Judith Proctor's Journal

 Free standing rigid heddle.

The two sets of warp threads go through the holes and slits respectively. Lift the warp up to select on set, and down to select the other.

This illustration dates from from 1300 - 1340, is from a library in Switzerland and was made in Germany.  (Codex Manisse)
 

And here is the only actual photo I've been able to find of a real one... (It's American, but  I'm sure they would have been used elsewhere.)

Label

Tape looms were used by weavers, men or women, who held the looms between their knees as they worked. The looms produced strips of fabric called tapes roughly an inch wide, that could be ornamental or plain, and were used for everything from garters to binding. Like the carved box nearby, the tape loom is part of a group of carved seventeenth-century objects that is thought to be the product of two joiners who worked in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in the second half of the seventeenth century, William Searle (1611-1667) and Thomas Dennis (1638-1706). Dennis probably trained with Searle in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England, before the two immigrated to New England.

Having just paid my £20 membership for the English Civil War Society (and £5 extra to the regiment of my choice - Norfolke Trayned Bandes), I'm trying to find out how my inkle and tablet weaving hobbies would have worked in 1642.

The first one is from 1524, German, I presume.  You have to look at the man on the right - his loom is supported in a box. It has two horizontal bars, supported by horizontal ones.  The warp thread runs between the two horizontal bars and runs over the back bar to where extra warp is wound round another horizontal bar.  On the warp, he is holding a square piece of wood with vertical slits in it (or possibly a wooden frame with strong thread tied across in several vertical rows..  That's called a rigid heddle.  Every odd thread will pass through one part of the heddle, and every even thread passes though in a different way (the picture can't handle detail on that scale).  When the heddle is lifted, it will raise all the odd-numbered threads, thus allowing the weft to pass under the odd threads, but over the even ones.  When the heddle is moved down, the situation is reversed.

It allows you to weave in and out of the warp threads with no more effort than swapping the heddle position and passing the weft shuttle through. Reverse the heddle and pass the weft the other way, rinse and repeat until your band is as long as desired.

More types of loom to come, but I thought I'd stick to one per post.

 As many of you will know, one of my major hobbies (after traditional dance) is narrow band weaving.

I'm currently playing around with Andean Pebble Weaving.  This is the first pattern I've tried, but I'm quite pleased with it. You can see the small background dots that give the technique its name.

It took a while to work out how to do it.  The instructions for it in the book I've used for a lot of my weaving, Anne Dixon's 'Inkle Pattern Directory'

 which is absolutely fantastic for basic techniques and Baltic pickup weaving (the kind of patterns you expect to see on Scandinavian Xmas jumpers)- here's one of my favourites that I wove - completely failed me when it came to Andean Pebble Weaving...

Her instructions for this technique were incredibly clunky and time-consuming. (they pretty much involved manipulating every single warp thread by hand, all the time.  The whole point of using an inkle loom is that there are bits of string called 'heddles' attached to roughly half of the warp threads (typically all the threads of a particular colour), so that you can lift them all up as a group, or push them all down as a group.  Then you only have to change a few threads to get the pattern you want.

In addition to that, I eventually realised that her warping instructions were actually for a Mexican band weaving technique, which admittedly works very much like Andean Pebble Weaving, but looks different visually - in simple terms, you have thinner warp threads for the background, and thicker threads for the pattern.

I bought a book on doing Andean Pebble Weaving using tablet weaving, which is a technique I'm very familiar with.  Which turned out to be totally unsuitable for me, as it assumed you weren't using an inkle loom (see icon).

However, I'd paid for it (including overseas postage from the Netherlands) so I was damned if I wasn't going to get some use out of it!

It's a very dense book in an acedemic style, lacking in photos and warping diagrams, but with the aid of that and the video below, I was able to work out how pebble weaving is supposed to be done.  The lady in this videos is doing close to  the traditional way (albeit on an inkle loom rather than backstrap) (I'll tell you what backstrap is in a minute...)

Backstrap weavers have  a belt round their back that the bottom of the loom is tied to.  See the set of string heddles.  For pebble weaving, add a second set of string heddles, and keep most of the rest of what she's got, including when the different colours of warp threads are separated by two sticks to keep them apart... See how pulling the heddles allows her to change colours.  Now imagine having to use two sets of those heddles, and having to do complicated stuff (as in the first video) separating the two sets of warps with sticks and picking up individual threads with a cocktail stick (or pick up stick of your choice).

My brain went Aragh....

There's complicated and there's complicated...

I brain ached for days.  In the middle of one sleepless night (asthma medication side effect), I finally came up with something workable.  Well, it proved workable when I finally warped up my inkle loom to test it.  After a lot of starting mistakes and a rapid learning experience....

You couldn't use my method on a backstrap loom - it only works on an inkle loom ('inkle' just means 'narrow band') and I don't think it would work for pieces over a certain width, but it works for me.  And is definitely easier than the method the woman with the inkle loom was using!

I did all my early weaving on a backstrap loom, but I was doing tablet weaving rather then want the south American women use.  Backstrap works well, is portable, and cheap, and it's what I use to teach new weavers as an inkle loom is an investment.  But I find my back is more comfortable if I'm not looking down all the time.

I'll spare you the explanation (unless you're a weaver and actually want to know) of how I got it to work, but it was an 'interesting' experience...

I'll probably do a few more bands in this technique, but there are so many techniques to try. There are  weaving styles from so many counties, Europe, Africa, Latin American.  I'm sure there are ones I've still to discover.

Some differ in the type of patterns, others in the way the patterns are made. Sometimes patterns from one technique can woven with a different technique to get the same result (or something that looks the same)

I did a weave along here,  a few years ago.  If anyone wants to learn how to weave a simple belt with scarp yarn, a pencil, a plastic bag clip, scissors, a pack of old playing cards, a hole punch, a ruler and a belt - just ask!

It might be nice to do another one.

 Kotturinn took me up on my recent offer to weave a belt, and we're both really pleased with how it came out.

As you can see, with this kind of weaving, there's a different pattern on the two sides of the band.

The star and diamond pattern was the one I chose it for, but I quite like the back side as well.

Here's a close up

For these interested in the technical stuff, it's a 'Baltic' style pattern woven on an inkle look.

It's a warp-faced weave  -ie. The weft is all one colour and the patterns are made by manipulating the weft threads.  (Unlike any weaving you did as kids, which was probably weft-faced.

I used two yarns of different thickness. Every thick weft thread will have a thin one on each side of it.  (Sometimes, you can use two thin threads side by side to achieve the effect of a single thicker one.)

The thinner of the two yarns effectively push the thicker yarn up between them and make the thicker yarn stand a little proud.

I used a strong, thin, wool, machine knitting yarn that I got from the local scrap store for the background.  I'm very fond of this particular purple yarn, it goes well with a lot of things and I have a whole cone of it.  Unlike acrylic yarns, it doesn't stretch under tension, so I have more control over the weaving.

The pattern threads were from self-patterning sock yarn passed on by a friend - the colours were used in a way that makes the pattern almost symmetrical, but with a slight random element. that I rather liked.  I really love the way the softer colours work together.

So, anyone else fancy a belt, hairband, bookmark, edge for a skirt, trim for a blouse, etc?  I'll make them all out of second-hand yarn and all I ask is a donation (amount of your choice) to one of my favourite charities.

You get to choose the approximate colours, length, and width.

You can choose a pattern if you like -but you can also say 'surprise me', which is what  Kotturinn did.