Adventures in Historical Tabletweaving

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)...

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 weavi...