of the brocade to try to improve coverage. It seemed to work- at least the coverage was much better than the beanie cap trim I did using otherwise identical materials.

Tubular cord

2010-01-02T19:12:00.001+13:00

Warp: Blue, lilac and white silk
Weft: White silk
Pattern: Spiralling stripes
Cards: 9
Width: 0.5 cm
Length: 50cm
What's new: tubular

This is actually part 2 of the weaving I'm doing for Enith, Lowrans's lady, in return for the warp spreader and bobbins he made for me. Part 1 is a brocaded band which goes around the neck of a cloak (I need to borrow my flatmate to get a good photo of it because my camera/photography is terrible at metal thread). Part 2 is a cord for tying the cloak closed. I made it based on the instructions here: http://www.silkewerk.com/tubular.html. The instructions are very easy to follow so I won't elaborate on the technique. I wove the band backstrap style (attached to my belt at one end), with the far end looped around my toe. It took about two hours, which is ridiculously fast compared to brocading!

"Anglo-Saxon" Belt

2009-12-27T09:56:00.000+13:00

UPDATE: it seems this pattern probably isn't Anglo-Saxon after all, but medieval.

Warp: Red, green and white silk
Weft: Green silk
Pattern: Woven in diamonds
Cards: 32
Width: 1 - 2.5 cm
Length: 140cm
What's new: not brocade

OK, so this isn't a brocaded pattern. I'm getting more and more keen to try the various non-brocaded techniques and sometime next year I expect I'll drop the "brocaded" from the blog title. Not yet though because I have 3 brocaded bands queued up after this already.

This pattern comes from a belt from Anglo-Saxon Cambridge. It is described on page 122 of Collingwood (2002 edition), page 53 of Hansen and on Þora sharptooth's site. Reproductions by Þora sharptooth and Shelagh Lewins can be seen online.

This pattern was calling out to me at this particular time because like the Mammen band it involves quarter-turning alternating left and right cards. It is the only non-brocaded piece I've done so far other than the basic eight-card chevron/diamond pattern that so many people do for their first ever tablet weaving experience. Although it looks pretty similar to that diamond pattern, it's actually cunningly designed to look the same on both sides. Instead of smooth lines on one side and jagged ones on the other, the jagged edges are spread between both sides so that neither of them look particularly bad.

I wanted to make a belt to donate to the Fighter Auction at Canterbury Faire with this pattern. I decided to increase the width of the pattern by increasing the central section a couple of times.
It's a bit of a shock to the system going from brocaded to threaded in patterns. When brocading, really the only thing of real signficance (for a somewhat sloppy weaver like myself) is that the brocade has the correct tiedowns. Change the card direction, accidentelly flip a couple of cards on the edge over, change the tension, whatever, it's not going to make a big difference. But with a pattern like this, it's essential the cards stay in configuration. A temporary change in tension can make a very obvious line in the pattern (see around the middle of the picture above). The tension on the individual threads has a major effect on the shape of the diamonds.I wove this band using the new warp spreader made for me by Lowrans Wilyamson, which I will write about in a separate post.

Because this band was for a belt and people seem to prefer their belts to be wider than 1cm, I did my best to let the band grow to a decent width. Looking back I think this was the wrong call because the resulting band is very loose weave and prone to deforming when pulled perpendicular to the warp . Also, the wider the diamonds the more jagged they look (compare my effort with Shelagh Lewins's effort linked to above. The belt ended up about 2.3cm wide although it took a while to get up there. I didn't cut my warp threads long enough so the widening section is going to have to remain as part of the belt.

To make the belt holes I ran one weft thread through each half of the shed, so there is a slit in the middle. This didn't work all that well due the to low warp density as mentioned above and the band is very uneven in width/tension in this area. It was also hard to make the two sides join up again after each hole without pulling the weft tighter and reducing the width of the band. I did get better at this as I went along. Here's a picture from the start of the hole region where it's at its worst.
I'm going to put a buckle and ends from Raymond's Quiet Press on the belt.

Medieval Archaeology (journal)

2009-12-02T12:55:00.000+13:00

For anyone else that didn't know, the first fifty issues of Medieval Archaeology are available for free online, including among many other interesting articles Early Anglo-Saxon Gold Braids by Elisabeth Crowfoot and Sonia Chadwick Hawkes.

