Weaving in Elvish - The Silmarillion Inscription

Silmarillion Inscription

August - December 2024

Materials: Maysville Carpet Warp (8/4 Cotton)

Tools: 52 weaving cards, tablet-weaving loom

Length: ~ 96 cm (38 in)

Width: 7 cm (2.75 in)

 

Here's another big project, and possibly the nerdiest one yet. I started it around the same time I started recording my old projects in this blog, and I completed it a couple of days ago, which means the blog is finally up-to-date (I actually did also weave a couple more belts on the new loom over the summer, but one was just solid colors and the other was a repeat of Hallstat 186, so I opted not to waste time writing about them).

The ideas that led to this had actually been rattling around my head for a while. I'm a big Tolkien fan, and The Silmarillion in particular has held a very special place in my heart since childhood. For a while now I've wanted to do some sort of Silmarillion-inspired weaving project. After seeing in a previous project how Catherine Weaver developed drafts for weaving English text (see her book, Tablet Weaving in Theory and Practice: Double-Face Inscriptions), I had the idea of trying to come up with a similar set of drafts for Tengwar, the writing system of Tolkien's elves. I sat on this idea for a while before finally deciding to try putting it into practice.

To start with, I made a first attempt at coming up with some double-face weaving drafts, for just a few of the characters, and wove a small sample. The result was promising but didn't look quite right, so I got out some graph paper and moved on to producing a set of drafts for all of the characters, incorporating the changes that I saw I needed after the first sample. In Tengwar, most of the letters are formed of a stem and one or two rounded bows, with the differences consisting of stem length and position relative to the bows. This meant that once I had a draft for one of these letters, I could extrapolate it to the rest. There are also some irregular characters, as well as diacritics and other extra markings, and with them I just did my best to maintain a consistent style.

Now I needed to actually weave the drafts I came up with. I wanted to do something more interesting than simply weaving a sample of each character in isolation, and my attention was drawn to a two-line Tengwar inscription that is featured on the cover (or inside cover) of most copies of the Silmarillion. If you're curious as to what it says, it's basically a short summary of the book:

The tales of the First Age when Morgoth dwelt in Middle Earth
and the elves made war upon him for the recovery of the Silmarils

I thought that it would be really cool to weave this whole inscription. Similarly to how I planned my UChicago tapestry project, I pixel-painted in photoshop to plan out the weaving, complete with some decorations on either end. While I used my graph paper drafts as a guide in this stage, I realized that it'd be better to keep things fluid, and improvised changes along the way - e.g. making some stems longer or shorter, adding a little flourish to the ends of some stems, having adjacent characters connect in some cases but not others, adjusting spacings to keep the two lines of text from clashing, et cetera. I also made many small changes throughout the course of weaving the thing, when some character just didn't come out the way I'd hoped.

Speaking of actually weaving the thing, I used the pixel grid I created as my guide. For this, I rotated it vertically, put it on my vertical monitor, and added some partly transparent layers in photoshop to help me keep track of some things:

• Because double-face weaving alternates every 2 picks between whether the "text" or "background" cards turn forwards, I added green highlighting to every other pair of rows, so I could know at a glance which cards turn forwards or back.
• To more easily find my place among the 52 cards I'm using, I strategically chose cards of different suits for different sections, and, in the guide, added blue highlighting for the columns woven by clubs and dark grey highlighting for the columns woven by spades or jokers (as a personal convention, I always use spades for border cards).
• To keep track of my place in the whole project, I added a big grey rectangle that I moved upwards as I progressed, so that it blocked off what I had already woven.

The weaving was slow-going, but I wasn't in a hurry. At 52 cards, this was just about as wide as I could go with this loom, and this presented a few extra challenges. With so many more threads, managing tension and trying to keep it equalized was more of a hassle, and re-tensioning when advancing the warp took longer. Additionally, I found that the top clamping bar didn't press hard enough in the center as compared to the edges where the screws are, and the central threads had a tendency to slip. I remedied this issue by adding an extra C-clamp in the middle of the bar.

When I was finished, I discovered that the length of the weaving coincided exactly with the width of my bookshelf, so I affixed it along the top. This struck me as a fitting place for this piece to hang.

