Pictish Name of the Week: Drusticc or Drustric

Drusticc or Drustric – A woman in the 6^th century said to be daughter of Drest and mother of Lonan, son of Talmach. She is mentioned in the Book of Leinster, the Book of Ui Maine, and Liber Hymnorum. Liber Hymnorum includes a story about her being sent to study with Mugind, abbot of Whithorn. Drusticc fell in love with Rioc (also studying there) and begged to be married to him but another student, Talmach, was sent to her instead. In the Book of Leinster, (fol. 373A?) “Drustric daughter of Trust” is in a list of mothers of saints as the mother of Lonan, son of Talmach. Lonan seems to be a saint in Galloway. Drest or Trust is a common name in the Pictish king lists and probably common through the rest of the Pictish warrior nobility.

As of yet, I've only read summaries of these accounts in secondary sources from the middle of the 20^th century. I'd love to get see the original texts or, baring that, find more recent scholarly accounts. But the old stuff is what is available in searchable full text and thus easier to find references in. Part of the Book of Leinster is available on the CELT archive, but I haven't been able to find the list of mothers of saints or any mention of Drustric. Nor do the folio numbers as given online approach anywhere near 373. (I tried 37A in case there was a subtle difference in numbering practice, but to no avail.)

Another potential problem with Drustric is that her father is apparently mentioned in at least one location as the king of the Britons or king of the northern Britons. Nora Chadwick notes that this might refer to the king of Strathclyde. Hector Chadwick, however, makes an argument for Trust, Drustic's father, as a Pictish king. Key to his argument is the fact that Trust or Drust or Drest is unattested as a British name, but well attested as a Pictish name and, in fact, the name of a Pictish king at the appropriate time in the 6^th century.

Chadwick, Hector Munro. Early Scotland: the Picts, the Scots & the Welsh of southern Scotland. 1949. Pg 12.

Chadwich, Nora K., Kathleen Hughes, Christopher Brooke, Kenneth Jackson, Studies in the Early British Church, 1958, pp. 61-2.

Pictish Sourcebook.

Finishing Some, Shelving Others

Between noise and chemicals from the construction going on in my house (across from my bedroom door no less), I've gone a little crazy this week. It's been hard to settle to anything and concentrate on it, even out of the house though that is worlds easier than in the house. I'd been trying to make progress on the Birka piece anyway. But I finally accepted yesterday that that was doomed. I went to a fighter practice to weave. I must have worked at least two hours, probably closer to three. I wove about five inches in total--that was net gain. I wove far more than that, but I was making mistakes so frequently that I did nearly half my weaving in unweaving mistakes. This isn't a pattern I understand fundamentally enough to reset the cards and go on, even if I were inclined to accept the mistakes.

I took it off the loom carefully and clipped it with a skirt hanger to either side of the pack of cards with enough tension to keep them falling all over the place. That way I can put it back on the loom and have another go at it once the construction is done. I'd woven up nearly half of it, about 4 feet or so.

I had far more success this week with wire work. The picture is of a bracelet I finished for a friend using the behind-two-rows technique. I'm getting better at the starting and ending part of the projects, the hardest part for me. I took in my stuff to a couple local beading and jewelry making stores, looking for clasps. The first place was less helpful but did have the clasp you see here. I was hoping to find something to fit over the often-less-pretty ends of the chain work, but alas, anything of that sort was far too tiny. Except two, one of which I also bought, but both came only in silver so I'll try it out on another project. For the copper I just had to make it as pretty as possible myself.

I think I may try either unworking the beginning which is behind-single-row and tends to stretch out more, or adding a few rows of single row at the end on future projects so that, either way, the piece's ends would be more symmetrical.

That aside, I'm very pleased with this latest piece. I was impressed at the second place that she recognized it as Viking wire knitting at once. She showed it around the other staff too. Fun stuff. They gave me some good ideas of other ways to end pieces and showed me some simple wire linking pieces that should be more sturdy than jump rings.

Pictish Name of the Day

For a number of years, since I decided on a Pictish persona in the SCA, I've been keeping my eyes peeled for Pictish women's names. These are generally assumed to be vanishingly hard to find. Most of the web sites I came across either claimed there were none known or one or, at most, two.

