Adventures in Historical Tabletweaving

Warp: Red and yellow wool (fibreholics) Weft: red wool Pattern: Snartemo II Cards: 16 Width: 1cm Length: 110cm I haven't had much time to post recently; most of my time has been going into organising the meal plan for Canterbury Faire . But the event is now over (and went very well!) so back to blogging... I wanted to have a simple-but-period band warped up for demonstration/teaching, and having just recently done Masku Humikkala, 8658:H17 I thought that Snartemo II would be good, since patterns where the cards turn as a pack are much easier for people to get their head around. I finally got the band warped up on the Thursday, halfway through the event. As usual, a lot of people came over and opined that the band looked lovely, but they couldn't possibly do anything like that themselves. In fact the majority of the people brave enough to give it a go were children! The band took form ridiculously quickly compared to other bands I've been doing recent...

Warp: Red, yellow, green and blue wool (fibreholics) Weft: green wool Pattern: Phiala's Snartemo V pattern (6th century Norwegian) Cards: 44 Width: 3.5cm Length: 50cm OK, so I said I'd do Snartemo V and here it is. It is from Phiala's pattern, with a few tweaks, and also a few points where I lost track of where I was up to and did the motifs in the wrong order! This is one of the few bands I have done where there is actually a decent pciture of the original (click through to a larger version). You can see that my own version is a lot more stretched out than the original which is if anything about shorter than square. I found it impossible to get the weft density up using sticky wool. This is a popular band to try and it always looks great. Here are some other examples: Guido Gehlhaar ( Steinmaus ) Irene Lyng ( Brikvaevning ) Micky V Schoelzke ( les tissages de micky ) One nice this about this band is that because the eyes are drawn to the regions with long flo...

Warp: Red, yellow, green and blue wool (fibreholics) Weft: same as above (varying colour) Pattern: Phiala's demo Snartemo pattern Cards: 18 Width: 1.6cm Length: 60cm The name "Snartemo" is given to a technique where each hole in a tablet is threaded with a different colour, and tablets are offset a quarter turn from each other so that turning them as a pack produces diagonal lines. Sometimes a card is turned repreatedly backward and forward, forming "floats" where a single colour appears on the top for several passes of the weft. The canonical Snartemo band is Snartemo V, from 7th century Snartemo, Norway. Hansen lists three other bands in a similar technique. This is the band I warped up while demonstrating how to do a Continuous Warp. It is the demonstration pattern (Excel format) Phiala gives showing how to construct a Snartemo pattern, with the green and blue warps swapped because that's how I absentmindedly warped it up. I've also marked...

I recently noticed that I am the #1 hit on Google for 'evebo pattern' (and second for 'evebo "tablet weaving') which has made me feel a little guilty since there's no such pattern to be found here. However, there is a pattern to be found on the web- you need to join the SCA-Card-Weaving yahoo group to access it, but the group has all sorts of interesting discussions and if you're keen enough on tablet weaving to be into 3/1 broken twill, you'll probably enjoy being on it anyway. If not, you can set the group to not send you any emails, or join it just long enough to get the file. The pattern is in the Files section, in a file called "Evebo creatures.zip". It is in GTT format. You can download GTT from here . Hopefully that will alleviate my guilt!