Sorry for the unannounced blog silence yesterday - I was off on a research trip, and I had planned to blog on the train when going back, but then things happened. Good things, mind you, but they were solidly in the way of my plan.

Research trips usually take longer than one expects, and there's lots of photos and thinking, but there's also always something that gets forgotten. (I'm at the count of two things for the trip yesterday, currently. More might pop up.) I also usually get into a sort of "oh that is so cool" rush, and my brain goes on overdrive, and then, at some point, I crash. Completely. As in "brain to mush".

So yesterday's trip did go wonderfully well as these things go - I met with lovely colleagues, got to talk about different textile techniques, and had the wonderful opportunity to see three medieval tablet weaves up close. I then went to see a fourth one - the Ulrichsmanipel - together with my two colleagues, and so it got a bit later than I'd originally estimated. Which meant that the train home was no ICE, and thus had no wifi, and so my plan to blog something while on the train back did not work out.

By the time I was back home, my brain had reached the final state of complete mushiness, and there you go - instant blog silence due to too much textile overload. The best kind of instant blog silence, if you ask me!

Now there's the post-research-trip stuff to do: Sort through the impressions, sort through the pictures, delete all the very blurry ones, and get everything in a semblance of order. Bonus when going through the pictures: repeats of "oh, that is so amazing" might happen...

NESAT is coming up - well, not utterly urgently and soon yet, but it is looming enough for me to think about it. Especially since I've registered to give an explanatory demo about my method on tablet weaving twill patterns without a pattern draft... and that, in turn, means I will have to aim for an explanation plus demo in about 20-30 minutes. Probably 30 minutes - since my two test runs that I made, quietly mumbling things to myself, took about half an hour.

So here I am, once again with the usual question of "how do I squash as much information as possible into X minutes while still keeping things understandable?" Which is the challenge I'm more or less facing every single time when I give a presentation, or a demo. (Or a workshop. I tend to fill workshops up with lots of info as well.)

For this specific problem, it starts with finding the perfect number of tablets. I have tried things out with a  dozen - which is enough to show the patterns when doing twill background, and how a pattern block moves across the band. For speed purposes, a few less would be even better, so I might cut the number down to ten.

I've also found that the best I can do in the demo is to explain what twill is based on (the diagonals) and show how to do a twill direction reversal. All the rest of how this makes it possible to weave basically anything on the fly will have to be explanatory only - probably with some additional demo bands and printed out pictures. Because this entirely unspectacular looking bit of diagonals and twill weaving, measuring a puny 5 cm, takes me half an hour to weave:

With talking about what I'm doing, and explaining, and showing some things to the empty air. (The cat refused to stand in as audience... she much preferred to nap somewhere else. Ah well.)

So... I'll fine-tune some more, and do it again, and make notes on what to print out in addition, and notes on what I want to say in what sequence. And then, I hope, it will eventually result in a nice little demo that will make my colleagues happy!

When it comes to tablet weaving, I am a little... um... peculiar. If you've taken a workshop with me, you will know exactly what I mean - I will insist on certain things being done just so.
There's also a stack of things I will not insist on, but will strongly recommend - such as weaving with as little tension as possible, or leaving a loop when you are inserting the current weft, or warping with a cross and inserting either a cross (two sticks tied together, like the cross in loom weaving) or a warp spreader. In its simplest version, this is a stick with holes in it, through which you pull the individual tablet threads (all from one tablet through one hole). There's also the comb-style version, which can be filled easier, and without cutting up a continuous warp:

[caption id="attachment_5051" align="alignnone" width="640"] Warp spreader made from a broken piece of weaving reed - the top can come off to fill it with threads.


The warp spreader will, as its name implies, spread out your warp - so by adjusting its distance from the tablets, you can make turning the tablets easier, and fine-tune how easy it will be to keep your weaving the perfect width. That is its main function, and for that alone, it is very much worth installing one.

However... there's this secondary thing where it comes in really, really handy. Imagine, for a moment, that you are like me and occasionally have your five minutes of utter and complete loss of all motor skills, resulting in things dropping in the most spectacular way. (That, by the way, is the reason why I am using lightweight parchment shuttles for my weaving.) Or, in that case, you have a warp that was dragged around inadequately secured and in an inadequate packaging once too often (I am, generally, not kind to my warps). It might just result in something like this:



That was adequately termed "tablet salad" by someone. It's only nine tablets, but detangling something like this could be a real hassle... if not for the warp spreader. With that in place, all you need to do is go through the cords going through the spreader, one after the other, gently extract the corresponding tablet from the salad, and place it to the side to form the stack of tablets that is supposed to be there.