This was a really exciting project for me. I'm really happy to have brought Tolkien back into my life, and to have finally joined one of my earliest literary obsessions with my latest hobby obsession. While this took a long time and I should probably do something different next for a change, I already can't help but get excited about other ideas for Tolkien-inspired projects. At some point, after a few more experiments, I'd like to put together a comprehensive guide to weaving Tengwar, but that probably won't be for a while. In the meantime, the photoshop file I used as a weaving draft is linked below, and contains examples of most of the Tengwar symbols.

Weaving Pattern 

• As a photoshop file (each pixel represents one pick, so zoom way in)
• As a PNG image of the grid:
  
• Including the previously mentioned highlighting overlays
• Without any extra highlighting
• Black and white (same format as the drafts in Catherine Weaver's book)
  

References

1. Catherine Weaver. "Tablet Weaving in Theory and Practice: Double-Face Inscriptions" 2020 (used as inspiration): https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/10482662-tablet-weaving-in-theory-and-practice-double-face

2. Useful Tengwar reference by Arno Gourdol: https://www.tecendil.com/tengwar-handbook/

Trying out the new loom - bookmarks!

Assorted Bookmarks

June 2024

Materials: Maysville Carpet Warp (8/4 Cotton)

Tools: weaving cards, tablet weaving loom

To take the new loom out for a spin with some smaller projects, I made a bunch of bookmarks to give out to friends and family. For most of these, I used the double-face approach I've described previously. Since it can be more or less thought of as pixel art, I didn't really need to draft things out much, and could sort of come up with the designs as I went along, with some trial and error, and occasionally using graph paper to plan portions.

 

This was fun - just making some silly little pictures with my homemade loom. It was a great way to get comfortable with a different way of weaving, without immediately investing a ton of time into a big project. When I finished weaving a bookmark, I'd cut it off the loom, fold the top end over a little wooden dowel (cut from gardening stakes), and sew it down. This is a great way of making little personalized gifts, and I'm sure I'll make more someday when I need another break from big projects.

Making a portable loom for tablet weaving

Tablet Weaving Loom

May 2024

Materials: Poplar wood, misc hardware

Length: 46 cm (18.125 in)

Width: 28.5 cm (11.25 in)

Height: 38 cm (15 in)

Design courtesy of CelticJujusBag on Etsy

One of the things I've really enjoyed about tablet weaving (especially with the backstrap method) is the DIY nature of it all - that the only tools I really need in order to weave some threads into a belt are a deck of cards, an old spatula, and some sort of anchor point. Of course, there's plenty of other useful, but not strictly necessary, tools that I use in addition - dumbbells, fishing swivels, gardening stakes, clamps, random bits of wood, etc. - and I love how they're all basically everyday objects used in an improvised way. To this day, I have not purchased a single item meant specifically for weaving, and for some reason I think that's neat.

All of that being said, I had started to get a bit frustrated with the difficulty of keeping my weavings straight when using the backstrap method, not to mention the hassle of having to tie myself in when starting a weaving session. So I started trying to come up with some alternate method, where the threads would be kept in tension statically, without me having to constantly apply force with my body. I'd tried the "2 clamps on either end of a table" method before and it worked fairly well, but took up too much space and would limit me to the length of the table. Inkle looms also didn't appeal to me, as they'd also need to either take up too much space or not allow for longer projects. Ideally, I wanted a solution that'd be compact but allow for arbitrarily long weavings - likely something that would only hold part of the project in tension at a time.

And then the youtube algorithm came through for me again, as it randomly suggested this video by Celtic Juju, where she describes a totally novel kind of tablet weaving loom that she designed herself. It's quite a simple concept - two sets of clamping bars held apart by a wooden frame. The bottom clamp holds the working end of the weaving, while the top clamp (with the aid of anti-slip tape) holds the threads. Behind the top clamp is a backplate full of holes to keep the trailing ends of threads separated. This fit my criteria perfectly - it supports weavings of arbitrary length while being fairly compact and portable. As an added bonus, it solves the twist management problem - since the ends hang loose, twist can be taken out by just releasing the top clamp, untwisting, and re-clamping. Excited to do some woodworking, I bought the instructions on how to build one of these looms from the creator's Etsy store.

