Change of plan – Stoneage Weaving

Not so long ago I found out that the first weaving was weft twined, rather than under over type, and twisted bast strips, rather than loose fibre, but I had been looking at Egyptian looms and weaving, so while I made the connection between basket weaving and the first fabric I hadn’t thought about the real potential of twining. It had been a long time since I had seen the picture of a Chilkat cloak in ‘The Book of Looms’, and there is no indication there of how they start their work.

Yesterday, I was looking at the older WWL videos on YouTube, when a title caught my eye: Taaniko Weaving – A Maori Weaving Technique. What an absolutely lovely video! Full of background information as well as detailed instructions for starting and finishing, and lots of inspiring pictures of what to do in between.

I was a bit late going to bed last night!

Next project

I have more than one project on the go, as well as a UFO and a dog on the loom, but my tablet weaving is over halfway done, so I’m thinking about what pattern I want to do next, as I’m getting bored of ‘vine’, lovely though it is. I want to try double faced TW again. I’m thinking of trying out one of P Collingwood’s methods. I tried the basic alternate ZS 2 forward two back ages ago but I didn’t like the texture, and it was nothing like the satiny appearance of the double faced TW that a group of visiting Spanish re-enactors had. Collingwood’s book has (afaict) every conceivable method of TW, and he has at least two other methods for double faced weaving, one of which looks a lot like the Spanish one. so I was going to try and get to grips with that next, but . . .

My long term project is finding out what pattern weaves can easily be done on a WWL, and actually producing and documenting them. Some days ago, I was doodling possible weft paths, musing on the ‘Snape variant’ as depicted in P Walton Rogers’ book, ‘Cloth and Clothing . . .’ and realised that it was probably done for similar reasons for making twill rather than tabby, i.e. to make a thicker, warmer fabric, and that it was almost a double faced weave, and that at least a simple version of both plain and compound double weave might be fairly easy on a WWL. This morning, flicking through P Walton Rogers’ book, ‘Cloth and Clothing . . .’ to find her diagram of the ‘Snape variant’, to compare my doodles with, I spot a diagram of 3/1 weave, just like one of my doodles. How did I miss that? Oh, wait, it’s turned. That’s weird, why would you do it warp faced? Oh! It’s tablet weaving?! But there’s no twist. How does that happen? I have got to try that! Hmm the text is rather ambiguous. Now I need to find out if it’s the same as the double faced TW I was going to do or a different one, or something else entirely! PWR refers to PC anyway, so that’s handy. TW does tend to make my head spin though so I’m off to play with WeaveDesign for a bit.

Krokbragd, Boundweave and Danskbrogd

Some time ago, I discovered krokbragd, and realised it would be very easy to do on a Scandinavian type warp weighted loom, no real surprise there, as it was obviously a rug weave. I played around with the method on a rigid heddle loom and came up with several little motifs that I liked, and looked around on the internet for more. One image had rows of little men, women, houses, pine trees and snow capped mountains. There was no information with it except that it was “traditional krokbragd pattern”. It couldn’t be krokbragd though, as the motifs used too many warps, so it was no use to me at the time.

Once again looking for weaves that would be easy to do on a Scandinavian type WWL, I remembered it, and started looking up krokbragd, hoping I would stumble across it again. I found dozens and dozens of other motifs of different widths but I didn’t find those. I did find that weft faced weaves are also called boundweave, though, and further searching brought up a gem of an article about danskbrogd. While it will take me a while to get my head round the instructions it is clear that it is a three shaft point threading using pickup, so is a perfect candidate for weaving on the WWL.