And then, a little while later, you can go back to weaving.



In this case, it was only nine tablets, so it was done very quickly. I once dropped my playband with 42 tablets - that took a bit longer, but still was not too bad, thanks to the cross that was in place there, too.

So... do you use warp spreaders? If not, do give it a try - it is worth it!

Sometimes, things turn out to be more difficult than anyone would have guessed. One of these things, as I've learned, is... getting a room.

Not a room at a hotel, or youth hostel, or such things; I'm perfectly capable of that, and it is generally not a problem at all (unless you wait until the last minute and then try to get something cheap in a town where there's a fair going on...). I was looking for a room to give workshops. To be even more precise, to give a tablet weaving workshop.

A while ago, when I was preparing for the weaving weekend in Belgium, I had figured out a good plan on how to place tables, chairs, and weaving warps so that the room available could fit the participants we'd planned for. I have since tweaked this a tiny bit, and I can comfortably fit twelve weavers using six tables. (And clamps, of course. I think there's no workshop where I don't turn up with my clamps.)

[caption id="attachment_4902" align="alignnone" width="979"] Table, clamp, band. I love this setup - it's quick, easy, versatile, and allows to have a wide choice on how to sit at the band.


For this constellation, I need a room size of no less than 6 by 9 metres, though - and it turned out that such a room for renting is very, very hard to find. Lots of people that I have talked to have expressed their wonder at this, and frankly, I would have thought it should be no problem either - before I started searching in earnest. Either there is such a room, but it is booked already, or the owners (especially churches) need it for themselves on Sunday, or it is not rented out over weekends, or it is completely unaffordable for me. I've managed to rent one room once, for my last workshop, but alas - this place is one of the "usually booked already" places.

Which means that, after searching for more than a month now, I was quite frustrated. So much that yesterday evening, I looked at our living room again... with a sharp eye, and a measuring tape, and the help of the Most Patient Husband of Them All (who really, absolutely, and utterly deserves this title - as my giving a full weekend workshop at home also means that our main living space is taken up).

There was then some drawing of available space, and some cutting of folding table mockups, and more measuring and thinking - and finally we came up with a method to fit up to eight weavers. Which is very good - and which means that I can finally, finally set the date for my next tablet weaving course, which will be a beginner's workshop. (It will be on March 7 and 8, by the way... description for the shop and booking possibility will come up tomorrow at the latest.)

I've spent this weekend teaching weaving to six wonderfully enthusiastic people - and I can tell you that while everyone enjoyed it (as I was told so) - I think nobody had more fun that I did.

Tablet weaving is one of my favourite teaching topics. It's simultaneously easy and brain-bending. There's simple rules to follow, and within those rules, you are completely free to do as you wish. Mistakes are easy to make, but they are also easy to spot, and after a while you make less and less of them. And for teaching purposes, with the system that I have developed for weaving both "normal" patterns and twill patterns, it's even not relevant whether someone has been doing tablet weaving before or not.

So everyone gets the basic explanations, then we get to work making a warp, and then weaving starts. Which, about inevitably, results in a room full of very quiet, very concentrated people, exploring the structures and possibilities of tablet-woven bands, conjuring up patterns. It actually was so quiet that I could hear a pin drop. (Yes, I actually tried. It was only just audible, but that was because the floor in the room was relatively soft, so the pin made very, very little noise.)

In my course description, I purposely did not promise that we'd get into twill, as this can be hard to gauge. While a weekend course is usually enough to at least touch the basics (the plain background, and the principle of how to weave a motif in that), I can't guarantee that more will be covered, as this very much depends on the individual group. In some groups, the weavers want more time to explore diagonals patterns, for instance, and that, of course, is a wonderful thing as well.

This weekend, however, everybody was keen on getting some twill shenanigans done, and so we did. I can tell you that for me as the teacher, seeing that first line in everyone's band move first there, then here - that is the most exciting simple line that I know. Also, it means that I get to tell one of my favourite teaching stories: The one about the little renegade tablet that wants to start a revolution.