Over the years I have found quite a few names that are worthy of, at the very least, consideration in this topic. Many of them have some dubious or debatable aspect to them: whether the name is really Pictish, whether it is really a woman's name, whether it was the name of a real person and not created for a legendary context alone. Nevertheless, given the scarcity of evidence for female Pictish names, it seemed worthwhile to bring these names together with a consideration of both their evidence and their problems.

But although I've done quite a bit of research and compiled quite a few names with shorthand notes to myself, I've been dragging my heels actually writing it all out and putting it up for people to use.

So, I've decided to use this space to try to edit my notes on one name a day (I won't be faithful to this, but it's a good goal). If anyone wants to offer feedback on any of the names, or offer additional names or documentation, etc., please feel free!

So, to start us off, one of the most famous ones:

Eithne – the death of “Eithne ingen Cinadhon” is recorded in the Annals of Ulster in 778: “Eithni ingen Cinadhon moritur” (U778.11 in the Annals of Ulster, Electronic Texts Edition, University College Cork, http://www.ucc.ie/celt/online/G100001A/). Incidentally, this stands alone as the last entry for 778. Cinadhon is most likely Ciniod son of Uuredech, an 8^th century Pictish king. His death is noted, among other places, in the same annal at the beginning of 775: “Mors Cinadhon regis Pictorum” (U775.1) three years before Eithne's death.

Eithne is also a Gaelic name, one relatively popular in Ireland at the time and still in use today, the origin of the Anglicized name “Enya.” While this might make the name less distinctively Pictish, this is one of the best documented names for a Pictish woman we have.

Whether the name would have been recognizably an Irish borrowing or was in common use in Pictland as well is impossible to say. It's also entirely possible that the name would have been slightly different in Pictish and the Irish annalist altered it slightly to bring it in line with the familiar Eithne. See the alternate spelled versions of the Pictish king list for examples of such spelling shifts.

Public Displays of Weaving

(Largely a cross-post with the post of the same name on Soaked Kitten)

Construction began this morning on the front bathroom in the house we're staying in. Nevertheless, I figured I would try to be productive. But as the banging continued followed by odd chemical smells, I was driven to distraction. I grabbed my loom, my laptop and my husband and fled. My husband went off on errands whereas I got myself ensconced in Great Bear Coffee. I realized too late that by grabbing the lovely window alcove table which has the best natural light, I cut myself off from all possible power outlets. So, more weaving time than laptop time.

It's quite amusing weaving in public. It attracts attention even when I do it at an SCA event. Most people there know what I'm doing, but the non-weavers usually haven't seen tablet weaving in action and the weavers drift over out of professional interest.

But here in the middle of downtown Los Gatos, people are mystified. And of course, I have all the people walking by on the street as well as those in the coffee shop. Some of those in the coffee shop actually come over and ask about it. With the most thoroughly mundane in outlook I find myself groping to put it in terms they understand. With the more open minded or quick witted I can give my usual spiel and answer questions pretty easily.

The people walking by outside are funniest though. There is a certain social dynamic to looking in shop windows that seems to spill over onto this. As long as I keep weaving, I can see them stop and watch me from just outside. But if I look up and smile, they may or may not smile back but they universally take it as their signal to move on. The window display just looked at them! Time to go! Hee hee.

I'm still having to backtrack with some regularity on the Birka. Anytime my concentration slips, I'm liable to forget to mark my place and then I'm doomed. If I'm unpicking I inevitably have to unpick about four rows before I'm sure where my problem was and where in the pattern I've ended up. But some of my early mistakes were more involved than that. Now I know what's gone wrong and how to fix it when I make inevitable errors.

I'm now using a paperclip to mark my place in the pattern, and moving it after every single row rather than each pair of rows--it was too easy to get momentarily distracted and then not know if I'd done the first row of the pair or now. I'm working it into my routine--check pattern, turn all cards, clear the shed, put the weft through, move the paperclip, repeat.

