D'oh.

Sometimes, you puzzle over something and puzzle over it and try to find a good way to keep track of what is happening and how to count to two and keep right from left. At least that happened to me in the occasionally ongoing tablet weaving project, where I'm still trying to figure out how the weavers back then managed to weave those intricate patterns without swathes of graph paper.

So. I finally sat down once more and tried to count to two, keep track of those double-turns, start with double-turning the correct tablet, and keep left from right. Like so many times before, I was not able to do it. Again.

Short explanation of these semi-coherent ramblings: When tablet-weaving patterns on a twill base, you need to make sure your base slants in the correct direction. If your slant is wrong, the pattern comes out wonky.

This means that if you want to weave a triangle, you have to change base direction somewhere inside it, or the second side of the triangle will look really, really shitty.

There are two ways to change that slant, one more modern and one historical. The modern one is easy - you weave to the middle of your triangle (or triangular section of a larger pattern or motif), then swap the turn direction of all your tablets, done. This works, but gives you lots of float lines in the middle of the pattern.
For the historical one, you only change turn direction of every second tablet, and you do that sequentially. For this, you either let a tablet stand idle or double-turn it, and one of my problems was knowing which one to pick to start the sequence.

Sigh.

And then, suddenly, I was wondering about the rule to know which tablet to start with. Because there must have been a rule, depending on, probably, slant direction and number of tablets in the pattern part. And then I was thinking that this would mean thinking ahead and figuring out beforehand how many tablets would be involved in that pattern part... and that would mean even more counting, and more keeping track of things, so more brain work. Which is, according to my theory, something you want to avoid.

Not because I'm thinking folks back then were stupid. No, because you want to have as much brain capacity free for keeping track of the things you have to keep track of, and on making your pattern look nice and shiny. So my rule for the tablet weaving system is that everything that can be made a rule and shoved into the backbrain will be made a rule.

Such as the direction the tablets in their packs are turning (always towards each other) and the direction the stripes are running when I turn the whole pack into one direction. That does make things easy because I only need to look and I know what my base pattern slant is, for instance.

As I was wondering about these possible, yet still-unknown-to-me rules for the double-turn tablet, I suddenly thought about trying to do the direction change not at the start of the triangle... but at the end. After I have decided, spur-of-the-moment, that the thing is large enough now and I am going to close it.

Well. What can I say except "D'oh" and "why didn't I think of this much earlier". Turns out that this makes finding the tablets that need to double-turn so, so much easier - it basically reduces all the problem to "look at your tablets, check if they stand correctly, and if not, make it so". Which is totally fitting in with how I figure that a lot of the original weaving was done, and makes things much more relaxed and much more logical.

So now I'll be going for a little more practice with this stuff, first on my 12-tablet trial warp... and then on the larger, 42-tablet trial warp. Because sometimes you just need some room to play, right?