After a trip to home depot, I got to work - hand-sawing, drilling, and gluing. Working with wood was fun, the design was pretty easy to follow, and the whole thing only took about 3 days (A Sunday and two weeknights) to finish. I made a couple of minor customizations to the design - I made the whole thing slightly longer, and I arranged the storage compartments so that the front one would perfectly fit my deck of weaving cards. Later on, I joined my roommate on a couple of trips to the potters studio and made some simple clay weights for weighing down the loose thread ends. These help keep the threads from tangling, and help unwind them when removing twist buildup.

Overall, my experience of weaving with this new loom has been positive, and I've mostly switched over to using it as my primary weaving method. There are certainly some trade-offs - there's a bit more hassle during initial setup, as well as every time I advance the warp, and I'm still not sure if I'm overall saving or losing time by using the loom. But I find it to be worth it for a few reasons. It is very nice to have a static object keeping all of the threads in place and in tension. Not only does it keep the weaving relatively straight, but it's also just more comfortable and less stressful. The other thing I like is that I can jump in and out of a project in progress with ease - I just put the loom in my lap and carry on weaving, no need to tie anything around my waist. This also makes it portable, so I can weave pretty much anywhere I can sit. I've especially enjoyed being able to weave outdoors - be it on the roof of my apartment or a meadow in the redwood forest.

References

1. Tablet weaving loom design/instructions: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1302915705/tablet-weaving-loom-instructions-pdf

2. Video on how to use the loom: https://youtu.be/F-BHRBE8Zjw

Another belt and the return of the mountain motif

Mountain Motif Belt

May 2024

Materials: Maysville Carpet Warp (8/4 Cotton)

Tools: 23 weaving cards

Length: ~ 117 cm (46 in)

Width: 33 mm (1.3 in)

 

I really wanted to use my "mountain/lily" pattern again, and I felt like I was missing a belt with more muted colors, so I wove one with that pattern in grey and black (although I couldn't resist keeping a bit of dark red in the border). Photoshop came in handy again here, as I used it to try to visualize what my previous weaving of this pattern would have looked like with alternate colors before finally making a choice.

I came up with a bit of an innovation to deal with the end of the belt on this one. As I've pointed out before, the 2-ring style of belt buckle flips the belt when it is passed through it, meaning that the end of the belt will be showing the opposite side of the weaving compared to the rest of it. This time, I wanted to avoid this outcome, so I needed a way to swap which side of the band the pattern shows up on. If I figured out a way to do this, I could weave normally (with the pattern coming out on top) until I had enough length to encircle my waist, then weave the remainder with the pattern coming out on the bottom side. Following this approach results in the pattern being visible all the way around the belt when worn.

 

Finding a way to switch sides mid-weaving like that turned out to be easier said than done, however. After some analysis and experimentation (both physical with test weavings and digital with Tablet Weaving Draft Designer and some Python code), I concluded that it probably wasn't possible to flip any arbitrary pattern in such a way, but that there was a way to do it provided that the initial threading of the cards met certain criteria. Maybe I'll write a more detailed post someday going through how I derived this technique and proving that it works, but for now I'll simply describe how to do it and when it can be applied.

 

How to swap sides mid-weaving

 

Requirements

In order for this method to work, each pattern card must be threaded such that every hole on the card has a neighbor with the same colored thread as itself. Or, in other words, each card must be threaded with two threads of one color and two threads of another color, with threads of the same color being adjacent to each other.

Steps

1. Weave normally until you reach the point at which you want to switch the pattern to the other side.
2. Take note of how each pattern card is threaded and categorize them into 2 types: If the two top holes (called A and D) of a card have the same color threads, consider it to be in category "AD". If holes A and D have different color threads, consider it to be in category "DC".
   
3. Weave one pick, turning all cards forward once.
   
4. Weave a second pick, turning pattern cards you had categorized as "AD" forward, and pattern cards you had categorized as "DC" backwards.
5. Continue weaving the original pattern, but with turning directions inverted - every forward turn in the pattern should now be a backward turn, and vice versa. (This does not apply to border cards, which always turn forwards).

 Technically, the choice to turn all cards forward in Step 3 is arbitrary - you could instead turn each card in any direction of your choice. The crucial thing is that every "AD" card is turned twice in the same direction, while every "DC" card is turned once in one direction, and then once in the other direction.