I just realized that given the blog I'm on now, those last couple paragraphs probably have less context than they might. I'll have to repost them on Playing with String later.

Birka Back on Track

At last I tackled my threaded in Birka project again and this time I got it back on track. Once I backtracked enough to know where I'd gone wrong and why, and to establish where in the pattern I was, I marked my place, then hastily returned to the computer and made a turning chart specifically for the "reversed" turning pattern.

It was on coincidence that I'd been derailed about an inch after I'd changed directions. The first time through the reversed sequence I was excruciatingly careful to turn everything the right way, but on the second time through I began to relax and weave "normally" again, convinced I'd gotten the direction change to work. Unfortunately I was simply using my original turning cheat sheet turned upside down as my reminder. Well, clearly I was a bit inconsistant in remembering to reverse everything I came to. Some things were reversed, and other things I'd done just as they read on the page. Disaster!

I've woven up another couple inches with my new "reversed" turning chart. I did it in different colors even so I wouldn't mix them up. It seems to be working. No doubt I'll find my rhythm with this one just as I did with the Rams Horn and variants and the Anglo-Saxon diamonds before it. Till then, I'm sticking to my turning chart like felted wool.

Quest for Written Treasure

Today I undertook a quest in the pursuit of better and more knowledgeable tablet weaving. Little did I know when I set out just how involved that quest would be. First I persuaded my husband to drive me not only to our local library to return some books and select more fluffy fiction, but also to the next city over (in the Bay Area one blends into the next rather continuously--this was only about half an hour away) to go to the San Jose University Library. Handily, San Jose has made their eight story university library a part of their public library system so that non-students like me can still check things out.

I had, you see, discovered that most often quoted text on tablet weaving, Peter Collingwood's Techniques of Tablet Weaving is at present prohibitively expensive to someone on a very meager budget like myself. I most often saw it online for around $145 though through diligent searching I saw as low as $56--tempting but still quite the expenditure for a book I'd never even thumbed through myself. But I also discovered that a copy was present in the San Jose Uni library, checked in. I even assertained that it was on the 8th (top) floor in the folio section and got its call number. Armed with that, and directions, and even instructions for where to park in downtown San Jose, I set out on my quest.

I went up to the 8th floor, found the TT section right where I recalled it from the map...and saw no sign of Techniques of Tablet Weaving. There were some other interesting books, and I picked up a different card weaving book and one on twining, and then I headed down to the 2nd floor which was the closest source of help in the form of a real live person. The folio TTs, she explained, were across the way from the regular TTs. It was, in fact, a coincidence they were on the same floor since all the folios are on the top floor.

Chagrined at my carelessness, I headed back up the 8th floor and right over to the folio section, located the folio TTs...found a different and less useful book by Collingwood right where I would have expected Techniques of Tablet Weaving. Of the latter, there was no sign.

I hunted nearby shelves. I carefully read the title of every book in the TT section in case I was skimming right over it. No. It wasn't there.

Down I went again to the put upon librarian on the 2nd floor, dragging my put upon husband behind me. "Ah," she said, when she took a closer look at the record. She explained that things in the library sometimes happened all too slow. The book had been recently returned--recently meaning August 23, a mere nineteen days ago. It was probably still on the reshelving shelves. Yes, those too were on the 8th floor. So, back to the 8th floor we went. This time my husband declined scanning shelves with me and instead prudently settled into a corner to read a randomly selected book. This proved wise as Collingwood's book was neither with the folio TTs nor with the regular TTs in the shelving area. I finally began skimming my way through all the Ts and at last, near to giving up, in the very last section, nestled by a TU and a TV, was this mighty tome of tablet weaving knowledge.

With my loot, I promptly checked out and escaped the library, thanking my long suffering husband for his forbearance.

I started out reading the book from the beginning, there being a very interesting chronology of tablet weaving finds pre-1000AD that Collingwood was aware of. There are probably more now that could be added to that list, but it is still the only list of its nature I have come across barring the excellent detailed lists by Nancy Spies regarding brocaded tablet weaving...but only brocaded.

