Birka Madness

What have I gotten myself into? After doing several variations on the Ram's Horn pattern - of which I am very fond - and then a straightforward inkle project, I thought I would shake things up again. So I decided to try one of the Birka patterns. I got this from Guntram's page as a GTT file, based on Mistress Thora Sharptooth's extrapolations (if memory serves) from the brocaded band(s) from Birka. See earlier posts about how much slower and more painstaking brocaded tablet weaving would be compared to the regular sort.

Well, I'm not convinced brocading would take significantly longer than what I'll be doing now! I failed to pay enough attention to the turning sequence before stringing the darn thing up. If I had, I might have balked. As it is, I'm determined to give it a try. But there are essentially five, count them, five packs. That's five sets of four cards each (scattered through the set) that turn in different directions. There's four sets of patterns. All forward. 2nd and 5th pack backwards, 1st, 3rd, and 4th forward. 4th and 5th backwards, the rest forward. 3rd and 5th backwards, the rest forwards. You do each pattern twice for a total of eight picks before you get back to the beginning.

I'm still in the trial and error phase of getting this to work. I made a chart to figure out which cards were turning together and when arriving at the color coated chart you see in the picture. the yellow sections in the chart are backwards turns. The colors along the chart correspond to packs. I cut out samples of the colors and taped them to their corresponding cards making the packs you can see in the picture. However the packs stretch across so much of the working space of the loom I don't think I can leave them so spread out. With my tension bar still suck in one spot, moving the project forward is an ordeal to be postponed as much as possible.

I am trying to figure out how much I can combine packs without it becoming very painstaking to find the right cards to turn which way.

There has to be a better way.

It's just a matter of finding it.