Weaving Pattern

• As a TDD file (for importing into and modifying in Tablet Weaving Draft Designer)
  
• As an image (ready to be followed for weaving)

References

1. Tablet Weaving Draft Designer software: https://jamespbarrett.github.io/tabletweave/

A tribute to Black Sabbath (another guitar strap)

Black Sabbath Guitar Strap

December 2023 - April 2024

Materials: Maysville Carpet Warp (8/4 Cotton)

Tools: 43 weaving cards

Length: ~ 163 cm (64 in)

Width: 54 mm (2.1 in)

 

This project may have gotten away from me a little. I had taken a break from weaving for a couple of months and was trying to think of a new project to get back to it. I figured I should make another guitar strap, since I have 2 electric guitars and it'd be cool if both had hand-woven straps. I mostly use my second guitar to play Black Sabbath songs (because they're often played in non-standard tunings), so it made sense to make this strap a tribute to the pioneers of heavy metal.

 

How to represent Black Sabbath in a tablet weaving? The colors, at least, were obvious - the band is closely associated with black and purple. But coming up with a design was trickier. I did a lot of fiddling with diagonals in Tablet Weaving Draft Designer hoping I'd stumble on an idea, and eventually I found that with 35 pattern cards, I could just about create the text "Black Sabbath" with stylized, 60s-ish letters. I figured this was a decent starting point so I added a border and surrounded the text with random meandering squiggles, then threaded up my cards and tried it out. 

This first iteration of the text was rough but showed promise. I also found that it got lost a bit within the squiggles, so I drafted a new version with a thick solid black border around the text. I also made a second design element - a big gothic-looking cross (common in Black Sabbath's symbology), on a solid black background and oriented diagonally going the opposite way to the text. At this point I started to have an idea of how the rest of the strap would be laid out. I'd have alternating black parallelograms with either the text or the cross in purple, and the trapezoid-shaped spaces between them would be filled with whatever squiggles or geometric patterns I could come up with.

With this, I settled in to a slow and laborious routine - weave a section, then go back to Tablet Weaving Draft Designer to draft out the next section. I kept the text and cross more or less the same throughout, but improvised different in-between bits each time. For something that was essentially filler, this took a lot of time and thought. I was determined to keep each segment twist-neutral, so in addition to improvising interesting-looking patterns, I had to make sure each card would ultimately have the same number of forward turns as backward turns while keeping the design cohesive. And while Tablet Weaving Draft Designer is a great piece of software, I was really testing its limits with 43 card wide, 200+ pick long drafts - each change in turning direction has to be individually marked, and when the draft is so large it can take the software a second or two to respond to each mouse click.

 

On the weaving side of things, I was really happy with how the text and cross ended up turning out. I was frustrated, however, by difficulties in keeping my weaving straight and the width even. Thankfully the flexibility of the item means that these flaws, while glaringly obvious while tensioned and being woven, aren't really noticeable when actually used as a strap.

It actually took me a while to finally add the hardware to make this band into a strap after I wove it, as it ended up being a bit wider that 2 inches in places, and most guitar straps seem to be 2 inches wide exactly. This made it really hard to find the necessary pieces. Eventually I found an etsy store selling 2.25 inch tri-bar slide strap adjusters and sewed it all together. 

Weaving Pattern 

Since my pattern on this piece never quite repeats, and trying to fit all 924 picks into one file would be impractical and difficult for the software to handle, I've broken it up into segments.

 

Click here to access all of the drafts for this project.

For each segment, I've included the TDD file (which can be imported into Tablet Weaving Draft Designer), as well as the weaving instructions in both PNG image format and text format. I also included a draft of the "template" for most of these sections, which features the text and cross but leaves the spaces in between unfilled.

References

1. Tablet Weaving Draft Designer software: https://jamespbarrett.github.io/tabletweave/ 

Kosovorotka (Slavic peasant shirt)

Kosovorotka

May - October 2023

The last few posts were about weavings I did as part of a larger project to recreate a historical Slavic peasant shirt. Well, here is the finished product.

The kosovorotka (from the Russian for "skewed collar") is a style of shirt most popular from the 16th to 19th century throughout Russia and other Slavic nations. It typically goes down to about the mid-thigh, and is worn with a belt (like a tunic). Its most distinguishing feature is a standing collar with a vertical slit positioned off to the side. The usual explanation for this asymmetric design is that it prevented peasants' cross pendants from swinging out when they bent down throughout the work day. Because this was a garment that peasants would sew by hand, out of fabric that they wove themselves, the sewing pattern is quite simple, and consists entirely of rectangles (to avoid any fabric going to waste). 

