St Bertille's Sleeve Trim
November 2022
Materials: Maysville Carpet Warp (8/4 Cotton)
Tools: 16 weaving cards
Length: ~ 132 cm (52 in)
Width: 13 mm (0.51 in)
I think this is the first tablet woven piece I'm actually proud of. It's a skip-hole pattern, meaning that the pattern (aka non-border) cards only have 2 threads each, so half of the holes are empty. This produces a sort of 3-dimensional effect that can look quite neat. The weaving process remains the same, although you have to use something like a pencil (I used little wooden gardening stakes) to hold the cards in place when not turning them, as they will otherwise rotate into a diagonal position.
The pattern originates from the tablet woven trim on a Catholic relic - a piece of sleeve presumed to have belonged to St Bertille of Chelles Abbey in the 7th century. It was originally woven in silk, and is only 9 mm wide, with most of that taken up by the border.
I made a couple of changes to my overall process when weaving this one.
For one, I cut a new shuttle out of an old credit card. The rigidity of
it made it much better than cardboard for beating the weft thread down,
which makes for a tighter weave along the forward-backward direction.
This was also quite a bit longer than my previous pieces, and I came up
with a somewhat clever way of quickly measuring out threads: I flip over
my spinning desk chair and prop it up, then tie the end of the string
to one "spoke" of the base. I then spin the base of the chair while
holding the thread so that it wraps around it. After the base has
rotated as many times as I need threads, I cut through all of the
wrapped up thread to produce the threads I need, all the same length.
References
1. Weaving pattern: http://ladyelewys.carpevinumpdx.com/2020/10/07/st-bertille-of-chelles-abbey/
2. Weaving tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPQ3lNxbZM4
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