Adventures in Historical Tabletweaving

I spent a lot of time weaving my bicep bands based on the chasuble of St Wolfgang a few years ago, but the end result was very underwhelming.  I used 120 denier loose-spun silk and it really wasn't up to the abrasion it got from the cards. This year I've re-woven it using 240 denier tight-spun silk and the thread came through it without any problems. I also used a better red. The result is so much better! The cards themselves took quite a beating just like they did last time. I think I'll try painting the edges of the cards with nail polish again next time I weave with this type of thread.  Getting enough "real" cards, like wood or bone, for a project with 400+ warp ends would be pretty expensive. I also think that tensioning would be challenging with cards that much thicker since the warp threads on the outside would need to be significantly longer than the ones in the middle.

  Yes, I have completely given up on naming these things.  Maybe it's a flower?  Anyway, here it is, the last of the 5 motifs. I took the photo below, which unusually for me managed to be in focus, and straight away noticed the knot (centre right, in red).  The knot is gone now but I'm glad nobody but the camera is looking that closely!   Here's another photo I thought I'd share.  When I finished the first of the two bands, the cards were a wreck, and when I swapped them all out for new ones I thought I'd try to improve the situation by making the cards a bit stiffer, so I painted nail polish around the edges of all of them.  Well, that worked, as far as making the cards stiffer went.  Not a one of them gave out. On the other hand, it didn't have a great effect on the warp.  This picture is of what greeted me when I moved the cards down about 10cm into the second band.  Threads dying all over the place.  Over the fo...

 This is the second motif I wove, but the first time I did it it was about 40% longer than this and I wasn't very happy with the outcome.  So here's my second attempt. I don't really have much more to say at this point other than that I'm about ready to finish this project and am very glad to have only about 5cm to go! Oh! and also, I bought brocade for the bliaut these bands will be going on and it is very pretty .

Here's another figure from the Chasuble of St Wolfgang: the candlestick. I assume.  It might be a flower, I guess. This is the first figure after I re-strung all the cards.  Most of the many, many knots I tied in my warp threads are hidden on the back of the cards, but some of them slipped into the front while I wasn't looking. For this figure I tried doing as the original seems to have done and making some of the pattern in the ground colour (the blue parts).  It looks OK here, but from many angles the blue rather fades into the background.

Yesterday, Aldygtha created a new Historic Tablet Weaving Facebook group, and it is already filling up with interesting discussions and beautiful photos of members' work.  If you like historical tablet weaving (and you don't hate Facebook!) you should join!

Sorry for the long break between posts, I've had 3 weekends in a row swallowed up by events, and also I may have got a ... little bit ... distracted ... by an embroidery project. OK, so I haven't done any weaving for the last 3 weeks.  And probably won't for another 2 or so, when I finish the first figure in the embroidery and hopefully get it out of my system. Anyway, here's another figure from the Chasuble of St Wolfgang band.  It's actually the 3rd one I wove; the second one doesn't look so great so I'm going to see how it comes out the second time through before posting it.  But this bird looks pretty much like I was hoping.  Here's the link to the photo of the original on Kopert.  Not sure why this bird is holding a boot.

 Right.  Here are some pictures of my lion from the Chasuble of St Wolfgang.  This is the pattern from pages 120-121 of EPAC . The pattern in EPAC is 125 tablets wide, although the description of the band says it has 132 tablets.  Not sure if any "lost" tablets are in the border or the pattern. There's one obvious way that this pattern differs from regular 3/1 broken twill: The vertical (lengthways) cross-sections of the regions where the red is up are not multiples of 2 passes long.  In fact to counteract the difference in warp density and weft density, the lines across the band are usually 1 weft pass wide while the lines down the band are usually 2 tablets (8 warp threads) wide.  When I started, I wasn't sure how to approach this- maybe there should be half turns to bring the red up and down at the right point? Or maybe the red should be brought up early or down late, with the brocade obscuring the jagged edges?  I couldn't tell from the photos ...

Well, it's been a month since my last post, and I've been travelling, and sick, and lazy, so I haven't got around to writing anything up yet.  So here's a somewhat blurry and out-of-date photo of the first couple of centimetres of the St Wolfgang pattern, just to prove I've done something!  There are several mistakes just in this little section of the band but it still manages to look quite pretty. Hopefully I will get  real blog post together soon!

