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/