Adventures in Historical Tabletweaving

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...

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: Guido Gehlhaar ( Steinmaus ) Irene Lyng ( Brikvaevning ) Micky V Schoelzke ( les tissages de micky ) One nice this about this band is that because the eyes are drawn to the regions with long flo...

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...