more weaving nerdery

[dragonlady7]

the author, weaving, fiber arts

via https://ift.tt/cpUjNEs

so i have like. fallen down a rabbit hole of this goddamned tablet weaving, which is both funny and like, not.

Sometimes a thing catches you, y’know? and you just want to hyperfocus on it and do nothing else. And that’s what’s happened here, which is fine. It’s that it’s complicated enough to be absorbing, but not so much that it’s actually difficult; my tiny, frazzled, distracted, memory-leaking burnt-out little pea brain can actually achieve reasonable results even under the cognitive load of (gestures broadly) current events and such. So I’ve now achieved two entire finished completed bands, and have finished them off in like. Reasonably competent ways. I’m going to sew down the beginning end of my first one a little better, because not only does the beginning of the weaving need a bit of reinforcement as one does, but I also fucked up the weft in the first quarter-inch, so if I can just sew that down to stabilize it the whole thing will be much more usable. Also I finished the second one off by braiding the long fringe and I don’t really like how it came out so. Anyway! Experiments.

What am I going to do with these two finished bands? I don’t know. I’m going to make a third one, something with a white weft, because I loaded the shuttle with white and started using it on the white/black/blue second band, and immediately realized that while the bands are warp-faced, the weft is visible in a few tiny spots and having a design with a black border and white weft looks awful. So I need something with a white or off-white border for my next trick, because I’m not unloading that shuttle. (Yeah I wove the whole band with an improvised shuttle made of a bit of a paperboard box folded in half and cut to shape and scotch-taped down, it was not graceful but it was effective.)

I want to try mixing threads. So far I have used only 8/4 carpet warp from Webs, which I own in four colors– black, gray, blue, and cream– but I bought some #10 crochet thread yesterday at Jo-Ann’s, and I own a very weird assortment of other threads/strings/yarns that I’d love to incorporate. And the book I’m using, borrowed from unicornduke https://tmblr.co/mvpjndqauh5chejctfgjjzq​ (A Simplified Guide To Historical Tablet Weaving), has descriptions of a number of extant examples, mostly recovered from graves, and many many of them are made with mixed fibers. (Very often, linen weft and wool warp, so you see the wool and the linen holds it in place but is largely invisible. I specifically want to try that.) One, notably, from the Hallstadt salt mines, is wool warp with horsehair as the weft, and I desperately want to try that, but am coming up blank on anyone I know IRL who has a horse!

I recently texted my older sister to ask if I could get some sawdust from her husband’s saw mill, and they obliged. Her daughter rides horses at a stable and I’m trying to guage how weird it would be to ask if she could collect me some hairs next time she’s grooming one. I need like…. a handful of long mane or tail hairs, just to make the experiment. They don’t need to get spun together, I can use them single-ply, it’s easy enough to weave in ends– I’d need like. Probably eight to ten inches is the shortest that’d be useful, and I’d need, well, a dozen that length at least to make the experiment.

Anyway. A project for a later date, but something to keep in mind.

But the thing I came here to note down is the use of fishing swivels to manage twist buildup. Part of this is my horrible allergy to watching instructional videos, which I fucking hate, but as I’ve tried to research tablet weaving, I’m finding much of it is described so generally. And so as I was reading, the only information I’ve found is fishing swivels for sale, and the description ‘use fishing swivels to manage twist’, with no information besides that.

cut for some photos:

So, what I did, was I warped my inkle loom in the usual way, where you just tie the warp all the way around the warping pegs in a circle? But I tied an end of the warp to each side of a fishing swivel, and called that good. That seems to be how one would use a fishing swivel to manage twist, right?

If you are a person who is good at knowing how physical objects interact you might be snickering at me right now, however. For as I learned, no, that is not all you need to do.