I must admit that while this is a historical style of garment, I did not strive very hard for historical accuracy in my techniques or materials. These shirts were typically made of home-woven linen or hemp, whereas I used some nice cotton fabric from the fabric store. The decorations on the collar and sleeves were most often embroidered rather than tablet woven, and I do not know of any evidence that tablet weaving was even practiced in Russia in those times. That said, I think that tablet weaving is perfect for this application, and I really enjoyed working on a project that combined multiple crafts in this way.

References

1. Kosovorotka sewing pattern: https://www.my-karnaval.ru/info/russkaya-narodnaya-rubaha-svoimi-rukami/

2. Kosovorotka sewing tutorial: https://youtu.be/HizCNOezCWw

 

Sleeve trim with lily motif

Sleeve trim with lilies

September 2023

Materials: Maysville Carpet Warp (8/4 Cotton), 20/2 spun silk weft

Tools: 31 weaving cards

Length: ~ 30 cm (11.8 in) per sleeve

Width: 42 mm (1.7 in)

 

Continuing with the Kosovorotka (Slavic peasant shirt) project, I wove some trim for the sleeves to match the collar. Since the cuffs of sleeves don't have a well-defined "up" or "down" direction, the mountain motif wouldn't make sense. So to design this trim, I started with the "lily-only" version of the trim design, which I had used for the vertical portion of the collar. I then widened the pattern by 8 cards, and filled the new space between the flowers with a long snaking zigzag. 

 

As with the collar trim, I used a silk weft thread to reduce bulk. This was also around the time I switched to yet another makeshift shuttle. This one is a hard plastic spatula I got for a dollar at the local salvage yard. I like this one a lot. The straight, rigid edge is great for beating the weft down, and the handle is very convenient. The only downside is that while my right hand just grips the handle, my left hand has to press down on the somewhat sharp upper edge of the spatula, which can get painful after a while (You can see that I put some duct tape on that part to mitigate this a little).

Sewing the sleeve trim onto the garment was much easier than for the collar. I even managed to line it up so that the pattern appears to wrap continuously around the cuff, and I'm quite happy with how this ties together the look of the shirt. I also ended up with quite a bit of extra trim, some of which I attempted to fashion into standalone bracelets, but that didn't really work out.

Weaving Pattern

• As a TDD file (for importing into and modifying in Tablet Weaving Draft Designer)
  
• As an image (ready to be followed for weaving)

References

1. Tablet Weaving Draft Designer software: https://jamespbarrett.github.io/tabletweave/ 

2. Kosovorotka sewing tutorial: https://youtu.be/HizCNOezCWw

 

Hallstatt 123 - A capstone project

Hallstatt 123

August 2023

Materials: Maysville Carpet Warp (8/4 Cotton)

Tools: 25 weaving cards

Length: ~ 109 cm (43 in)

Width: 33 mm (1.3 in)

 

This piece was a bit of a milestone for me. Like Hallstatt 186, the design comes from a piece of fabric found in the prehistoric salt mines at Hallstatt, Austria, and is dated to the 8th-4th century BC. Of the examples of tablet-weaving found at Hallstatt, this is by far the most complex, with one repeat of the pattern consisting of 72 different steps, almost all of which are distinct from each other. Of particular importance to me personally, this is the pattern that originally inspired me to try tablet weaving in the first place, as it is the subject of Kristine Vike's video which had introduced me to the existence of this craft back in November 2022. Finally making it myself felt like graduating from tablet weaving class.

 

As with the last piece from Hallstatt I wove, I transcribed the pattern into Tablet Weaving Draft Designer from Karina Grömer's article where she details her experiments in recreating the tablet-woven pieces from Hallstatt. I chose the colors and border style to match the collar trim I wove last time, as my intention was to use this piece as a belt for my peasant shirt (The kosovorotka is long shirt, reaching down to the mid-thigh, and is typically worn with a belt). I really like how the use of 2 different shades of red created the impression of a deeper, more vivid coloration.

Appropriately for a capstone project, weaving it was a challenge, as the pattern was somewhat insane. All of the pattern cards turn independently of each other, there are 72 different steps, and there aren't really any mental tricks to remembering the process. I just had to write down all of the steps and follow them carefully, and try not to lose my place. Knowing that some Bronze Age people were following these same steps some 2500 years ago was pretty awe-inspiring and makes me wonder. How did they draft their weaving patterns? Did they have their own system of notation? Did weavers memorize the 72 steps for producing a design such as this one, or were they also squinting at some guide? Did this particular pattern hold some significance in their culture? Was it a common weaving pattern, or some artisan's deranged experiment?