After that I started skipping around, getting a feel for what all is covered, and following one reference to another within the book. One mystery has gained a little clarity: he gives a couple examples that I've found so far (they're separated by specific weaving technique) of double faced patterns that are brocaded. The outlines of the figures are clearly double faced weave, appearing on both sides of the band, but on the "front" side the background is brocaded leaving the double face woven figures to outline the brocading.

A number of other things are beginning to come together in my poor brain, but their still too ephemeral to put into words (without simply quoting Collingwood at length) so I'll wait till its more solid.

I've found references and passages to a number of specific finds I've heard referenced or seen discussed elsewhere, such as the Egyptian diagonals, the tablet weaving on the Orkney hood, the snartemo bands, etc. I see there's also some specifics about techniques and designs I've wondered about like some spiral techniques that look similar to yet distinct from the rams horn patterns I've been doing, the missed hole technique, and so on.

Anyway, I look forward to studying this book in more detail. I know it's bound to be outdated on some of the historical stuff, but it looks like it is definitely a good launching point for more research. I must say, I think if I'd picked up this book when I was first beginning tablet weaving, my eyes would have glazed over and I would have put it right back down! It's only because I have some understanding of the basics that I can begin to wrap my head around all his scores of different diagrams.

Croy Wire Chain & Experiments in Wirework

So, I gathered a little more information about the "silver wire ribbon" from the Pictish hoard. For one thing, it is also known as the Croy chain--important, this. Why? Because it gave me another search term that led me to yet more information. I found a quote from 1978 in a 1980 article on the origins of knitting. The quote compared the Croy chain to a similar one found at Ballinaby. I suppose it's worth repeating here:

I find them to be of identical looped structure, made from long lengths of wire, which at first sight strongly resembles stocking stitch. Both are in the form of flattened tubes, that from Croy having 16 'stitches' per round (7 stitches and 6 rows per cm) and that from Ballinaby having 6 'stitches' per round (6-2/3 'stitches' and 7-1/2 rows per cm). Although the fabrics strongly resemble knitting, on examining them under the microscope I found the structure to be different. Whereas in knitting the loops are usually drawn through those of the preceding row, in these cases the loops have been drawn through the two preceding rows...

One frustration I had reading this entire article--which was otherwise fascinating--is that I don't in fact know how to knit. What very little I know about knitting wouldn't lead me to believe it is very similar in technique to the style of trichinopoly I was taught in which one end of the wire is threaded through the loop above and drawn through...whereas knitting seems to involve using a continuous ball of yarn manipulated by knitting needles.

Anyway, the part that really made me raise my eyebrows was the comment that the loops had in this case been drawn through the two preceding rows, not just one row. Because the technique I was taught drew the wire through only the preceding row.

So, of course, nothing would do but to try out the logistics of drawing the wire through the two preceding rows. It seemed...unlikely. But I am ecstatic with the results.

In the close up picture here, you see along the bottom my sample length, only a few inches long. The left half of it uses the technique I first learned, looping through only the immediately preceding row. The right half of the chain switches to looping through the two preceding rows. As you can hopefully make out, it makes it much more tight, more complex-looking, and surprisingly more even-looking as well. I also liked the look of it one draw hole earlier--it had a different look, hard to describe. This size got far enough the have the outside edges of each loop/stitch meet in sort of V. One size larger they hadn't yet met, giving a different effect.

Above is the beginnings of another such piece with more "stitches" around--seven instead of five, I believe. Using the same small stick, this makes it significantly harder. The five stitch around through two rows technique was shockingly easy. Going up to seven stitches is now harder than my original technique. The stitches are so close together that I have to take care with each stitch to go behind only one stitch not it and halfway through its next-door neighbor.

Getting it started was also a pain. I knew I'd have to go only one row up for the first couple rows, but I started in on the back two rows plan as soon as I could--which was too soon. I ended up going back to single-row-back technique for a couple extra rows to stabilize the whole thing before giving it another go. Still, I have high hopes for it turning out in the end. Many imperfections are forgiven once you pull these things through the draw holes!

