Adventures in Historical Tabletweaving

I'm giving a talk on tablet weaving at Canterbury Faire next week and part of it will be on the tools used. I've made up a short handout on these so I thought I'd put it up here. Sorry- it was too big to convert to Google Docs format, so it's in .doc format, and it's laid out terribly in the Google Docs viewer. Looks alright if you download it.

Pictured is the warp spreader made for me by Lowrens. Also included are the cute bobbins he made me, but I haven't had a chance to use them yet because I made the mistake of sticking the holes in my latest batch of cards too close together which made butterfly bobbins the tool of choice. My warp spreader is based on Teffania's one , which was designed to look like the items in those 14th and 15th century manuscript pictures. It has 42 holes. I have used it on two bands so far, one with 32 tablets and the other with 33. Tthe main purposes of the warp spreader are to keep the twines evenly spaced and to stop adjacent cards and their threads from getting tangled. It did both of these things very nicely. It is so nice to be able to stick your hand in the shed next to the weaving and push it towards the warp spreader, and watch all the twist smoothly move down to the far side of the spreader. I recommend using one of these. So now of course I'm going to talk at length abo...

Warp: Blue silk Weft: Blue DMC embroidery cotton Brocade: Spun gold (Anchor) Pattern: 11th-12th century chasuble Cards: 31 Width: 2cm Length: 60cm This is part 1 of the weaving I did for Enith. The pattern is from EPAC , page 180. There's nothing exciting about it except that it was the first brocaded piece I did with the warp spreader (worked very nicely) and I used three strands of the brocade to try to improve coverage. It seemed to work- at least the coverage was much better than the beanie cap trim I did using otherwise identical materials.

Warp: Blue, lilac and white silk Weft: White silk Pattern: Spiralling stripes Cards: 9 Width: 0.5 cm Length: 50cm What's new: tubular This is actually part 2 of the weaving I'm doing for Enith, Lowrans's lady, in return for the warp spreader and bobbins he made for me. Part 1 is a brocaded band which goes around the neck of a cloak (I need to borrow my flatmate to get a good photo of it because my camera/photography is terrible at metal thread). Part 2 is a cord for tying the cloak closed. I made it based on the instructions here: http://www.silkewerk.com/tubular.html . The instructions are very easy to follow so I won't elaborate on the technique. I wove the band backstrap style (attached to my belt at one end), with the far end looped around my toe. It took about two hours, which is ridiculously fast compared to brocading!

UPDATE: it seems this pattern probably isn't Anglo-Saxon after all, but medieval . Warp: Red, green and white silk Weft: Green silk Pattern: Woven in diamonds Cards: 32 Width: 1 - 2.5 cm Length: 140cm What's new: not brocade OK, so this isn't a brocaded pattern. I'm getting more and more keen to try the various non-brocaded techniques and sometime next year I expect I'll drop the "brocaded" from the blog title. Not yet though because I have 3 brocaded bands queued up after this already. This pattern comes from a belt from Anglo-Saxon Cambridge. It is described on page 122 of Collingwood (2002 edition), page 53 of Hansen and on Þora sharptooth 's site. Reproductions by Þora sharptooth and Shelagh Lewins can be seen online. This pattern was calling out to me at this particular time because like the Mammen band it involves quarter-turning alternating left and right cards. It is the only non-brocaded piece I've done so far other than the bas...

For anyone else that didn't know, the first fifty issues of Medieval Archaeology are available for free online , including among many other interesting articles Early Anglo-Saxon Gold Braids by Elisabeth Crowfoot and Sonia Chadwick Hawkes.

This is my second go at the Mammen cuffs after my first was lost in the mail. For the specs see the Mammen band Mk I . This time through I decided to do away with the whole "edge tablets turn every pick" thing by dropping one tablet (Under the stave on the left side). This means there are an even number and as long as you're throwing the ground weft in the right direction one of the threads of the edge tablet is caught up every pass. Additionally it (theoretically) means that the two twines on the outside of the stave border looks symmetrical- although to be fair I'm not neat enough for it to be an issue. Additionally I wanted to see whether I could encourage the band to be wider by using thicker tablets- the idea being that if the warp splays slightly outwards rather than inwards as it leaves the weaving the band will be more likely to widen than narrow. Since I still don't have any proper tablets yet I achieved this by gluing multiple playing cards together....