Monday 11 May 2009

The sun is shining, the grass is green...

That was a really pleasant, wonderful and relaxing weekend - spent mostly at home, doing necessary things for the medieval gear (like cleaning and shining shoes and washing textile stuff) at a leisurely pace, eating yummy things (like really tasty asparagus and strawberry cream cake), reading and doing some fun weaving.

The fun weaving is in preparation for a tablet weaving workshop, scheduled for August. The workshop is meant to teach people already experienced with threaded-in patterned tablet weaves how to do free patterning and double-faced weaves in twill structure, by showing the underlying mechanics of the weaving process. And in preparation of this, I'm weaving a "play-band". A band like that - used for playing around with different turning techniques and developing patterns - is what we'll weave in the workshop, to each her (or his) own play-band.


The warp I made for my preparation thing is relatively thick, plied silk yarn in red and off-white. I used the opportunity to try some patterns I had drafted from other bands before proper playing, but the hours yesterday were spent with fun combining of turning sequences, pattern pieces and twill. The thing I like most about play-bands? First of all, there are no real mistakes. You can just do things. The worst that can happen is that either you get totally blown away pattern-wise and have to turn the tablets back into starting sequence, or that you end up on the back of the band with your pattern. Then you can either tablet-turn your way up again or you just flip the band and go on where your pattern has gone to. And occasionally, there's a real nice pattern piece in the sequences that turns up by chance... and on a play-band you can take the time and space to isolate this pattern bit by placing it on a twill background.

And I had an obscene amount of fun yesterday weaving this pattern bit:



Guess which of these three will win the race?

2 comments:

Kruliczyca said...

Very witty indeed. I guess I have now one more reason to learn tablet weaving, hahaha...

a stitch in time said...

Hehe. It's not hard to do either, as long as you stick to simple tablet weaving (like on the pic). If you like a bit of self-tormenting, however, you can make patterns that are incredibly time-consuming and need full attention. All the time.