Weaving Pattern

• As a TDD file (for importing into and modifying in Tablet Weaving Draft Designer)
  
• As an image (ready to be followed for weaving)
  

References

1. K. Grömer. "Tablet-woven Ribbons from the prehistoric Salt-mines at Hallstatt,
Austria – results of some experiments" 2005: https://www.academia.edu/11916994/Tablet_woven_Ribbons_from_the_prehistoric_Salt_mines_at_Hallstatt_Austria_results_of_some_experiments

2. Tablet Weaving Draft Designer software: https://jamespbarrett.github.io/tabletweave/ 

3. Kristine Vike's video weaving Hallstatt 123: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmbWwGK1wK0

Collar trim with mountain motif

Collar trim with mountains and lilies

June - July 2023

Materials: Maysville Carpet Warp (8/4 Cotton), 20/2 spun silk weft

Tools: 23 weaving cards

Circumference (collar): 50 cm (19.7 in)

Length (button placket): 20 cm (8 in)

Width: 3.5 cm (1.4 in)

 

Having made a variety of different belts and straps already, I wanted to try the other major historical use for tablet weaving - adding decorative trim to garments. I decided to make a Kosovorotka, a type of traditional Slavic peasant shirt which typically features colorful trim on the collar and sleeves. Sewing the shirt itself was very simple (garments historically worn by peasants tend to be as straightforward as possible) - making and applying the trim was the real point of this project.

I started with the defining feature of this type of shirt, the collar (Kosovortka translates to "skewed collar", and gets its name from the fact that the buttons are positioned off to one side of the collar). I wanted to come up with my own design for this, and, as usual, I did so by messing around with Tablet Weaving Draft Designer. I guess I still had mountains on my mind after my trip to Mexico earlier that year, because I quickly fixated on the idea of making a mountain motif. To fill the spaces between the mountains, I came up with that 3-pointed shape. It wasn't really meant to represent anything, but in hindsight I think it's kind of reminiscent of a stylized iris or lily flower, so let's go with that. I also came up with a novel style for the borders, using a mix of colors to create a border that was consistent but a little chaotic.

 

Since I didn't want the trim to be too bulky, I once again used the thinner 20/2 silk thread as the weft, while continuing to use the 8/4 cotton for the warp. 

 

The collar that I was going to make with this consists of 2 pieces - the standing collar that wraps around the neck and is thus oriented horizontally, and the placket for buttoning the shirt, which extends down from it vertically. Once I had woven more than enough to make the first part, I changed up my pattern, because mountains only really make sense when the band is horizontal. For the vertical portion, I simply replaced the mountains with more of the "lilies".

 

To sew the collar trim onto the garment, I followed this Russian youtube tutorial. This part was a little nerve-wracking, as I had to cut up something I'd spent many hours weaving, and some of the steps could not be undone without re-weaving the trim. Thankfully I didn't make any major errors, although my work was pretty messy, and I ended up doing a few bits of hand-sewing to cover/clean up some of it. 

 

All that was left after that was to add buttons and buttonholes. There were a few possible ways to go about this, and I ended up going with a hidden placket with the buttonholes so as to avoid putting holes in the woven piece.

 

Weaving Pattern

• Mountains and lilies:
  
• As a TDD file (for importing into and modifying in Tablet Weaving Draft Designer)
  
• As an image (ready to be followed for weaving)
• Just the lilies:
• As a TDD file (for importing into and modifying in Tablet Weaving Draft Designer)
  
• As an image (ready to be followed for weaving)

References

1. Tablet Weaving Draft Designer software: https://jamespbarrett.github.io/tabletweave/ 

2. Kosovorotka sewing tutorial: https://youtu.be/HizCNOezCWw

UChicago Commemorative Tapestry

UChicago Commemorative Tapestry

May 2023

Materials: Maysville Carpet Warp (8/4 Cotton), 20/2 spun silk weft

Tools: 54 weaving cards

Length: ~ 63 cm (25 in)

Width: 6 cm (2.4 in)

I made this piece for my younger brother's graduation from the University of Chicago. This was a departure in many ways from the methods I'd gotten used to, and gave me the opportunity to try out a bunch of new techniques. For one, I used a double-face technique (following the drafts in Catherine Weaver's book on the subject) to weave my brother's name. The lettering is based on that found in the 1457 Mainz Psalter, which was the second major book to be printed with movable type in Europe. I also improvised a bit with the double-face technique to create a rendition of the phoenix and book featured on Uchicago's coat of arms.

