It's that time of the month again... where I have way, way too many tabs open in the browser. Which means, yes, high time for a link dump!

Margarita Gleba and Susanna Harris have been working on the topic of splicing (instead of spinning) for a while now, and their research is making waves - case in point: Current Archaeology is featuring an article about spliced textiles.

Care more for blingy stuff? The "Schatz von Preslav", a Bulgarian treasure find from around 920, is currently on exhibition in the Louvre in Paris. Here's a German article about the treasure.

Tablet weaving, anyone? Viktoria Holmqvist's article about the Dune Belt and Eric of Pomerania's belt is available online as pdf, with some corrections to the original article printed in NESAT X.

Another book about tablet weaving will come out soon - Claudia Wollny and Ute Bargmann are publishing "roslein und wecklein", a transcription of a 15th century manuscript with patterns for brocaded tabletwoven bands. See more about it here.

And finally some music, played on a late 19th century guitar:

I'm back from my breather, and it was a wonderful time - there was holiday knitting, and there was bouldering, and some quality shopping for things I cannot get here, and there were walks in sunny weather and a bit of mudlarking and there was cake.

Lots of cake.

[caption id="attachment_4080" align="alignnone" width="446"] That, by the way, is the Afternoon Tea for two people in the Salvation Army Café near St Paul's. Which was delicious.


Somehow, British cake is considerably different from German cake, and somehow I have not yet managed to copy it. I probably have not tried hard enough (read: properly, using a recipe from Britain and actually sticking to what it says) - but when we are across the Channel, I end up eating lots of cake and really enjoying it, and scones with clotted cream as well.

So there was cake, and scones, and more cake. Too much for my own good, probaby... but I regret nothing.

There was also a streak of luck in timing, and we got to see the first female Doctor Who right when it was aired in Britain, which was totally awesome (and of course accompanied by a nice cup of tea). It's probably a good thing we only discovered quite late that we could watch older episodes of Dr Who in our apartment, or there might have been some binge-watching to the detriment of sleeptime (which was very, very much needed).

What there was not, though, were those lovely German Heinzelmännchen who take care of all the work back home while one is away, so on the list of "urgent things to do", getting emails and shop orders on their way was right up there on top with "go grocery shopping or starve".

Now there's some Textile Forum stuff to be taken care of, and Google has let me know that there seem to be some issues with the mobile version of my webpage. So if you've been trying to read stuff on the blog with your mobile implement and have gotten a load of 404 errors - I'm sorry about that, I am now aware of it, and I am trying to fix it. (If you should run into any errors, or have any other issues with these pages, please don't hesitate to tell me. It's amazing how many things can remain undetected even if you try from time to time to make sure everything is working alright - so I always appreciate getting a hint if something is not!)

And the doggy is done - finally!

This one was actually inspired by an original published in Audrey Henshall, "Five Tablet-Woven Seal tags"(article behind paywall). It's not looking as elegant by far as the original, which has a proper eye and keeps its head up much more, and has a nicer jaw and slightly different paws... but it's a running dog-like critter, and, most important to me, was woven with only very slight residual muddling up of tablet directions and alignments.



As you can see, my version turned out a little club-headed and thick-necked. I'm still very, very happy with this, though; weaving it was an interesting mix of excitement and relaxation, with only very few "oh my goodness now I have to fudge this bit" moments. I'm also getting better at transitions between the different design elements and at getting the timing for these transitions right.

Now I'll have a think about what to do next... it might be time to tackle some geometric motif for a change, to see how that works. Or another peacock, in a different design. Or a phoenix (that might be really interesting, with flames and such). So many choices, so little time - it takes me about a full day of work to weave one of these critters, so it's still a time-consuming thing.

Speaking of time and time-consuming things, as usual, my autumn will be getting rather crazy, so I am taking a few days off before the final craziness that is preparing for the ETF. Which means a little blog break as well - I'll be back on the blog on Wednesday, October 10.  Have fun until then!

... that's appearing on this band.

 


Some more things have fallen into place, and I've invented some more mnemonic rhymes that are more or less silly, but all very helpful for me.

Now there's only (hah!) the torso and front paws and head to weave, and I will have a doggy on my band. Making the hind paws was exciting, especially the first one, and I was very proud to have gotten the distance to the second leg large enough. Which, on retrospective, would have been very hard not to - due to the structural rules when weaving. Anyways, it was a lot of fun up until now, and a very exhilarating feeling of "oh my goodness this all works as it's supposed to!" which is a nice change from "oh my goodness I've gotten totally muddled and this may look pink but it's all in the wrong direction and I'm out of the rhythm so I need to fudge this and hope it won't be too obvious".