That is another thing teaching in this style has taught me - if you work paperless, without drafts, stories and mnemonic aids are wonderful tools to help explain things, and to help remember them. I don't know how pattern instructions were passed on in medieval societies, but I could well imagine a teacher tell a story to the pupils to help them remember what needs to be done at a given place in a pattern. It would probably not have been the story about a little tablet being a revolutionary and turning everything around (which is something that would not have latched onto basic cultural knowledge and background as it does with today's people), but it might have been something else fulfilling the same purpose. Songs and stories make wonderful tools for keeping things in minds, and I thoroughly enjoy teaching with stories. And daring little revolutionary tablets that prepare their revolution in the underground, quietly, looking like every other tablet for a while... until, suddenly...

When I started out trying to reconstruct how twill may have been tablet woven back in the Middle Ages, I had a list of things that the method would need to deliver - if you like being fancy, you could say I had a Requirement Specification. Apart from the obvious (has to work without written patterns, has to work with an indefinite number of tablets), one of my list items was "has to be robust" as in the system should be so workable that it is possible to stop at any time and take up the work again without a problem, and that it should be possible to weave while other stuff is going on in the vicinity, or while you're not one hundred percent fit. Also obviously, weaving really complex patterns in fine silk on a wide band won't work if you are bone tired and there is a bunch of people nattering at you - but to do simpler twill motifs, it should not matter if there is a group of others chatting in the same room, and you are keeping half an ear on it, occasionally joining into the chat.

Both the coffee cup weaving and the UFO weaving took place while there was a pen-and-paper roleplaying session going on in the same room, which for me sort of qualifies as "mildly distractive environment". So for my expectations, the system is robust enough; it does happen occasionally that I forget to re-order a few tablets, but I usually catch this even before turning them, and if I don't, it becomes really obvious right afterwards, and is easy to fix. (Turn the offenders back, sort, re-turn them.)

Something that happens even more occasionally, but that is much, much more of a nuisance: Forgetting a weft thread. This has really obnoxious results. First of all, it only becomes rather obvious a good while after the vile deed has happened, and I'm usually not willing to unweave two picks to fix the issue. Unfixed, the forgetting of a weft results in long floats across the width of the band, which can be very obvious if you are looking at the structure (or are a nitpicky person and are looking for mistakes). It actually happened twice when I was doing the UFO, see if you can find the spots:



Have you found them?

The second effect of forgetting a weft, which is at least as annoying, is that I use the side the shuttle hangs on as an indicator of what may or may not be done at that stage, pattern-wise. So having forgotten a weft, this changes, which can be confusing, even when using a marker on one side of the band to keep track of the "do-things-side" as opposed to the "maintenance-mode-side".

I complained about this to the Most Patient Husband Of Them All, and he quite correctly said that there must be a way to see that the weft thread is missing... so we spent a while discussing all the possible ways we could, collectively, think of.

The end result was that since the missing weft causes a change in the band structure, it is possible to see it right after you turn the tablets and press in the shed. However, since every thread is only tied down by the weft every fourth pass, this means only every fourth tablet shows this structural difference - so it is visible, but it is very subtle.

Here is how it looks with the weft thread in:



And this is the same pick without the weft thread:



It's no wonder I never noticed before when I had missed putting in a weft (and none of my students did when this happened in a workshop). Now that I know what to look for, though, I'll keep an eye open for the telltale tiny gaps on the edge of the weaving knife when pressing in.

Are you occasionally forgetting the weft? Do you go back when that happens to you?

I've done a bit more tablet weaving again recently, in preparation for the two courses that I'll be giving (August 31/September 1, and September 14)... and, of course, things happened.

When at the last Textile Forum, one of the lovely people there gifted me with a bit of yarn in colours that I loved, and that was enough for a nice warp for a playband with 20 tablets. I've been wanting to do a simple playband anyways, with 20 tablets, as a demo band for my weaving lessons, or for explanations, so I happily did the warping, and my cunning plan for the weaving was to do variations on diagonals, as inspiration for course participants looking for pattern possibilities.

I started out doing this, and it went well for a while, resulting in things like this:



which was fine, and exactly what I wanted.

And then... then I got bored. Diagonals all the time... sigh. So I sort of by accident transitioned into twill, and then suddenly, well, this happened:



followed by this:



because obviously, what you really need to weave as motifs when working with a reconstructed historical weaving technique, are steaming cups of coffee and the UFO from Space Invaders.

Right?