My other major change was that instead of using the backstrap method, I stretched the warp between two C-clamps on either end of a work table. This took up quite a bit of space, but had a few advantages. It removed the hassle of having to tie myself in and the difficulty of using my body to regulate tension, meant that the setup remained constant through the whole project, and let me look at everything I'd woven all at once, from any angle. This helped me to see any issues with the pattern and make tweaks to it on the fly. This method also allowed me to use the "continuous warp" method of threading the cards, which was a bit of a time saver.

I also used 2 different types of thread for this project. For the warp (which is what is visible in tablet weaving) I continued to use my usual 8/4 Maysville Carpet Warp, but for the weft (which is hidden and holds everything together) I used the 20/2 silk I had tried weaving with a few projects ago. The reason for this was that using a thinner weft allowed my picks to be packed closer together, which was good for preventing the lettering from getting too stretched out.

Overall, this was a great experiment. I love how natural the medieval typeface looks when recreated in thread, and I enjoyed seeing how tablet weaving could be used for representative tapestries in addition to the more common geometric designs.

The rest of this blog post goes into way too much detail on some of the techniques I mention above.

Double-face tablet weaving

Previously, almost all of my tablet weavings have used some sort of diagonal threading, where turning all of the cards in the same direction indefinitely would produce a series of diagonal lines. This sort of approach is great because the individual threads end up lying diagonally as well, and so this results in smooth geometric patterns. With double-face weaving, on the other hand, the cards are threaded with 2 colors so that turning all of the cards in one direction produces alternating horizontal lines with jagged edges. This allows for a sort of "pixel art" approach, with each pixel comprising 2 turns of one card (This means that the "pixels" are actually quite a bit longer than they wide). You can plan your weaving on a grid of stretched out pixels, and then weave the pattern as follows:

1. Look at the first row of your pixel grid. For pixels that are the foreground color, turn the corresponding cards backwards. For those that are the background color, turn those cards forwards.
2. Turn all of the cards in the same directions as you did in step 1.
   
3. Look at the next row of your pixel grid. Do the opposite of step 1 for it - cards that should produce the foreground color turn forwards, and the rest turn backwards.
4. Turn all of the cards in the same directions as you did in step 3.
5. Now all of the cards should be back in their original orientations (since they all either turned 4 times in one direction or twice in one and twice in the opposite). Repeat the process from step 1 for the next 2 rows of your pixel grid.

One of the things that double-face is great for is weaving text. Catherine Weaver has a book, Tablet Weaving in Theory and Practice: Double-Face Inscriptions where she explains the process better than I have here, and provides drafts (in the pixel grid format I alluded to) of all of the letters in the Latin alphabet. Her letters are based specifically on the typefaces found in the Mainz Psalter of 1457, the second book (after the Gutenberg Bible) to be published in Europe using moveable type.

 

Reading Catherine's book on weaving inscriptions gave me the idea to make a band featuring my brother's name for his upcoming graduation. I also wanted to add in UChicago's coat of arms in some way, so I created a stretched-out grid in photoshop, overlaid a partly transparent image of the coat of arms, and filled in the grid, fiddling with it until I got something I thought would look recognizable. I then opened another file in photoshop, and pixel-painted (with the pencil tool, using 2 real pixels for every "pattern" pixel) the whole pattern as I envisioned it (including the letters, which I transcribed from the book). I then rotated the image vertically, put it on my vertical monitor, and used it as my weaving guide.

 

Continuous warping

My use of a stationary setup, along with the fact that all of the pattern cards are threaded the same way, allowed me to use a trick I'd seen in a video by Linda Hendrickson called continuous warping. Instead of measuring out all of my threads ahead of time and then threading them one-by-one, I do the following:

1. Start out with 4 spools of thread and the weaving cards I'm going to use, stacked so that the holes line up.
   
2. Pass the end of each thread through the appropriate hole in all of the cards at once.
3. Tie the 4 ends onto one of the C-clamps
4. Loosely holding the deck of cards, walk around the table, wrapping the 4 threads around the C-clamps, and dropping one of the cards every time I walk from one end to the other (2 cards dropped every round-trip)
5. Finally, cut the 4 threads off of their spools, and tie the new ends onto the first C-clamp.

