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/