Knotwork belt

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.

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