Mammen Band Mk II

2009-11-22T19:43:00.000+13:00

This is my second go at the Mammen cuffs after my first was lost in the mail. For the specs see the Mammen band Mk I.

This time through I decided to do away with the whole "edge tablets turn every pick" thing by dropping one tablet (Under the stave on the left side). This means there are an even number and as long as you're throwing the ground weft in the right direction one of the threads of the edge tablet is caught up every pass. Additionally it (theoretically) means that the two twines on the outside of the stave border looks symmetrical- although to be fair I'm not neat enough for it to be an issue.

Additionally I wanted to see whether I could encourage the band to be wider by using thicker tablets- the idea being that if the warp splays slightly outwards rather than inwards as it leaves the weaving the band will be more likely to widen than narrow. Since I still don't have any proper tablets yet I achieved this by gluing multiple playing cards together. It may have worked a little since this time through the band was 2cm wide rather than 1.5. I was really trying to keep the band wider though so I'm not sure how much of that can be attributed to the cards. Also they were kinda annoying due to substandard gluing. It's really time I got some proper tablets!

2cm was enough for this band to reach the hallowed goal of having a weft density as high as its warp density! Wow! You wouldn't really want it any higher than that (17 or 18 picks per cm).

Narrow Mammen band

2009-11-06T22:59:00.000+13:00

Warp: Lilac silk
Weft: Lilac linen
Brocade: Spun gold + silver (Kreinik jap)
Pattern: Wide Mammen band
Cards: 17
Width: 1cm
Length: 70cm
What's new: 2 different brocades, turning alternating cards

This one was executed just the same as the wide mammen band. The pattern is from Egon Hansen's Tabletweaving but I had to take a stab at the location of the silver bits myself based on the Danish National Museum's photos. I didn't take any photos of this one before sending it up to Iarnulfr so I guess it lives only in my memory :(

What's going on?

2009-10-19T12:47:00.001+13:00

I recently returned from a 7-week holiday which is why there have been no posts. Actually since then I completed the thin Mammen band to go with the wide one in the previous post. I forgot to photograph it before I posted it up to Iarnulfr with the wide one. Unfortunately, on Wednesday Iarnulfr received the envelope I posted them in- still sealed, empty! My bands have either been lost or stolen on their journey. Neither makes a whole lot of sense.

The bands have been reported missing and I will take on another small project while waiting to see of anything comes of that (I doubt it). If they haven't turned up by the time that's done, I will weave the wide one again, incorporating a couple of changes I thought of while weaving it the first time. It's more about the process than the finished result after all.

I'll post a short entry on the narrow band, which I doubt I'll be motivated enough to re-do since it was not as challenging.

I won't be sending bands through regular mail again. Seems obvious when you think that at minimum wage, there was at somewhere around NZD1500 of labour in there!

Mammen band

2009-07-26T09:06:00.000+12:00

Warp: Lilac silk
Weft: Lilac linen
Brocade: Spun gold + silver (Kreinik jap)
Pattern: Wide Mammen band
Cards: 35
Width: 1.5cm
Length: 2 x 30cm
What's new: 2 different brocades, turning alternating cards

A couple of months ago I came across the Danish National Museum's page on the Mammen textile finds. It lets you zoom right in and look at the detail. The arm bands are gorgeous and I decided I wanted to give them a go. They differ in 2 major ways from any of the bands I've woven previously:

1. The cards aren't all turned at once. Peter Collingwood describes this band as having the cards threaded in 2 holes and turned as a pack but EPAC says they were threaded in 4 holes and the odd and even cards were turned in alternate picks (The edge cards are still turned every pick). I decided to go with EPAC's interpretation since I've already tried the 2-hole thing. Turning the cards half as often means you can get a higher weft density.

2. There are two brocading wefts: silver and gold. Thanks to the stave border, there is gold in every pick. Silver appears in most picks. You can't just pass both brocade wefts through the main shed because the brocade will bulk out the picks and lower the weft density. EPAC describes the method of using two brocade wefts on p. 112. The "background" weft (in this case the gold) passes from selvage to selvage, going through the main shed in areas showing the background colour, and then diving right to the back of the band in areas where the "foreground" (silver) brocade weft shows. The foreground weft does not go all the way to the selvage but only passes back and forth in the area where it shows on the top of the band. A consequence of this is that the background weft shows on the back (with no tiedowns) in the areas where the foreground weft shows on the front.I got the pattern for this band out of Egon Hansen's Tabletweaving. It's been tweaked slightly so that the silver diamonds show a cross motif rather than a fylfot.