I have a new project.  It is the band on the Chasuble of St Wolfgang (or rather, one of them).  You may have seen the pattern in EPAC on page 120, or plate 179 in Collingwood.  There are photos of the original at Kopert -taken by someone who knows it's useful to show the part of the band where the brocade has worn away!  You can see Nancy's version here but it is not 3/1 broken twill The band is approximately 3cm wide, has over 120 tablets, and is woven in brocaded 3/1 broken twill.  This is the first time I am combining both techniques so it is a bit of an adventure.  To make things even more exciting, I am weaving it using very thin (120 denier) red and blue filament silk from Devere .  For the brocade I am using real gold thread I bought from John Marshall . I'll be weaving on my inkle loom because there's no way I'll be able to keep things neat otherwise. EPAC graphs the first figure from the band, the lion (or aardvark pushing a lion mask,...

Warp: Dark green silk (fibreholics) Weft: Dark green silk (devere) Brocade:  Tambour thread (Hedgehog handworks) Pattern: Taplow Barrow Cards: 23 pattern + 2x2 border Width: 1.2cm Length: 85cm This is just a quick brocade pattern I did while waiting for some other stuff to come together. The pattern caught my eye when it was executed by opusanglicanum not long ago.  Since them I've also spotted a version by Gina-B which made me want to buy the metal strip she used on the spot.  Unfortunately Benton and Johnson's website is under maintenance so I will just have to be patient. The pattern is from page 45 of Crowfoot and Hawkes's Early Anglo-Saxon Gold Braids . I used the tambour thread which I bought after having trouble with the cornering in the Mammen band.  It's definitely more supple- whether it's supple enough I'm not sure yet because the fibreholics silk I used for this warp is about 5x thicker than the devere stuff I used for the Mam...

Warp: Candy silk (devere) and sewing linen Weft: Candy silk Brocade: Spun silver (devere) and gilt passing thread (Hedgehog handworks) Soumak: Red silk (devere) Pattern: Mammen Cards: 23 pattern + 2x7 border Width: 1.5cm Length: 80cm I think this pattern is going to be my nemesis. As you may recall, I have already woven it twice , after New Zealand Post managed to lose it the first time. At the time, pretty much all my information on the band came from Hansen. However, since then I came across Lise Ræder Knudsen's article Brocaded Tablet-Woven Bands: Same Appearance, Different Weaving Technique in NESAT VII, which talks about this band and also some others in a similar style. She has a quite different idea about how the band is constructed: Hansen says that all cards are threaded with silk and the band is executed with "card idling"- ie turn the odd-numbered cards in one pass and the even-numbered ones in the next. Knudsen says that all 4 holes were ...

I do have something more interesting to write about, but work has been a bit draining recently, and I have really not felt like sitting in front of the computer during Fun Time. So in the meantime, here's a picture of a Mouse Guard pouch I made last week with tubular tabletwoven cords. There are 3 cords 80cm each, woven on 4 cards in wool. The spiral is against the twist so the end result does not look spiral-y.

UPDATE: Those of you who wanted a higher-res picture, here is a sample. Warp: Red silk (fibreholics) Weft: Red sewing silk Brocade weft: Anchor gold lame, green and good DMC cotton Pattern: 13th century German, birds and zigzags. EPAC p.143 Cards: 18 ( EPAC pattern has 16, original band had 17) Width: 1.5cm Length: 2 x 40cm It's been an odd 3 months, with earthquake and moving house and other interruptions. This is the first project I've managed to finish in that time. It is a pair of garters to go with a pair of silk hose I made earlier in the year. The pattern can be found on page 143 of EPAC and is from a 13th century band from Memmelsforf bei Bamberg. It depicts birds (eagles?) in two different colours of silk, separated by gold zigzags. That's 3 different brocading wefts- never more than two on the same line though, thank goodness. I wove this band backstrap-style and it's somewhate uneven. The hose are made of red silk lined with pi...