Fishing swivels, like any mechanical thing with moving parts, are easily-fouled by tangling strings. I learned that if the ends of your string are long enough to tie, then they’re long enough to get stuck in the business bits of the swivels. ALSO, the little metal rings at the ends of the swivels are kind of… slippery? Hard to keep your overhand knot tight. You’re going to have an absolute beast of a time with your tension, as the swivels get unevenly fouled by the ends of the yarns, and also some of the knots slip. It was pure hell, and I had to take the band off very early and give up, because of this, when the whole point of the swivels had been to avoid what had happened with the previous band, where I did not reverse direction early enough and so the woven area of the band advanced past the free space left by the twist unwinding as I wove backward, and made it impossible for me to continue far before I ran out of yarn. [image: image]

[this is sort of in the middle of the process– i have the red yarn needle through the one loop of all the swivels to hold them together so they don’t keep sliding around, and you can already see how the ends have wrapped around the whole business so much you can’t even see the swivels. This is where I was starting to suspect a problem. and no– holding one end of the swivels in place with a yarn needle isn’t going to prevent them from working, the point is that there are two ends and each can independently swivel as much as you want in any direction, so I was trapping one end and leaving the other free, and it was actually useful in the beginning for keeping the tension manageable, so later when I stopped doing that it made things bad, but the yarn ends had, in my defense, already made things very bad by then, so.]

So. Here’s my theory on how to use the fishing swivels, which I have not seen explained anywhere.

Tie your warp to the swivel– I used one swivel per tablet, so four cords per swivel, and of course you have to thread the card on before you can tie off the warp. I tied it as tight as I could. I would say to additionally tie a second knot at a slight distance from the swivel, so that your ending fringe is stable and your weaving’s not coming up against the securing-knot, which is a pain when you’re trying to undo it later. Tie it as tight as you humanly can. Then take the loose ends beyond your securing knot, trim them to be all the same length, wrap them tightly around the area between the securing knot and your second, weaving-starts-here knot, and then fasten them down securely with masking tape or something like that. You must seal them down so that they cannot get fuzzy and get into the swivels. I have seen no discussion of this and yet cannot see how this technique would work without something like this being implemented.

Repeat for all cards, and do this on both sides of the swivel. There can be no loose ends, or they’ll foul the swivel mechanism.

I’ll get photos next time I try it, but I’m going to do, for my third experiment, a pattern with balanced twist, where you alternate the directions the cards turn so that the twist doesn’t build up in the first place, simply because I haven’t tried that so far.

Probably someone showed all this in a Youtube video, but since I can’t fucking stand videos instead of instructions, it’s the same to me as if nobody had ever talked about this. Do feel free to research it, if it’s a thing you’re interested in, and also feel free to tell me if someone seems to have a better method, but understand that if you link me a video I’m very unlikely to watch it. I have the best of intentions but a whole lot of antipathy toward the video format, which is the worst of both worlds– both slower than reading, and also my memory is such that I will not remember the crucial bit of the instructions after watching it, so I wind up both no smarter than I was and angry from having wasted a whole bunch of time.

Anyway. I digress. I’ve resisted the alternate-direction patterns because I know I 1) can’t count, and 2) can’t reliably tell clockwise from anticlockwise, so I am absolutely going to be wildly confused the entire time I’m weaving, so I suspect the alternating-direction patterns are Not For Me, but they are a very large subset of tablet weaving patterns so I need to at least try them.

Yeah, somehow I reversed the pattern in my fishing swivel experiment band, ¾ of the way through the band, even though i would swear to you that I turned the cards away from myself the entire time without variation. Just, somehow in the middle of this, without having flipped the tablets or reversed directions, the pattern started going the other way. Which is not how that works, so clearly I reversed the direction, but I swear to you I turned the cards the same way every time, and I don’t understand how this happened. If I got that confused in a pattern that had no reversals, I’m just telling you now I’m going to be hopeless in a pattern that does have reversals. This is dyscalculia; I simply cannot see the difference in rotation directions, the way I can’t figure out which of my hands is the left one, so this is going to be a problem for me. But maybe it’ll work out anyway. I don’t know.

(For a while at work I often had to go through big orders of slide scans and rotate the sideways ones, and the command said “rotate clockwise” or “rotate counterclockwise” without illustrating the direction, and so I would constantly have to tip my head as I imagined the face of a clock, which I might remind you I can’t read so about 75% of the time I would guess wrong. I cannot overstate how thoroughly my brain does not work for this task.)

anyway wish me luck

here’s what that second band looks like for most of its length, though, by the way, which is pretty acceptable: [image: image] (Your picture was not posted)