Bruce's comment about the multi-spouted pot being maybe used as a lamp (thank you, Bruce!) was, it seems, not the first one. There's a German article about special forms, though, that comes to the conclusion that these multi-spout pots generally do not work well as a lamp. (See "Lampen im Barbaricum", p. 222, in Armbruester, Tanya, and Morten Hegewisch. Studien zur Archäologie Europas, edited by Joachim Henning, Achim Leube and Felix Biermann, vol. 11, Bonn 2010).
So... the spouty pot is probably not a lamp. Though it may have been used for some kind of drinking games, the one in Pfakofen was found in context with a spindle whorl, and there were cochineal lice inside the pot - placing it nicely in a textile work context.

When we were in Eindhoven with the first Textile Forum, there was also one of these pots replicated - and Viktoria Holmqvist mentioned that she'd always wanted to try one as a warping helper for tablet weaving. And so she did - with very good success.

It works like this: You thread the yarn ends through the spouts into the pot and out the middle hole, and then thread your tablets with them.



Then you place the balls of yarn into bowls or similar containers, so they don't roll about the floor like crazy, and you can start warping.



The trick is to pull upwards - if you do that, you will get a really smooth, evenly-tensioned flow of yarn from your spouty pot. I've tried this with a 5 m stretch between the warp end posts, and it still worked nicely, provided you pulled up (or as up as possible); for an even longer warp, I'd set a zigzag course instead of a straight line for warping, and then more length would not be an issue at all.

I've made quite a few warps, and pulling up is always a good idea, but using the pot makes things just... smoother, more evenly tensioned, and much, much more fun.

Bonus feature: It looks like dancing.



Second bonus feature: I now have a 5 metre warp with 20 tablets to play with...

Sometimes, things just line up, and then exciting things happen. Such as a weekend workshop on tablet weaving that I will give, on January 18-20 2019 - in a stunningly beautiful house in Méry, Belgium. I am utterly, utterly thrilled by this - and maybe you are too?

The house is the Merveille de Méry, a 19th century country house, lovingly restored and beautifully situated in woody grounds. It's near Liège, which means it is easy to reach by train (and there will be a shuttle service to the house).



My workshop will run from Friday late afternoon to Sunday afternoon, and we will explore in depth the structures of tablet weaving. The aim is to give you a deep understanding of how patterning in tablet weaving works:

- the differences in s- or z-warping
- their relation to patterns and turn directions
- how to tell where you are in a pattern
- how to see which thread colours will appear next in your band
- how to fix mistakes
- how to transition from threaded-in patterns with two colours to doublefaced weaves

These things are taught as part of a system, starting with making a continuous warp. The deep understanding of how tablet weaving works, together with this system, will enable you to:

- analyse, understand, and copy bands that you see
- draft your own patterns with two or more colours
- weave patterned bands without any pattern draft, similar to how bands have been woven in the past.

This workshop may even take you to the basics of weaving 3/1 broken twill - the type of patterning used in the most complex of medieval tablet woven bands.

Workshop start is Friday, January 18, 6 pm; you can arrive at the house from 2 pm. The workshop ends on Sunday, January 20, at 4 pm. If you are travelling by train, a shuttle service from Liège to Méry on Friday and back on Sunday is possible.

I'm so delighted to be able to offer this - I've been wanting to do a larger tablet weaving workshop for a while now, and to have the opportunity to do it in such a stunning house, where we will have one room dedicated to our weaving and the rest of the house to relax between sessions, this is just awesome.

If you are interested, you can book your spot - including food and drink! - via my shop. If you book before December 10, you get the Early Bird Special Price of 395 €; after this, the regular fee is 425 €.

I'm already looking forward to this so much!

I need some guinea pigs. Or, as the Germans call it, "Versuchskarnickel".

I have mentioned I was planning to make a video workshop on the pattern-free tablet weaving method, right?