I've known since early on that a twill band will tend to spiral on itself when not under tension, and that the way to counteract this is to have a few cards going in the other direction. EPAC mentions it (p. 68), saying: Generally, at least two tablets at each edge are threaded in the opposite direction, or alternating S and S, to compensate for the twisting of the band which is inherent in this type of weave. I'm sure I read elsewhere that alternating at one end of the band only was sufficient but I can't find a reference for that now. That's what I did for the " scrolling vine " band which was my first foray into twill bands. I didn't have any problem with spiralling so it seemed that doing a SSSSSSSSSSSSZ weave was sufficient to avoid any problems in that area. However, the plain (no brocade) band I've just finished, which was threaded ZSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSZ, had quite an extreme twist on it. It turns out that the "reverse the edges" pla...

Warp: Green silk (colourmart) Weft: Green silk (colourmart) Pattern: card idling monochrome twill Cards: 17 Width: ~1cm Length: ~1m I decided a while ago that I wanted to have a go at the "simulated satin effect" band from Þóra Sharptooth's Three Tablet Weaving Recipes page. So I did- but it seems I did every imaginable thing wrong in the process! Here's a list: No loom: because I was taking this band travelling with me, I did it backstap style. This is the only band I have woven without two fixed tension points (whether it be 2 chairs, my Oseberg loom, or an inkle loom), excluding the tubular cord I did around Christmas. The tension of this band was all over the place Using a new type of silk: This was the first outing of the silk I got from colourmart . The silk from colourmart is great value and the customer service is very friendly, but this silk turned out to be a lot stickier than what I was used to (closer to how wool behaves) which didn't help...

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...

Warp: Dark green and yellow silk Pattern: Egyptian diagonals, based on middle-eastern emboridery Cards: 56 Width: 4.5cm Length: 65cm Lacking any actual tabletwoven bands to base the pattern I was weaving for my friend Maheshti on, we ended up deciding on a pattern from a medieval middle-eastern embroidery sampler. Unfortunately I forgot to note down the name of the book or any more specific information- I will ask Maheshti and see if she remembers! The pattern is very diagonal-centric, so I decided to use Egyptian diagonals for it. As mentioned in my previous post, this is even less documentable than other techniques such as doubleface and brocade, but it fits the pattern well, Maheshti didn't seem bothered, and I'll be honest, it's not like I have much excuse to make Egyptian diagonal bands for my own uses so I may as well take what chances I get. This is the first band where I have created the pattern myself. Luckily it's pretty easy to do with this technique. I de...

Note: This pattern doesn't match exactly what's in Hansen; you can see an updated version here Warp: White and light green silk Pattern: Kaukola 'S' motif Cards: 15 Width: 1cm Length: 1.1m I wanted to try a non-brocaded pattern at Canterbury Faire and this seemed like a pretty gentle introduction. This is the band from Kaukola mentioned on page 109 of Collingwood. It is from 11th-13th century Finland. It is covered in Hansen, pattern included. This is the first time I've tried to follow a non-brocade pattern out of Hansen. People had warned me that Hansen's patterns are not the clearest but this was my first personal encounter with them (It didn't help that I was working from the Danish version of the book). In the end I abandoned the pattern and just worked it out from the picture of the reconstruction. The pattern is only 7 tablets wide so it wasn't too hard to work out and would have been trivial if I'd done any patterns with Egyptian di...

Warp: Dark green silk Brocade: Spun sterling silver (Devere) Pattern: Birka 6 Cards: 21 Width: 1.2cm Length: 2m This band is for Bjorn, in return for the replica Viking beater in the previous post, as well as a bone pickup stick and some antler bobbins which I will blog about shortly. It is very similar to the other Birka patterns I have done. Bjorn supplied me with some 28 gauge sterling silver wire to use for the brocade, but I couldn't make it turn corners sharply enough. You can see my attempt to use it at left in the picture below. When that failed I turned to Devere's sterling silver metalic thread around a cotton core. It is very nice to work with, my favourite brocade thread so far. I used it double stranded. Bjorn liked the band, originally intended for cuffs around his tunic, enough to commission more of the same- this time to go around the neck- in return for a chest, so I'm about to start on a second metre of it.