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:
- 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.
- Turn all of the cards in the same directions as you did in step 1.
- 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.
- Turn all of the cards in the same directions as you did in step 3.
- 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:
- Start out with 4 spools of thread and the weaving cards I'm going to use, stacked so that the holes line up.
- Pass the end of each thread through the appropriate hole in all of the cards at once.
- Tie the 4 ends onto one of the C-clamps
- 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)
- 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).
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