Well, the "planning to" has progressed to "I have a script, and a camera, and I am getting started". Which is nice. However, since this is the first thing in that line of work, and since I want to make sure that what I am doing is going to work for those who will be watching the videos, I need some guinea pigs to give me feedback on the test runs of the lessons.

What does that mean? It means I will send you download links to the videos I have made, taking you through the course from start to finish, with probably some wait times inbetween as things get into the way or I get sidetracked or have technical issues. You will be getting test run videos that are probably badly cut (I will not invest oodles of hours into the test run) and contain the occasional verbal blunder. Some of them will not be made with the final materials.

Your task, if you are joining the merry band of furry victims, will be to watch the videos, follow the instructions, and tell me everything that was not good, not clear, not helpful, or otherwise shitty. (And yes, I fully expect to hear a lot of "this was shitty" - after all, it's first steps in many regards for me.) That starts with the instructions themselves, obviously, but goes on to camera work and camera angle, lighting, or maybe just the fact you find that my beheaded upper body is twitching too much while holding shears and bits of yarn into the camera. (I will also ask you to provide your full contact data, and sign an agreement form that you will not pass on or publicise the videos or parts of them in any way.) I'm not keen on hearing that I am doing a lot of things badly, but I much prefer hearing about them from a band of testers with minds steeled against weird takes than from the paying customers later on.

What do you need to join in? Basically, just the will to do it, and enough time for doing the tablet weaving according to the instructions. It will eat some hours, as it is a slow task, but if you are interested in this, you will probably find it fun and not tedious. You do not need to be an expert in tablet weaving - in fact, I'd be happy to have one or two absolute beginners in the group, and you will be able to follow along just as well, as we're doing the system from scratch.

You will also, apart from your general willingness, a way to watch the downloaded videos, and the time to do stuff and then give me feedback, need 30 tablets plus yarn to weave with... and two points to tie your warp to. There will be a video bit about tools and materials, so you'll be informed properly. (Or so I hope.)

I am aiming for about a dozen folks. So... if you are interested, let me know via mail, or contact form, or through the comments here - preferably with a short summary of your previous tablet weaving experience, so I can get a basic idea, and I'll get back to you with further info!

And the doggy is done - finally!

This one was actually inspired by an original published in Audrey Henshall, "Five Tablet-Woven Seal tags"(article behind paywall). It's not looking as elegant by far as the original, which has a proper eye and keeps its head up much more, and has a nicer jaw and slightly different paws... but it's a running dog-like critter, and, most important to me, was woven with only very slight residual muddling up of tablet directions and alignments.



As you can see, my version turned out a little club-headed and thick-necked. I'm still very, very happy with this, though; weaving it was an interesting mix of excitement and relaxation, with only very few "oh my goodness now I have to fudge this bit" moments. I'm also getting better at transitions between the different design elements and at getting the timing for these transitions right.

Now I'll have a think about what to do next... it might be time to tackle some geometric motif for a change, to see how that works. Or another peacock, in a different design. Or a phoenix (that might be really interesting, with flames and such). So many choices, so little time - it takes me about a full day of work to weave one of these critters, so it's still a time-consuming thing.

Speaking of time and time-consuming things, as usual, my autumn will be getting rather crazy, so I am taking a few days off before the final craziness that is preparing for the ETF. Which means a little blog break as well - I'll be back on the blog on Wednesday, October 10.  Have fun until then!

... that's appearing on this band.

 


Some more things have fallen into place, and I've invented some more mnemonic rhymes that are more or less silly, but all very helpful for me.

Now there's only (hah!) the torso and front paws and head to weave, and I will have a doggy on my band. Making the hind paws was exciting, especially the first one, and I was very proud to have gotten the distance to the second leg large enough. Which, on retrospective, would have been very hard not to - due to the structural rules when weaving. Anyways, it was a lot of fun up until now, and a very exhilarating feeling of "oh my goodness this all works as it's supposed to!" which is a nice change from "oh my goodness I've gotten totally muddled and this may look pink but it's all in the wrong direction and I'm out of the rhythm so I need to fudge this and hope it won't be too obvious".