Next up will be making one that is wider. I got a new wider dowel and just need to cut it down to a manageable size. I don't know how to add more (bigger) holes to my draw board since I didn't make this one to begin with. Maybe one of the guys will know...

Spinning Yarn and Tangling Cards

My Birka tablet weaving has been a bit intimidating so today I chose spinning as my activity while I caught up on my shows--now that I've been doing all this tablet-weaving, it feels wasteful to sit and watch something without my hands making something.

I was pleased to find that my spinning skill hadn't declined any in the months since I last tried my hand at. That isn't to say that I'm great at it, but it's reasonably thin and reasonably even and I'm getting better at prepping and feeding in the wool while the spindle is spinning, rather than giving it some spin and then stopping it and then letting the spin travel up some prepared length of wool and so on. I was even using continuous roving rather than breaking off managable pieces and tearing them lengthwise to make them thinner like I did in the beginning. This did become humorous however when I got up to answer the phone, clutching spindle and thread and unwittingly trailing roving across the whole living room and office. Regathering it seemed disturbingly like recoiling intestines.

This evening I finally tackled the weaving again. I got it going and was finding something of a rhythm with it. I have it in 4 packs now, one of which is two combined which only need be separated for two of the eight picks. Even with only four packs instead of five and overlapping them a bit, they take up a lot more working area than usual. And so the spin forming is more quickly a problem than usual. I decided to try changing direction after less than two feet of weaving. The direction change looks quite decent though I'd be tempted to try a couple other potential reversal points to see how they differ. But it looks of a piece, so I wasn't too worried about needing to change directions more often than usual.

Unfortunately, I apparently didn't have the reversed turning sequence drummed into my head well enough. I've messed up the turning sequence somehow and am now in that painful and slow process of working my way backward to a familiar point. I'm too tired to have the patience to get any further with it right now. Hopefully it will look less scary, not more so, in the morning.

Wire is A Bit Like String...Except When It's Not

Copper corrodes. Who knew?

I wanted a project while the toddler I was watching was (blessedly) taking a nap, but I didn't feel like bringing the Birka tablet weaving project of doom into the same room with said toddler. She might have been sleeping at the moment, but it never lasts, now does it? And as soon as she's awake she can be relied upon to bee-line straight for whatever you least want her to get into. The idea of my cards getting tangled and twisted atop their inherent complexity makes my blood run cold with horror.

So, instead, I pulled out my wire stuff. Referring to this craft is problematic. I've seen Viking wire knitting, Viking wire weaving, trichinopoly, Viking wire chainwork, continuous wire something-or-other, etc. One of the earliest extant examples of this craft happens to be Pictish--more on this later, I hope--and there are examples elsewhere, so calling it "Viking" anything is a little odd, though by far they had the most extant examples. But that is actually the most consistent element of the name, right beside "wire." Anyway, whatever you want to call it, I pulled it out...and discovered that the last piece I'd been working on, which happened to be copper, was busy turning my stick green. Another finished copper piece in the bag was also turning green. And one of my tools (actually filtched, er, borrowed from someone's tool box... *whistles*) is rusting. So it looks like I have some wire and tool maintenance in my future. I know people have copper jewelery...or is it all alloys and specially treated? Probably. But people *used* to have copper jewelery... So there is more research in my future.

I've also been thinking in the direction of wet felting again. I made a wet felted bag at West-Antir war that was pretty spiffy if slightly lopsided. I've been thinking of making a felted bottleholder to disguise a regular glass bottle and give it a strap for greater ease in using it as a water bottle at events. It might be interesting to try a leather costrel one day for greater authenticity, but I don't know how to make one and I can't afford to buy one, so I'm stuck brainstorming with what I can make.

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.

What Was Typical Medieval Tablet Weaving? Don't Look at Me!

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.

From Tablet to Inkle

Saturday, 4 September 2010 - last repost

Yet more weaving. Yay, weaving. This one was in record time too. I warped it up at Thursday fighter practice (also talked to one of the marshals about learning to marshal next time). Then I stayed up late weaving the first bit. Then Friday I was having a bad day. I've had headaches and wonkiness more often than not the last week after months of being relatively headache free. Anyway, I was feeling irritable and obsessive. Any attempts to accomplish things on the computer just resulted in me wasting an hour or so on nothing. So finally I just decided to weave and pretty much wove up the whole 3+ yards that day.

