Adventures in Historical Tabletweaving

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 t

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the places of two adjacent tablets at the intersection of two diaonal lines works, because Silja says this research is out of date.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 compilat

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