I've had no luck contacting my silk supplier recently so I ended up dying some of my white silk with Rit dye. There was a brief period where I was very alarmed about the bright purple I ended up with, but enthusiastic rinsing got it down to a colour that could plausibly caused lilac!

I'm still using playing cards for my tablets. I threaded them up with alternating sides up so that (combined with the rectangular shape of the cards) it would be easy to spot when all odd cards were in one orientation and all even ones in another. This has probably saved me a lot of time.

Because of the hoopla going on with turning the cards, I couldn't really weave this band with the cards suspended in midair as I usually do. I know some people swear it's impossible to do brocaded tablet weaving without a board to rest the cards on but it hasn't been my experience- although it would probably have helped with the 2-hole band. But for this one, with the cards in different orientations, I really needed something to rest them on. I'm using a stack of boardgames and jigsaw puzzles, which is probably a bit sub-optimal, but works!

I tried separating the cards out into odd and even packs to make it quicker to turn the half packs, but it just made a huge mess. I've gone back to having them as one pack. I turn each card individually on picks 1 and 3. On pick 2 I turn the odd cards as a pack to catch up with the even cards (turning the edge cards by hand) and on pick 4 I turn the even cards backward as a pack and then rotate the whole pack forward (it's easier to move cards from a vertical to a horizontal orientation than vice versa).

The first four picks of this band went excruciatingly slowly. With the 2 brocade wefts you can't really use a pickup stick to raise the tiedowns. It's quicker to just pass the brocade weft under them individually. But I've got into the rhythm of it now and am managing to do about 2cm per hour. It's coming out at 14 picks/cm which is higher than usual but still only half as many as the original, even though the band is about the same width.

Bands with light-coloured grounds tend to looks less striking than ones with dark coloured ones, but I don't think this one is looking too bad (or too different from the original, my woeful weft density aside).

Kentish band

2009-07-25T21:08:00.000+12:00

Warp: Purple silk
Weft: White linen
Brocade: Gold strip
Pattern: "Sarre 94" - Kentish pattern
Cards: 9
Width:7mm
Length: Approx. 1.2 metres
What's new: Metal strip brocade, brocade on both sides (in places)

I wanted to do a band using metal strips and the Kentish bands seemed most appropriate. The pattern is one from Þora sharptooth's site (It's also on Ælfflæd's Saxon Rabbit which has a wider variety of Kentish patterns). I altered it slightly to make it symmetrical to my eye. I used a white linen weft because I wanted to see what it looked like- linen was often used as a weft but it probably wasn't dyed to match the warp-not always anyway. The contrasting weft shows up at the edges and looks alright if the weaving is perfect, but is very unforgiving of aberrations.

The metal strip I used was uncoiled Rajmahal Sadi thread. It makes for a very thin strip. I used it double. It didn't seem very annoying to use but I seemed to be going a lot slower than usual considering the simplicity of the pattern.

I recently bought some purple wool to make into a "day bliaut" and I decided to use this band for that despite the Dark Ages nature of the band- it's pretty hard to distinguish from bands with the Anchor Lame thread even from close up. Because I wanted the band to go around the keyhole neck of the garment I thought I'd give a go to switching the side of the band the brocade shows on, so it can turn a 90 degree corner with a fold (hope that makes sense). For about 2cm around the corner I brocaded both sides.

I wove enough for bicep bands in addition to the neck decoration. I was originally considering doing more of this pattern for the wide cuffs of the bliaut, but I got too bored so I guess that's not going to happen.Update: you can see the finished "day bliaut" here.

Neuper #29

2009-06-28T22:13:00.000+12:00

Warp: Purple silk
Weft: Purple silk
Brocade: White silk
Pattern: Anna Neuper #29
Cards: 29
Width:1.7cm
Length: Approx. 1.2 metres
What's new: Tiedowns under 1 thread

I just got a copy of Anna Neuper's Modelbuch (as published by Nancy Spies and Ute Bargmann). This is a book of brocaded tablet weaving patterns as recorded by Anna Neuper, a nun from Nuremberg, in 1517, at the time when tablet weaving was dying out in favour of other decorative fibre techqiques such as lacemaking. The patterns are all pretty obvious and geometrical. They're all pretty similar to the pattern I used on my garters back in my first brocaded tablet weaving experiment.

