Adventures in Historical Tabletweaving

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

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 :-)

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.

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 thro...

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.

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.