Today was Warping Day. Well, Warping Afternoon - fortunately, the relatively small warps of limited length that we use in the weaving workshop are quite quick to make. So now I have this, waiting to be packed up: 

On the left there's a few "oh no bad things happened" warps, prepared in case something bad happens and we need a quick new one. On the right... that's a stack of edge tablets, waiting to be installed at some point. 

Edge tablets - usually all threads in one colour, and two or more of those monochrome tablets per edge - are an absolute fixture in historical bands. They make for neat edges, and if you weave patterns with my system, they are one way to tell which tablets turn in which direction. 

However... adding edge tablets also makes warping a little more time-consuming, and it means one more thing to keep track of. That's why I did my workshops without edge tablets in the past. (Remember what I wrote about things evolving? That's one of them.) I've thought about a few different options on how to include them without making things too weird at the beginning, and I think I have found the solution and the hopefully impeccable timing for adding edge tablets: The point where they are actually helpful, and where the basic understanding stuff that does not require extra "empty brainless twisting" has already happened.

Next Monday I will know more. Now there's a tad more preparation to do, but the main stuff has all happened. 

Oh, and due to the Bahn going on strike on Thursday and Friday... I will have to figure out whether I can go by train (probably not) or will have to take the car after all. Sigh.

I'm already looking forward to the next weekend - a group has booked me for a tablet weaving workshop, so we will spend the weekend twisting tablets and brains, and making straight and diagonal lines, and understanding where to look and why things work just as they work. 

So I'm now preparing for the workshop, which includes prepping the tablets:

The workshop starts with warping tablets, and then we weave our way into understanding how patterns happen, and how to make them look just like you want them to look. It's the system I've developed that can be taken further into weaving 3/1 broken twill without a written pattern (though we won't go that far during this weekend). 

All the tablets we'll need are now ready for warping, with all the punched holes empty and waiting to be threaded. I have a list of some more things to prep, and a few printouts to make, and some warping for the edge tablets.

Like all workshops, my tablet weaving workshop evolves over time - sometimes there's a chance discovery of something that works very well, or there's a "snag spot" where participants seem to struggle regularly, so these things get updated in my master script after a workshop, and are done a little differently next time. I really like to see how these things change and evolve and grow over time. And then there's the additional changes made to adapt the workshop to the group's wishes, so while the workshops are somehow the same, they also feel quite different every time... and part of the fun and joy in giving these is discovering their own specific vibe. (Plus, of course, the joy of seeing those little aha!-moments when something suddenly clicks.)

The weekend prep is continuing, and one of the tasks was to get the "show band" ready for... well... the show. Which meant finishing the half-done motif that was currently on there.

Last time I played around with that was way too long ago, and it was trying to freestyle copy the Evebø dog (or whatever it's supposed to be). I can't remember exactly what happened at some point when it was time to split the forelegs, but something must have happened. Maybe I made a mistake, or something came up and I had no more time, or - well. The result, in any case, was me stopping the weave for a while.

A long while.

So I now sat down, undid the last twists to make sure everything was aligned properly, fiddled with the tension, and tried to figure out where I'd been and what to do next. As usual in my attempts to do the doggy beast, it did not work out entirely as I had planned...

...so I have another slightly faulty, slightly weird and crooked animal to add to the zoo. One of these days, though, I'll manage to do one properly. Without weird butts, or weird forelegs, or weird eyes, or weird snouts and foreheads.

Anyway, the beast is done, and now I will add a little bit of white background (just a centimetre or two) before segueing into diagonals, which is what I have planned for the demonstration. 

Go see me in the Stadtmuseum on Saturday 20:00 to 22:30 to meet this little beast in person! 

Band weaving with rigid heddles (or with string heddles) is a wonderful technique - it's relatively easy, quick, and versatile, and if you like patterns, there's always the possibility to do pick-up patterns or insert some extra heddles. Small wonder that there's a lot of band weaving implements in folk museums...

The North, especially, seems to be a place for beautiful bands and, consequently, for looms and other weaving tools. There was a discussion on the Braids and Bands mailing list a few days ago about a certain form of band loom, the Norwegian cradle loom, and Mari Voipio did the list a favour and made a public list of the looms in the Digitalt Museum (thank you Mari!). You can find the list here - it contains a lot of looms, and there is also a very interesting video about band weaving included. 

 With the pandemic lasting for rather long, I started (like some other people) to offer some of my workshops or courses online. So far it's the sewing workshop (about medieval stitches, seams, and hem types) and the spinning workshop.

I've been asked at some points about offering other workshops as well, and I've thought about it, but not every one of my workshops is online-able, at least not in my reckoning and how I teach it.

The most recent in-person techniques that I taught were the tablet-weaving workshop and the loop-braiding one. I can definitely say that I will not offer the tablet weaving one as a digital version. There are several reasons for that.

One of them is that there's often little movements or little habits that influence how smoothly the weaving goes. I need to see these, and in my experience from the spinning workshop, that is just not possible via a small screen and with limited camera positioning possibilities. It's not as crucial in the spinning workshop as it is for tablet weaving, and there it can already cause issues. 

I also need to be able to see the band, in detail and from up close - because occasionally, threading errors happen, or a single tablet flips or goes out of alignment, and, well, see above.