I was going to start the Mammen bands next but it's taking a while to get the silk. So I thought I'd make one of the patterns from this book. I don't have an immediate use for it so I may donate it as a prize for the Fighter Auction Tourney at Crescent Fence in August.
For this band I am using a double thickness of white silk for the brocade, and (for the first time) tiedowns under one thread only- except for the card at each edge, since this makes it look neater. I'm making the pickups as suggested in Peter Collingwood's Techniques of Tablet Weaving which I've also just got. The cards are rotated a 1/8 turn after passing the ground weft, so that one thread in each card is higher than all the others, and then pickups are made from there (plus some stuffing around to deal with the edge cards).

Birka 22

2009-06-28T21:19:00.000+12:00

Warp: White wool
Weft: DMC linen
Brocade: Wool
Pattern: Birka 22
Cards: 21
Width:1.7
Length: Approx. 0.4 metres
What's new: Wool

Birka 22 is the only pattern from Birka found with both silver and gold brocade (the rest are all silver). Next to the simple 8-card threaded in chevron pattern, it seems to be the most common tablet weaving pattern for re-enactors to follow (at least in this corner of the world). However most people don't seem to do it as a brocade pattern. Þora Sharptooth has created a "recipe" for Birka 22 that uses Egyptian diagonals to create the pattern and it seems to have taken on a life of its own. I doubt all the people that have woven it are aware the original Birka bands were brocaded. No slight intended to Þora Sharptooth, whose website is an excellent resource and who is quite clear on the fact that this isn't actually the original form of the pattern.

The wool I used for the warp is from Anna Gratton Ltd. The brocade is wool from Strand New Zealand. This was my first brocaded band woven in wool and it took a little while to adjust. With the silk I've been using (and the linen as far as I recall), you can just use the beater to shove the warp threads apart to create each new shed. With the wool, you actually have to pull the upper and lower threads apart- bashing them with the beater just makes a mess. Coverage is great with the fluffy wool.

This band is going on my linen apron dress.

"Dogs and Flowers" Cingulum

2009-06-20T13:53:00.000+12:00

Warp: Red silk
Weft: DMC Cotton
Brocade: Spun gold
Pattern: "Dogs and flowers", 13th/14th century cingulum, Halberstadt
Cards: 46
Width:2.5cm
Length: Approx. 1.4 metres
What's new: higher number of cards. Intermittent brocade.The warp runs left to right in the pattern above. Also, I have stretched it out so it appears about in proportion to the real thing. This pattern is on page 138 of EPAC. I modified it slightly. I removed 4 picks from the flower, so that it turned out circular when I wove it (as usual I can't get my weft density up as high as the original band). The original had the dog's collar in a contrasting thread, which I couldn't be bothered with, so I also altered it to be gold brocade right through.

I used gold Kreinik jap #7 for the brocade. For the brocaded regions I used polyester thread for the ground weft so I could make the brocade as dense as possible. Between each dog/flower is a region of 20 picks with no brocade. For these regions I used the same silk as the warp for the ground weft. I thought using a thicker thread might make the transitions between the brocaded and non-brocaded regions a bit less jarring. It didn't really work very well. The band was still much thicker (not wider- well, actually the width was a bit all over the place) in the brocaded regions.

Now I'm done I've realised I don't know how to finish a double-wrapped belt so this piece is in limbo until I work that out :(

Update: you can see the finished clingulum here.

Beanie Cap Trim

2009-06-02T09:58:00.000+12:00

Warp: Blue silk
Weft: DMC Cotton
Brocade: Spun gold
Pattern: "Scrolling vine", 13th century cingulum
Cards: 17
Width:1.3cm
Length: Approx. 1.2 metres
What's new: Twill

Beanie caps are one of the distinctive clothing articles of the Germanic region in the 12th century. They can be small and dishlike (kinda like Jewish skullcaps) or more hemispherical. The pictures on the left are from Katherine Barich's picture gallery which has some really awesome pictures, but they aren't well referenced so I'm not sure of their exact source.

