I finished my inkle weaving project. I think it took about 7 distracted hours in total, including warping, much faster than most of my tablet weaving projects. Sometimes the warping alone seems to take that long! Nevertheless, there's only so much you can do with plain inkle weaving, and if I start doing picked out pattern work, it won't be fast any more.
I've been trying to do research, yet again, into actual medieval techniques and patterns and usages of tablet weaving, especially in the British Isles. There is, of course, the "rare" threaded in diamond pattern from an Anglo-Saxon find. There is also a 12th century collection of five tablet-woven seal-tags which apparently include at least one, maybe more examples of "rare" threaded in patterns as well as "rare" use of the double-face technique. I've only seen various people's discussion of the article discussing these 5 examples, however, and modern reproductions of two of them (one threaded in, one double face) and I'm working on plans to track down a copy of the article which sadly appears not to be available online. What is difficult to discern in a casual search (casual here meaning lengthy but confined to the internet) is what tablet-weaving techniques are typical!
I have quite a good book about brocaded tablet weaving that discusses typical and unusual forms and techniques of brocaded tablet weaving right down to breaking down what percentage of extant bands were what width (nearly half were half an inch or less, by the way!) and used what fibers (silk and wool for most of it with spun gold or silver normal for brocading; linen vanishingly rare). But the book doesn't compare brocaded tablet weaving with the rest of the larger pool of tablet weaving.
Anyway, this fruitless exercise devolved, as it often does for me, into trolling through the online archives of museums in search of individual extant finds that I can analyze and compare myself. This time I picked the British Museum which is sadly short on medieval tablet weaving from Britain though it has some truly amazing pieces from the 19th and early 20th century from various far flung corners of the world. The one that really boggled my mind had geometric designs on one side and words woven onto the other. Doing one or the other--fine. Doing both at the same time? My hat goes off to that long-lost weaver.
Anyway, I'll get myself to a library and see if this proves more fruitful than the last time I did this about 4 years ago. And I'll try some more museum trolling. You never know what you'll find doing that. My most recent revelation was Pictish wire knitting. I knew the Vikings did it. I knew it was extant elsewhere on the continent. And, in fact, I'd seen this bit of wire work before, but long before I'd ever heard of trichinopoly or cared what it was particularly. It had looked complicated and beyond me and I don't do much playing with metal of any kind. But I learned trichinopoly a few months ago and took to it eagerly. And since I have a particular interest in the Picts--my chosen culture in the SCA--it was exciting to find that one of the earliest extant examples of the form was in fact Pictish.
Anyway, time to put it down for a while and try again tomorrow.
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