Today Knights Errant came to Santa Cruz and we had a fantastic afternoon. Ron got in lots of great fighting and I warped up my loom for my second ever inkle project. I had to go back and fix things about a half dozen times (forgot where the "open" vs "heddle" threads went and reversed them, missed out some blue threads and had to add them belatedly, and so on). Nevertheless, even with mistakes, I think I had it fully warped in well less than 2 hours, in stark contrast to warping a tablet weaving project.

I wove the first few feet of the inkle project and I'm fairly happy with it. It doesn't look quite like I pictured, but it's a fun simple pattern. The nice thing about inkle weaving is that the pattern also shows up on the reverse side. Since this piece is destined to be a hair ribbon rather than sewn down as trim, I though that might be a good feature.

I learned a bit more about how to do complex stuff with inkle weaving recently and it sounds agonizingly slow. Nevertheless, I may try some at some point.

More String: Ram's Horn and Vines

Thursday, 2 September 2010 - more reposting

I've finally got some pictures up to share the tablet weaving I've been doing. Both of these shots are of the bands still on the loom. The one in purple, red, white and gold was my first attempt at this kind of pattern, the one I mentioned earlier where the tension bar broke in the middle. I'd taken a whole sequence of shots during the stringing mishaps and the process of getting it going, but most of them are blurry so I'll spare you unless someone has a burning desire to see the before and after shots.

The black band with green and blue and cream is a variant on the pattern frequently called the "vine" or "flame" (depending primarily, it seems, on whether the weaver is using warm or cool colors...mine therefore being a vine pattern :P ). I was rather inordinately pleased that it came out just the way I wanted on the first try. I did spend most of a day stringing it up, as usual. I made one threading error I caught at once and fixed quickly. And one stringing miscalculation which has introduced an interesting "flaw" in the band. The last card of black has only three strands of string instead of the usual four. This means that that side is slightly more thin and loose than the other side, and it means that card tries to "fall" out of position quite routinely. That aside, it is hardly noticeable and I'm fairly pleased with the experiment. If I'd been more patient I could have added in some of the crochet yarn I bought for weft, but I was too excited about beginning to weave!

I've been getting lots of compliments about these recent bands and the last belt, and I think I am opening myself to paid commissions. Now I just have to figure out a fair asking price. They do take a lot of hours...but I can't charge the moon either. Bah!

Off now to weave some more... Bwahahaha! String!!!

Weaving and Twining and String, oh my!

Ok, I'm going to copy over my string-related posts of the last couple weeks from my other blog. Here goes: 23 August, 2010

Recently I have taken up again with fiber arts, learning twining (which I'd never heard of) and inkle weaving (which I've wanted to know how to do for years). And, having acquired an inkle loom at long last, I also tried out card weaving on the inkle loom (a common practice).

I have to say I have mixed reports about my inkle loom. At first I was quite happy with it. It wasn't perfectly balanced to weave in my lap but I could make it happen, and it worked great sitting at a table. And it was in fact quite a bit easier to warp a card weaving project on the loom as opposed to the various and sundry ways I'd tried over the years to warp up a backstrap project. The most finicky part of any inkle loom is inevitably the tension bar. The need for a good tension bar is, in fact, why I didn't attempt to get one of my more hardware-inclined friends (or husband) to simply make me an inkle loom. The rest of the design is straightforward enough. But the tension bar is tricky.

My tension bar broke yesterday.

I was about a 1/3 of the way into my second full project on the loom, having also finished a very short inkle project on it. My first full project, a belt for a friend, came out beautifully. I need to get a better picture than the one here, but all I had handy was my cell phone before I gave it away. It's a pattern of diamonds based on an Anglo-Saxon archaeological find. I used 100% wool due to a desire for authenticity and temporary insanity...but despite getting bogged down for weeks when I had to back-trace a mistake which is painfully difficult and slow and tedious when working with wool, it wasn't as bad as I remembered and I think I'd do it again with enough incentive. At the very least I think I want one for myself before I give up on wool for another eight years.