I made a beanie cap a while ago but it fit my head pretty poorly so I decided the make another one that was stiff enough to retain its shape when it is worn. This is the first item of clothing I have made specifically to have tablet weaving on it. There are no extant women's beanie caps that I know of but EPAC lists a French 11th/12th century ecclesiastical skullcap with thin tablet-woven bands down the middle of wider bands, which is what I'm doing.

The pattern is a "Scrolling vine" motif from a cingulum (belt) attributed to St Edmund, Archbishop of Canterbury, 13th century. The pattern can be found on page 132 of EPAC.

All the previous bands I've woven had alternating S- and Z-threaded cards but for this one I tried doing a twill band which means having all the bands threaded the same way. Threading all the cards the same way causes the band to spiral when it's not under tension so it's recommended you have one or two threaded in the other direction at one edge, so the band has 15 Z-threaded tablets and 2 S-threaded ones. Warping your band up in a twill configuration lets you do all sorts of exciting things like 3/1 broken twill, but for this band I'm just doing the unexciting all-cards-turn-at-once thing I've been doing with previous bands. The main difference I've observed with weaving a twill band is that reversing the turn direction is much more obvious on the front of the band than with an alternating S and Z setup so you can't just go changing the direction whenever you feel like it.

This is a picture comparing the three ground weaves I've used so far (showing the reverse of the bands). The top one is the regular alternating S and Z 4-hole weave. The middle is the twill weave of this band and the bottom is the 2-hole of the Birka 7 band. I'm assuming the reason that on the top band the S and the Z warps do not look equally tightly wound is due to the the ply of the silk.

The spun gold I'm using for this project is Madeira Metallic No. 10 which is similar to the anchor lame but I think might actually be even thinner. Coverage is not great, but the simplicity of the pattern means this is not a huge issue.The magic of the internet has made the brocade in this pciture look silver. It's gold, I promise (And the top band above is more orangey than the bottom one, too!)

Birka 7 (for tunic?)

2009-05-08T11:58:00.000+12:00

Warp: Red silk
Weft: DMC Cotton
Brocade: Spun silver
Pattern: Birka 7
Cards: 17
Width:6mm
Length: Approx. 1 metre
What's new: 2 holes per card threaded

This is my second project for Iarnulfr, who is now making me a bed. It is very similar to the first band I did for him, except that I have actual red silk now so don't have to dye it myself (with poor results), and I've persuaded him to let me try with only two holes in each card threaded (alternating positions on each card). There are Viking bands where this may have been done (it's also possible that they were threaded with linen and it has completely disappeared).

Iarnulfr isn't sure what this band will be going on yet but it will probably be something tunic-like.

Weaving a band with only two holes threaded per card requires a slightly different technique to 4-hole bands. With 4-hole bands, the warp threads are packed densely and you can pretty much walk away from the weaving without any fear that the cards will slip out of alignment. But because there are only half the warp threads in a 2-hole band, you have to constantly hold the cards in place. So (at least the way I do it) your left hand is always on the card, leaving only your right to manipulate the wefts, which is a bit annoying.

The other issue is that with only 2 holes threaded, and an odd number of cards turning a quarter turn each turn, at one side of the band the ground weft will be looping around one of the absent warp threads, which means that card will be completely fail to be caught up in the band. To get around this I passed the ground weft to the back between the last and second-to-last card and then came back in from the outside. Of course if I'd thought ahead the problem could also have been solved by not following a strict alternating S and Z threading.

On the plus side, the lower warp density meant it was easier to get high weft density, so the brocade coverage is excellent. The band is also a bit wider than I was fearing- about 8-8.5mm compared to 1cm for 4-hole bands with the same number of tablets. Obviously this means it's quite a bit thinner (in addition to being narrower).

Pouch Trim

2009-04-19T09:04:00.000+12:00

Warp: Perle cotton
Weft: DMC embroidery cotton
Brocade: Kreinik jap
Pattern: 15ht century chasuble neckine, Braunschweig (EPAC p. 137)
Cards: 15
Width: 1.3mm
Length: Approx. 40 cm
What's new: Cotton ground, Kreinik jap brocade. No reversal of card turn direction.

