...then I turned the cards...

...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!