So... half a dog done, half to go. Though I should probably also take care of some other things...

...now I'm a Bee-Weaver...



This thing gave me an ear-worm. A slightly, hum, changed one... as now I am a bee-weaver, having woven a bee. Or something that should look more or less like one. (Thanks for the prompt, Christa!)

As you can clearly see, I'm still not the Queen Of Counting Correctly - else the torso would have been in the middle of the band and the wings the same size. I'm also not yet the Queen Of Getting Started Properly Right Away, and the two blue spots before the antennae start bear testimony to that.

The rest, though? I'm okay with how it went, seeing as it was all, again, made up as I went along. (My plans were slightly different, but at one point they had a chat with reality. Hence no incision between torso carapace and striped abdomen.)

If you look closely, there are slight irregularities in the stripey bit, and these are due to different twill direction. I was aware of these switches in direction but chose to ignore them. You might also be able to see the difference in appearance depending on twill/weaving direction - one direction has a much clearer, cleaner appearance than the other, and that is due to the ply direction of the warp threads, and a very common (and unavoidable) effect in this technique.

This was fun to weave, and didn't take a gazillion years (only half a gazillion). I've also learned a few more things, and got more used to some others.

Finally I noticed that my warp tension had crept up and up... so I've remedied that for the next part (I had to move the band along the loom-thingie anyways to have more free warp to work with). While I was concentrating so hard on getting all the turns correct, and being on the brink of going crazy at what felt like all times, it was very seductive to just up the warp tension for easier mechanical turning of the tablets... and I didn't really think about it. I just gave in to temptation.

So... while a relatively high warp tension means it's easier to turn the tablets without them getting caught in a neighbour tablet's threads, and the shed opens nicely all on its own, the downside to this is not only more friction on the thread (no issue at my tension and with my warp threads, though) but also rather acute angles in the diagonals, and stretched-out patterns. Which is not so nice. So now that I am a little more relaxed with the pattern-inventing, I want to go back to lower warp tension to have prettier designs. I just have to get back into the good habits of how to handle the tablets when turning so the getting-caught-issues are minimised.

Next up: Some doggy inspired by a medieval tablet-woven band used as a seal tag. And I hope you're not all sick and tired of hearing about tablet weaving already!

I'm still weaving, and still figuring out details, and trying to find the best sequence for explaining all the things. It's all sort of interwoven - the structure of the band, the sequence of actions, the technique, what you are looking at, what design elements you have available - and so there's a number of possible sequences for explaining.

Usually in these cases, though, some sequences work better than others, and though sometimes a different one is better for individual people,there's bound to be one that works for most... and that is the one I am looking for.

Which will be the sequence for my paper about this method at the European Textile Forum, and for the corresponding practical part, and if it looks promising, also the sequence of explanation for all following teachings. So... no pressure, right?

Other things are developing as well - I'm still poking at the Kickstarter thing for translating my thesis, and I'm hoping stuff will resolve itself soon so we can take a next step; there's some shop maintenance and product planning going on in the background (currently the main problem is not my ideas, but finding someone willing to make the actual products), there's planning for a workshop weekend in January to be finished, and why do I wonder where my days all go?

I'm trying to get down pat how to handle the different design elements that can occur in a tablet-weave, and it's half fun and half frustrating and half exciting. Or something like this.

Basically, there are only about 10 elements that you need to learn to do anything, with the most straightforward being a diagonal line running in the main direction of your twill background. That one is really easy, while other things that are twisting things away from that straightforward thing are, hm, let's call it "more demanding". There are ways to do curves, and horizontal and vertical lines, and diagonals running opposite to the current twill direction, and they aren't that hard - but the challenges grow when you are doing multiple things at once and have to keep track of all of them (plus decide on the fly how the pattern should move on).

Also not helpful at all? Having a little reference sheet to help keep track of how the tablets should stand, and then discovering, after a long while of wondering why things occasionally go totally pear-shaped with no good reason whatsoever, that there was a lovely little mistake in that reference sheet. Bah. Duh. I did about a gazillion facepalms in my mind when I found out what had brought me down there again and again. (I had mostly looked at the bits left and right of the erroneous point, which were a-ok and really helpful, and only occasionally referred to the faulty part.)

So. Current status?



I have made a tree-like thing.

As you can clearly see, I'm still working on merging lines. I'm also still working on a lot of other things, such as starting diamond shapes out of nowhere in a timely fashion. Things are progressing, though, albeit slowly.

There is also still that occasional problem to keep left and right apart. It's getting better, though - having told myself so, so often by now that "towards the weft, slants up and left" that it starts to seep into the backbrain.

Next up: More new and exciting design elements - such as horizontal lines. Yay!