This was just a "filler" project while I waited for the materials for my next plans to arrive. The pouch is of green wool with perle cotton lucet cord strings. Perle cotton is not a period material for brocaded tablet weaving but it is a good stand-in for silk for the cheap of heart (actually, the silk I'm using is cheaper by the metre than the perle cotton, but you have to buy twenty times as much). I used the leftovers from the lucet cord for the warp. I think it is DMC perle cotton #8, which is quite a thick thread. The brocade is Kreinik jap. For most of it I used a double thickness of #5, which is pretty thin, but near the end I ran out and switched to a single thickness of #12, which has a pretty similar effect.

I got the pattern from EPAC. It is from the band of a neckline of a 15th century chasuble. The original changes the orientation of the diagonals now and then, but I don't like the effect very much so I just kept going in the same direction all the way along.The weaving went alarmingly fast after the experience with a linen warp. I decided to do the whole thing without changing the direction the cards were turning, although I don't think this made any significant difference to the end result. Speaking of the end result, it is pretty striking. And by striking I mean garish. This is probably an inevitability when your warp is pink, but I also think the gold jap looks quite a bit tackier than the Anchor silver lame. I don't know whether that's a modern sensibilities thing or whether it's just unnaturally shiny.

Cuffs on Linen Tunic

2009-04-16T18:28:00.000+12:00

Warp: Linen
Weft: Linen
Brocade: Spun silver
Pattern: Birka 21
Cards: 17
Width: 1cm
Length: Approx. 70cm
What's new: Linen warp

Coloured linen tunics are pretty iffy for the 12th century, but they're cool, so I wear them anyway. Likewise it's probably a bit early for linen tabletweaving, but I wanted to give weaving with a linen warp a go. I had a light brown linen tunic that was as yet unadorned.

The pattern I used was another one from Egon Hansen's Tabletweaving. It is a simplified version of Birka 21. The fylfots are omitted, although honestly I don't think anyone would have noticed if I'd included them, and there are only two scrolly things between each repeat of the tooth motif.

The ground warp and weft are both green DMC embroidery linen. The brocade weft is (again) Anchor silver lame.(The pattern doesn't exactly leap out at you on the band but this photo isn't helping)

I'd been reliably informed it wouldn't be a pleasant experience, because linen breaks very easily under tension. And yep, it isn't much fun. The first thread broke when I was about 4cm in and then they just kept breaking. Here's a picture showing all the broken warp threads sticking out the sides (it's especially bad on the left there, which is where I stopped):It isn't too hard to replace a broken thread. The part of the thread closest to the weaving I draw through the shed and out to the side. Then I thread a new length of the thread through the appropriate card and (using a needle) up into the weaving about where the original thread came out, and through the band a way and out the back where I tie it off. Then I peg the cards up and untie the other end of the warp, pull out the other end of the broken thread, add the new thread and tie it back up.

It does really cut into your progress when it starts happening regularly. Also, the newly added thread doesn't have the same twist in it that the ones that have been there all along have, so you can't just turn the cards the same number of times forward as back to end up with the warp untwisted. After a while you can start re-using the broken warp threads again (they almost always break between the cards and the weaving) but nevertheless you go through the thread you're using for the warp pretty quickly, which is more depressing than actually having to replace the broken threads.

In the end I had to stop sooner than I wanted too, just because I ran out of linen for the warp. I had been intending to do collar trim for the tunic as well as cuffs but in the end there wasn't enough.

Birka 2

2009-04-01T10:47:00.000+13:00

Warp: Silk
Weft: Linen
Brocade: Spun silver
Pattern: Birka 2
Cards: 17
Width: 10mm
Length: 114cm
What's new: Doubled-up spun silver brocade, linen weft

This project is for my friend Iarnulfr, in return for a chest he made at Canterbury Faire. Originally it was for the cuffs and collar of his brown Russ coat, but when coat and trim were finally in the same place it was determined that the colours clashed so its final purpose is now unknown.

The pattern is Birka 2 (chosen by Iarnulfr). I got it out of "Tablet Weaving" by Egon Hansen. Iarnulf wanted the ground to be red, so I dyed some of my white silk red with Dylon- unsurprisingly it turned out sort of orange. The brocade weft is two strands of Anchor lame silver thread, which is basically a very fine jap. The original Birka bands used drawn silver, but I don't have any, so the jap will have to do.