So... half a dog done, half to go. Though I should probably also take care of some other things...

...now I'm a Bee-Weaver...



This thing gave me an ear-worm. A slightly, hum, changed one... as now I am a bee-weaver, having woven a bee. Or something that should look more or less like one. (Thanks for the prompt, Christa!)

As you can clearly see, I'm still not the Queen Of Counting Correctly - else the torso would have been in the middle of the band and the wings the same size. I'm also not yet the Queen Of Getting Started Properly Right Away, and the two blue spots before the antennae start bear testimony to that.

The rest, though? I'm okay with how it went, seeing as it was all, again, made up as I went along. (My plans were slightly different, but at one point they had a chat with reality. Hence no incision between torso carapace and striped abdomen.)

If you look closely, there are slight irregularities in the stripey bit, and these are due to different twill direction. I was aware of these switches in direction but chose to ignore them. You might also be able to see the difference in appearance depending on twill/weaving direction - one direction has a much clearer, cleaner appearance than the other, and that is due to the ply direction of the warp threads, and a very common (and unavoidable) effect in this technique.

This was fun to weave, and didn't take a gazillion years (only half a gazillion). I've also learned a few more things, and got more used to some others.

Finally I noticed that my warp tension had crept up and up... so I've remedied that for the next part (I had to move the band along the loom-thingie anyways to have more free warp to work with). While I was concentrating so hard on getting all the turns correct, and being on the brink of going crazy at what felt like all times, it was very seductive to just up the warp tension for easier mechanical turning of the tablets... and I didn't really think about it. I just gave in to temptation.

So... while a relatively high warp tension means it's easier to turn the tablets without them getting caught in a neighbour tablet's threads, and the shed opens nicely all on its own, the downside to this is not only more friction on the thread (no issue at my tension and with my warp threads, though) but also rather acute angles in the diagonals, and stretched-out patterns. Which is not so nice. So now that I am a little more relaxed with the pattern-inventing, I want to go back to lower warp tension to have prettier designs. I just have to get back into the good habits of how to handle the tablets when turning so the getting-caught-issues are minimised.

Next up: Some doggy inspired by a medieval tablet-woven band used as a seal tag. And I hope you're not all sick and tired of hearing about tablet weaving already!

I'm trying to get down pat how to handle the different design elements that can occur in a tablet-weave, and it's half fun and half frustrating and half exciting. Or something like this.

Basically, there are only about 10 elements that you need to learn to do anything, with the most straightforward being a diagonal line running in the main direction of your twill background. That one is really easy, while other things that are twisting things away from that straightforward thing are, hm, let's call it "more demanding". There are ways to do curves, and horizontal and vertical lines, and diagonals running opposite to the current twill direction, and they aren't that hard - but the challenges grow when you are doing multiple things at once and have to keep track of all of them (plus decide on the fly how the pattern should move on).

Also not helpful at all? Having a little reference sheet to help keep track of how the tablets should stand, and then discovering, after a long while of wondering why things occasionally go totally pear-shaped with no good reason whatsoever, that there was a lovely little mistake in that reference sheet. Bah. Duh. I did about a gazillion facepalms in my mind when I found out what had brought me down there again and again. (I had mostly looked at the bits left and right of the erroneous point, which were a-ok and really helpful, and only occasionally referred to the faulty part.)

So. Current status?



I have made a tree-like thing.

As you can clearly see, I'm still working on merging lines. I'm also still working on a lot of other things, such as starting diamond shapes out of nowhere in a timely fashion. Things are progressing, though, albeit slowly.

There is also still that occasional problem to keep left and right apart. It's getting better, though - having told myself so, so often by now that "towards the weft, slants up and left" that it starts to seep into the backbrain.

Next up: More new and exciting design elements - such as horizontal lines. Yay!