Adventures in Historical Tabletweaving

A local, Aelfric Branwelather, offered to make me some wooden tablets at Canterbury Faire this year, and I've finally had a chance to try them out this month. The tablets are about 5cm square and 1.5mm thick. I had to finish sanding them myself, but they are working very well.

Lowrens has made me another warp spreader. The first one he made was in the style of Teffania's - a rod with hole drilled through it. This gels with what can be seen in the few manuscript pictures which show warp spreaders. There are about 7 manuscripts listed in EPAC (including the errata) which contain warp spreaders, out of a total of 33, so I suppose if there's one thing which can be concluded it is that use of the warp spreader is optional (possibly dependent on how prone the warp fibres are to tangling). Of those seven, I have managed to lay eyes on 4: Book of Hours Duke John of Bedford, ca 1420-1430. Vienna, Österreichisches NationalBibliothek, ms. 1855, fol 25 (at right) Book of Hours, ca. 1407 . Oxford, Bedleian Library, ms. Douce 144, fol 19 Book of Hours, Paris, ca. 1400-1410 , Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek KB 76 Fol 21 French tapestry in Rheims Cathedral, France, ca. 1507-1530 (below) There are apparently another couple in Des Cleres et Noble Femmes but the pi...

Here's the long-promised post about the Oseberg loom made for me by Iarnulf. Here's a link to Plate 13 from Osebergfunnet Vol. 2 with line drawings of the loom. Iarnulf has copied the dimensions closely. The wood is spruce and macrocarpa while the original was beech. The loom stands about a metre tall and is just under 2m in length. Here's a photo, taken before it was oiled. It feels great to be weaving on a documentable loom. Because it breaks down into pieces it's also very convenient for taking to camping events. The goodly length means you can go for a long time without having to reverse your twine direction (As I've mentioned before, it does make it very inconvenient for setting up in the living room!). If I had one complaint it would be that the crossbar is right where my knees want to be when sitting on my chest seat which means I can't have my lap directly below where I'm weaving so the bobbins can drop there when not in use. This could easil...

Here are the different types of wooden bobbin I have been using recently. All three are made by local artisans. The top one is made by Ronan Mac Brian and is inspired by the reel in The Medieval Household - the same one pictured in this post in Haandkraft. This bobbin wasn't designed for tablet weaving and the wide section is just a little top wide for passing through the shed. It works very nicely for reeling thread onto, which is handy for when you want to do a continuous warp and need to have the same colour on more than one reel. The second one is one of three is by Lowrans Wilyamson and along with the warp spreader he made me was payment for the bands I made for his Lady earlier this year. He made them after a discussion we had about the bobbins in the Hours of Catherine of Cleves although as you can see they aren't that similar. Lowrans wasn't at all sold on the bifurcation- partly because I couldn't think of a good reason for it, and partly because it wo...

As mentioned in the previous post, theses bobbins were part of the payment for the Birka 6 bands I'm making for Bjorn. They are based on an item in the Swedish Historical Museum (pictured below). In addition, they look a little like the bobbin in the picture at the end of this post, which a scene of the annunciation from a Festal Missal of Savoy (Den Haag, KB 128 D 30, fol. 37r, c. 1460). The bobbins work well for tablet weaving, having a wide neck making them quick to wind thread onto, but a narrow profile making them easy to pass through the shed. However, lacking any notches or other way to stop them from unravelling, they do tend to unwind when in use which can be a bit annoying.

To the right are the items I have been using as a beater. The ruler is provided not for scale, but because I used it as a beater for all my projects last year. It works very well. Above it is a bone folder. I'm told it can be bought at any craft store and is used for things like bookbinding and paper crafts (it was a gift). It also works very well, and looks unobtrusive doing it. The top item is based on an object found at Visby which is thought to be a beater. It is pictured below and you can read about it at ArkeoDok , although apparently since that page was written the item has been more firmly identified as a tablet weaving beater. All these items look somewhat similar, but they are quite different from the tablet weaving warp beaters depicted in 14th/15th century manuscripts. These are of wood and resemble swords or knives (or sometimes, seem more like baseball bats or popsicles- see the lineup I have assembled below). Eventually I will get myself one of these.

There is a line drawing of a shuttle on page 36 of Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon England. AD 450-700 by Walton Rogers described as " a bone band-weaver's shuttle, around which the weft would have been wound, from a 7th century settlement at Charlton, Hampshire". There was some effort a few years ago on the SCA-Card-Weaving list to track down the original object, but details surrounding the 1970s dig seem to be lost to the mists of time. At Canterbury Faire earlier this month, I had a discussion with a gentle I hadn't met before about this picture. He was a woodworker and spent quite a bit of time over the event working in our encampment, where we had various crafty things going on. Near the end of the event, I came back from somewhere or other to find the below item beside my loom. I didn't see him again to thank him! It's things like this that make Canterbury Faire really special. This shuttle is wood rather than bone. It is about 10cm long...

I'm giving a talk on tablet weaving at Canterbury Faire next week and part of it will be on the tools used. I've made up a short handout on these so I thought I'd put it up here. Sorry- it was too big to convert to Google Docs format, so it's in .doc format, and it's laid out terribly in the Google Docs viewer. Looks alright if you download it.

Pictured is the warp spreader made for me by Lowrens. Also included are the cute bobbins he made me, but I haven't had a chance to use them yet because I made the mistake of sticking the holes in my latest batch of cards too close together which made butterfly bobbins the tool of choice. My warp spreader is based on Teffania's one , which was designed to look like the items in those 14th and 15th century manuscript pictures. It has 42 holes. I have used it on two bands so far, one with 32 tablets and the other with 33. Tthe main purposes of the warp spreader are to keep the twines evenly spaced and to stop adjacent cards and their threads from getting tangled. It did both of these things very nicely. It is so nice to be able to stick your hand in the shed next to the weaving and push it towards the warp spreader, and watch all the twist smoothly move down to the far side of the spreader. I recommend using one of these. So now of course I'm going to talk at length abo...