The weaving went very smoothly although again there was a fair bit of variation in the band width.

Hose Trim and Garters

2009-03-19T20:32:00.000+13:00

Warp: Silk
Weft: Silk
Brocade: Silk
Pattern: 15th century chasuble. Munich (EPAC p. 144)
Cards: 9/21
Width: 6mm/12mm
Length: 60cm/60cm

For my first band I picked the pattern in EPAC which used the fewest cards. It is from a linen band from a 15th century chasuble. The design is a simple geometric consisting of diamonds and diagonal bars and I think it would not be out of place on 12th century garb.

The purpose of this project was to make garters for my dark blue woolen hose. We have extant hose from the 12th century with garters sewn on at either the front or the back of the hose. This is most excellent, since I've had several garters fall off during events without me noticing until it's too late to recover them. Unfortunately I don't know of any garters that were definitely tabletwoven (in pictures they mostly look like ribbons) but it doesn't sound like the most out there idea ever.

The warp, ground weft and brocade weft are all of Schappe silk from fibreholics. The warp and ground weft are an alarmingly bright blue, and the brocade weft is white. The original band had one-thread pickups but when I tried this it was hard to discern the tiedowns at all so I stuck with 2-thread tiedowns. This is the most common number in extant bands.

Since this was my first band and I wanted to tax my brain as little as possible, I brought the brocade weft all the way to the edge of the band at every pass ("Type 1" turn in EPAC). The brocade weft is clearly visible at the edges of the band.

The band went well once I got going. The chasuble the original band was from also had another, wider band on it and I decided to weave this as well, as trim for the hose. There's a pair of 13th century buskins with a tabletwoven band for trim in the V&A (or at least, fragments of the buskins are there).

The second band used 21 cards. I was unsatisfied with the results of the "Type 1" turns on the narrow band, so used EPAC's "Type 2" turns, where the brocade weft passes to the bottom of the band between the edge card and the next one in. This is the most common turn type in extant bands.

The band went pretty well but there are two aspects I'm unhappy with. One is the density of the brocade. There are clear gaps between each pass. The problem is not so bad on the narrower band so I think part of the issue is that although I was beating the weft equally hard on both bands, the force would have been more distributed on the wider one.

Ways of improving the coverage (other than beating the weft harder) would be to use a thinner thread for the ground weft than for the brocade weft, which would make the passes closer together, or to double up the brocade weft, which would make the passes wider. Both these methods are used in extant bands.

The other issue I had was that the weft tension varied wildly, so the width of the band fluctuated from about 0.9 to 1.3 cm. EPAC suggests measuring the width of the band at each pass. Personally the thought of this fills me with despair, and I just hope that with practice I become good at keeping it even by eye. It was a particular problem with this band because due to my inexperience I have no idea what the "right" width is (the 15th century band is a crazy 3cm wide so no help there).

Here's a (fuzzy) picture of the finished product. The garters are finished in plaits with one card (4 threads) in each strand of each of 3 plaits. I had re-sew the tops of the hose a bit so they were just the right width to get around my calves with a non-stretchy band on them.

Ecclesiastical Pomp and Aristocratic Circumstance

2009-02-11T17:43:00.000+13:00

I'm probably going to refer frequently to this book in this blog. It's great. The first half covers the social context of tabletwoven bands, historical uses for them, and the materials and tools used. The second half starts by giving a bunch of patterns of extent bands, and then goes on to list details (but not patterns) on all the extant bands the author, Nancy Spies, could find. Apparently all the cool kids are abbreviating the book's title as EPAC, so I will do the same.

Hello There

2009-02-11T17:00:00.000+13:00

I'm Amalie von Brisache, resident in the Barony of Southron Gaard in Lochac (or Amy, from Christchurch, New Zealand, if you prefer). I'm from 12th century Swabia but can occasinally be spotted in Viking garb. In the past I've mostly decorated my garb with embroidery, but have decided this year to branch out into brocaded tablet weaving, since it's a) quicker and b) easier to end up with something very similar to extant articles.

I don't have any experience with "real" weaving and the only tablet weaving I've done before is the simple 8-card chevron/diamond shape that most people cut their teeth on in the SCA.

I've decided to blog about the bands I weave in the hopes that this will guilt me into making steady progress- but at the moment I have plenty of ideas and motivation.