That turned out well enough that I got ambitious. The next pattern I tried is easily the hardest I've ever tried. It is closely related in concept to the next hardest pattern I'd ever attempted. That previous one is still half-finished in my mother's attic. I despaired of ever getting it going again after such a long gap--I'd already been working at it for over a year off and on when it got relegated to storage. But after the project I just did, I think I could pick up the other one.

This pattern, known as the ram's horn pattern, was a real pain. I didn't start with the best directions--I used a blurry printout of a blurry scan of one page of what I think was a longer set of instructions. I recopied it once in pencil to get a better look at it and then later on the computer with color to help with my threading. The biggest problem was that I misread the S/Z threading instructions for nearly half the cards, five on one half and five on the other of the 22 card pattern.

I entered what I had threaded into Guntram's Tablet Weaving Thingy (GTT) and then played with it until it made the pattern I had expected to get. If only I'd thought to do that before threading, it could have saved me a lot of grief. Realizing that it was the S/Z threading rather than a mis-aligning of cards was bad news. I had three options at that point: painstakingly untie and unthread the mis-threaded cards, and possibly some of their neighbors given that I'd done a semi-continuous warp, and then rethread them correctly; cut the knots off to rethread, reducing the time by about half but reducing the final length of the project by several inches; or see what I could do with the threading I had.

I chose the latter option, determining that the core of the design could be salvaged by flipping some of the cards and turning them so that the outline color--white--was still where it was supposed to be. My inside and outside colors became somewhat muddied, but still came out in fairly pleasing places. This was, thankfully, a test project in cotton since I was well aware there might be difficulties with so complex a pattern with such minimal instructions to go on, so I was willing to be slightly cavalier about the whole thing.

An acceptable compromise pattern determined, I began weaving. The right half of the pattern immediately looked just as expected, but the left was off. After tweaking it about, comparing it to the pattern and the opposite half, weaving and unweaving about 5 times, I finally got it all aligned properly and I was off.

During the first 1/3 of the project I still encountered problems frequently where I would get off the pattern one way or another. The turning pattern was a lot to hold in one's head. But I got the hang of it, in both directions, and then I was off.

And that was about when the tension bar broke. I don't really understand what's wrong with it, but the cap on one end has come off and the bar itself won't loosen. It'll turn, but it seems to tighten no matter which direction it's turned and is actually marking up the wood, it's so tight. Very frustrating.

At last I decided to treat the tension bar like one more fixed bar, removed the project from one and then two of the other pegs, using other objects--a bobbin of thread, a flat package, a ball of twine with a hole big enough to fit over one of the pegs--to increase the tension again, removing them as needed to ease the tension. It was very jury-rigged, but it worked, and I finished the project.

It's a fantastic size and weight for trim, in lovely rich colors, but I may keep it as a belt until I make a more belt-like belt for myself. That might be dangerous though. The longer I think of it as all of a piece, the harder it will be to cut it for trim.

Anyway, my success with multiple projects has inspired me weave more, yet the problems with the tension bar make me hesitate to start new projects until it's fixed or replaced. In any case, it's very good to be playing with string again.

String, Yay!

Why I'm starting this blog: I noticed that my blog about life, targeted at my friends, was getting increasingly taken over by string. I also noticed that other people's weaving blogs, fiber arts blogs, archaeology blogs etc that I was reading were typically more focused. So I decided it was time to have a blog of my own about the tablet weaving, inkle weaving, twining, wire weaving, luceting, and so on that gets me so excited. I'll probably throw in related stuff like my ongoing quest to research early medieval textiles and material culture from the region later to be known as Scotland.

As you may have guessed, I do reenactment and SCA. I also happen to be a scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature. As fiber arts do not in fact fall under literary studies, I don't consider myself an expert in this field. However, I do know something about what does and doesn't constitute good research, so when I'm guessing or when I'm doing something that there's no evidence for or scant evidence for, I'll say so.

If you have any questions, send me a message. I'm friendly, I promise.