I then added some wide-tooth combs to the far end of the setup to better space out the warp threads. I also attached fishing swivels to the outer teeth of the combs and used them to attach the border threads (which I measured and threaded the old fashioned way). 

 

References

1. Catherine Weaver. "Tablet Weaving in Theory and Practice: Double-Face Inscriptions" 2020: https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/10482662-tablet-weaving-in-theory-and-practice-double-face

2. Linda Hendrickson's video tutorial on continuous warping: https://youtu.be/eConIrGd7Og

3. Tablet weaving primer, with information about continuous warping (see "Faster Warping" section): https://www.shelaghlewins.com/tablet_weaving/TW01/TW01.htm

Fun with modular patterns - making a camera strap

Labyrinthine Camera strap

April 2023

Materials: Maysville Carpet Warp (8/4 Cotton)

Tools: 22 weaving cards

Length: ~ 163 cm (64 in)

Width: 26 mm (1 in)

 

This is the point at which I started to really get comfortable with pattern drafting. My roommate was needing a new camera strap and his birthday was coming up, so I decided to weave one. After choosing colors and determining how many cards to use to get the right width, I set to messing around in Tablet Weaving Draft Designer. I ended up with a nice geometric design that put me in mind of a labyrinth.

 

After I started weaving, however, I found that the pattern felt a bit too boring and regular, so I came up with a number of modifications to the base pattern unit, and then mixed and matched those as I wove, more or less improvising a varied but consistent design. This was a lot of fun! If you're curious about the specifics (or are me from the future trying to remember what you did), I'll elaborate on all the boring details at the end of this post.

 

Because a camera strap needs to be pretty long, my usual approach (described here) of measuring threads by wrapping them around the spinning base of my desk chair would not be sufficient. That approach usually yields a final length of around 42-50 inches, and I wanted at least 5 feet, so I ended up making creative use of a coffee table, as you can see in the video below.

 

 

Of all the pieces I've woven to date, this one has seen the most wear and tear, so I've been very pleased to see how well it has held up - yet another testament to the sturdiness of tablet weaving.

Pattern Details

 

Here's the basic pattern unit. Along the edges is a repeating pattern of triangles (which remains constant through all the variations), and in the middle is a simple diamond pattern. The triangles are offset from the diamond pattern, resulting in a "labyrinth" thing with a central "chamber" and "arms" snaking out to the northeast and southwest.

One variation is to make one or both of those arms keep snaking around for longer, accomplished by simply extending the basic unit from both the top and/or bottom.

The rest of the variations only affect the central 4 cards, and alter the appearance of the "central chamber". Here are a few of them:

 

 

Some of those variations (such as the heart shapes above) aren't vertically symmetrical, so I would always follow them up with their mirror versions, both for aesthetics and to keep the whole pattern twist-neutral. Likewise, whenever I used a "long arm", I'd make sure that it was eventually balanced by another long arm going the other direction.

 

The key to this sort of modular pattern drafting, I think, is coming up with a fairly tight set of constraints and then improvising within them. In this case,  I'd describe the constraints as follows:

• Cards 1-5 and 18-22 are unaffected by variations, forming a consistent border of little triangles.
  
• Cards 6-9 and cards 14-17 always turn together, and are only allowed to change direction every 8 picks. 
• Cards 10-13 always turn together, and are allowed to change direction every other pick.

Thus, most of the improvisation consists of changing what cards 10-13 are doing, with occasional changes to the length of the "arms" by changing how often cards 6-9 and 14-17 switch directions.

Here are the weaving drafts for all of the variations depicted above:

• Basic unit: (Image) (TDD file)
• Basic unit with long arms: (Image) (TDD file)
• "Eyes" variation: (Image) (TDD file)
• "X" variation: (Image) (TDD file)
• "Heart" variation followed by its mirror: (Image) (TDD file)
• Alternate "heart" variation followed by its mirror: (Image) (TDD file)
  

References

1. Tablet Weaving Draft Designer software: https://jamespbarrett.github.io/tabletweave/