Lots of little dots today...

I'll be giving a workshop about brocading in tablet weaving next weekend, so today saw me drawing lots and lots of little dots - thankfully, using the computer and appropriate drawing software made this a lot easier. (The whole thing was also helped by the fact that we'll only be using 15 tablets. There's a lot less dots in 15 rows than in 55 or more!)

So we'll have a selection of nice simple patterns to use in the workshop, all nicked from actual historical bands - though I suspect that we'll not get down to the actual original size of many of these bands, which was in most cases (for around 13-17 tablets) at somewhere between 4 and 10 mm in width... rather tiny.

But then, the tinyness does help with the bands looking quite spectacular. There's a small band with a dragon-like motif in the Irish National Museum Dublin, for instance, that looks just like solid gold. It's tiny and has really thin threads, and I'd love to show you a photo of it, but alas, it's copyrighted... so I'll have to keep the blurry photograph that I have of it to myself. Sorry.