Those are the visual issues. 

Warping is another thing where I have a set-up in the workshop that works well, but it requires using my favourite all-purpose-tool: the clamp. To be more accurate, four clamps per person. These are used for warping, then two serve as anchor points for the warp for the rest of the workshop, and then I pack them up and take them home again. That means that participants in an online version would have to warp with what they have at home, or get clamps on loan and have to send them back, or have to buy clamps, or I'd do the warping and send the finished warp for the workshop. The last would be the easiest version logistically, but it would also mean that warping - which is an important thing to learn - would not be part of the experience.

And then... there's the touching. Warp tension is one thing where it's helpful to touch and see, but that is the least of the points. There's this stage in the workshop when we're going off to weave freestyle patterns based on diagonals - diamonds, X-shapes, diamonds with a swirly centre, diagonals branching off each other. Mistakes happen, confusion might occur, and then I need to orient myself to see what happened, and what needs to be done, and I do that by leafing through the stack of tablets, checking each one.

And this is where, at the very latest, the idea of doing this virtually would die. I'm still hoping to some day, when it gets less busy here, finish filming and making the instruction video for tablet weaving planned and started oh, way too long ago - but transforming the in-person workshop on tablet weaving to an online version is just not possible. 

(In case you're wondering about the difference between a video course and the live online version: The video can be watched again and again if there's something unclear or difficult. Since different people tend to have their problems at different places, watching individually and re-playing the passages in question would not be an issue. Explaining something online live without the possibility of showing it on the band, and having potential visual problems caused by the participant cameras, well... let's say that this is sure not to work out well. It would also mean factoring in a good amount more time for the workshop in advance, making an already rather long one... impossibly long.)

I'm back from the weekend weaving workshop - which was (as these things tend to be) an enormous amount of fun, both for me and (according to their comments) the participants.

There was a lot of weaving done - quickly making centimeters on the bands on the first day. My weaving workshops always start with the very basics: Getting the hang of what different threading directions do, weaving stripes, the absolute basic principles on how patterns work. Then we do a little bit of doubleface to warm up, and then the fun starts.

That also means that the second is was devoted to more thinking and more looking at tablets, and more sorting things around, which slows down the weaving process. Let's say that it can be surprisingly hard to weave a simple monochrome surface... but all of my weavers did very, very well, and went away with a band and a learning curve that they can really be very proud of.

And I actually remembered to take a few photos! Though most of them are on a different camera than this very, very blurry one that I snapped with my phone, and have not transferred yet:

I did not promise twill in the workshop description, on purpose, but I usually get signals very quickly if the group, more or less, would like to try it. (They usually do.) And if that's the case, I try to get things arranged so everyone who wants to can get a little bit of the twill experience. 

That was also the case on the weekend, and we did manage to progress into twill weaving for the last part, to my great pleasure and to the great spinning of heads (in German you say "rauchende Köpfe", as in the brain is working so hard that smoke curls up from the head) on the weavers' side. 

I love weaving twill on tablets, and I really love teaching it. Twill is hard, though. You have to keep track of a lot of things simultaneously, and there's a stack of tablets that needs to be handled delicately and correctly, so some of your capacity is already taken up by the fine motor skills demands, and then (if you've done tablet weaving beforehand) there are things you always did differently and you have to do my way now (because of reasons, not because I like to pester people) so that eats even more of your brain or (if you haven't done tablet weaving beforehand) there are so many new movements that it's also eating up brain capacity, and that together means that it is getting hard to count to two.

There is concentrated deep silence during most of the time when I'm running a tablet weaving workshop. I have actually tried it once, where there was no carpet on the floor, and yes, you could hear the pin drop. That concentrated silence is even more obvious if twill is requested by the participants, though then you sometimes hear sighs, quiet mumblings (to keep track of the sequence in which things should be done) or, if something has gone properly wrong, a little cry for help or assistance.

As is also usual, only a part of the group went on to venture a little deeper into twill after the first bit of it. Twill weaving is not for everyone - you have to like this kind of brain-bending mental gymnastics, and some people do, and some people don't, and that is absolutely okay. The system I use is all logical throughout, and there's a stack of rules and little hacks and standard procedures that really help, but the challenge in the workshop is that you have to remember all of them at the same time, and a weekend workshop always means that there is limited time to let each new standard really settle into the brain and the hands.

I'd really like to try and teach tablet weaving for a full week some time, and see what could be done with a bit more practise before progressing to the next steps... but that would probably have to be at some weaving school or special event. Who knows, though - there's been so many interesting things and projects and jobs in the past that I'd never have dreamt of, the opportunity might arise at some place and some time.

For now, I have some notes to review, and some bits of my workshop script to tweak, a few little changes to make for the next workshop, and then I'll be waiting for the next opportunity to make some brain cells work very, very hard... 

The tablet weaving workshop is in March in the Fränkische Schweiz-Museum Tüchersfeld, on Friday 3 to Sunday 5. We'll cover tablet weaving from the basics to free pattern weaving with diagonals - and in some cases, participants in this course even proceeded on to the basics of 3:1 broken twill weaving, also without a pattern.  

The workshop can be booked via the museum website; the price includes materials and lunch on Saturday and Sunday.