Vintage Knitting Pattern: Knitted Fringe

© 2023 Carolyn Priest-Dorman

I was riffling through my digital collection of early knitting books one day a couple of years ago and got a wild hair to try a particular pattern from one of them. Thanks to the #Fiberuary 2023 social media event on Mastodon, I am inspired to finish the blog post I drafted about this pattern then. This is "Fringe, No. 9" from The Ladies' Knitting and Netting Book, Second Edition (London, 1838), and it amused me enough to share.

The instructions call for the creation of a strip nine stitches wide that looks a lot like a simple lace insertion tape or some similar passementerie. I used size 2 (2.75mm) needles and Webs Valley Cotton 10/2 (mercerized perle) for this sample. Here are the instructions, modernized somewhat.

• Cast on 9 stitches (I used long-tail).
• Row 1: Sl, k2, yo, k2tog, k1, yo, k2tog, k
• repeat Row 1 until you have enough length for your purpose
• Bind off five stitches.
• Cut the working yarn and pass it through the sixth stitch to secure the knitting.
• Unravel the four remaining stitches all the way back to the beginning of the band.

You really do just pull the stitches until they unravel.

They will all come undone to approximately the same length, into loops that are interconnected. The loop at the cast-on edge will be slightly longer than the others if you used a slip-knot at the beginning of your cast-on.

The resulting strip is completely stable. If you want, you can cut the fringes and/or trim them to a specific length; you can also block or steam them, which will make them fall more straight.

I would love to know how this fringe was used. I imagine it tacked to every single shelf-edge in the drawing-room, or dangling from perambulator shades, or maybe even (if you make it out of silk) fluttering on top of a surrey.

Viking Age Tablet Weaving: Kufic or Not?

Please read the important update at the bottom of this post.

Well, here on the Left Coast of the USA I woke up to a Viking textile controversy this morning, and no mistake! Maybe I'm an idiot, and maybe I'm not, but here's my take on it.

Today's controversy involves the Birka tablet-woven brocade bands. According to Annika Larsson (about whom more below), the geometric designs actually depict Kufic inscriptions saying "Allah" and "Ali." We already know there was plenty of contact with Muslim culture of the period given the large quantity of Persian silver and Eastern silk found in Viking Age contexts. That contact is not at issue, not even remotely. But this particular reinterpretation of the bands has me really steamed, and here's why.

Larsson's "discovery" is predicated on unfounded extensions of pattern, not on existing pattern.

If you consult any of the current crop of articles about this topic, you'll see a photo of a graph on a page with a mirror next to it. (Here's a link to the Heritage Daily one.) The pattern graph is quite clearly Band 6 from the Birka finds, an artifact found in a tenth-century woman's grave, Grave 965, which was published in Agnes Geijer's 1938 Birka III: Die Textilfunde aus den Gräbern. (See photo below, which is taken from Abb. 20, "Muster der Brettchenbänder," on page 82 in Geijer.)

If you look at the pattern Larsson is postulating, it shows nine additional pattern units at each side of the band, for a total of 18 additional tablets' worth of width. In Larsson's photo you can tell the additional pattern units apart from the original pattern units printed in Geijer because the additional units indicating the brocade weft at the two sides of the graph are slightly lighter than the ones in the central part of the graph; they are also printed 90 degrees off from the direction of the original unit graphics. This unexplained extrapolation practically doubles the width of the band, and here's why that's a problem.

According to Geijer, Band 6 was woven in a technique common to almost every piece of tablet-woven brocade at Birka. Each pattern tablet was threaded half with silk, half with linen and offset by one-quarter turn from the tablet next to it. "Stave borders" of warp twining one tablet wide marked off the selvedges; they are threaded entirely with silk. The tablets were alternately threaded and turned continuously forward. The band was woven with a structural weft that is hidden inside the band as well as a supplementary metallic brocading weft that floats on top of the band to make the pattern. When linen is "up" during the weaving, it's always covered with metallic brocading weft; when silk is "up," it's often (but not always) visible as a tie-down point. This technique is very economical, as the resulting band looks like it's woven with 100% silk when it is much less expensive to weave than 100% silk as about half the warp is linen rather than silk.

If you consult Tafl 17:1 in Birka III for a photo of Band 6, you can clearly see the continuous metallic weft of the band turning at each selvedge to enter back in the other direction. If Larsson were correct that Band 6 was originally significantly wider, you would not see those turning loops; you'd see a series of discontinous single passes of brocading weft with cut or broken ends at each edge.

Annika Larsson is currently with the Institute for Archaeology and Ancient History at Uppsala University in Sweden. The bio at her web page there says "[t]he first degree I took at the Textile Institute, where I trained myself as product designer and pattern designer for the industry. But I am also a craftsman and collaborate with various craft crafts in textiles and throws." She is not trained in archaeology as nearly as I can tell.

You may remember how she offered a radically disruptive theory in 2007 that Viking Age women's oval brooches were worn at the level of the nipples. (You can read more about her idea here.) I have yet to read a textile archaeologist's endorsement of that particular version of costume history, which doesn't surprise me since on the face of it it seems incompatible with much of the published archaeological material on women's clothing from Birka, let alone the rest of the Viking cultural milieu.

Again, I have nothing against the theory that these patterns are Kufic. I would welcome additional overt evidence for Persian influence at Birka, since I already believe the mix of cultures there is too rich and thorough to gloss Birka as representing a single and "Viking" cultural context. But Larsson's theory flies in the face of what we know about Band 6; it doesn't pass my sniff test.

UPDATE 17 October 2017: I see the Guardian has called me a "textile archaeologist." This is incorrect. I have never claimed to be a textile archaeologist, although the discipline of textile archaeology is my chief intellectual interest. Please do not hold me responsible for anybody's failure to describe me correctly.

UPDATE 1 November 2017: The Enköping Museum has put out a statement about this controversy.

The criticism is directed towards a part of the exhibition, but not to the whole. In anticipation of clarifications from the researcher at Uppsala University, the museum now chooses to pause this part of the exhibition until further notice. [via Google Translate]

The statement further makes it clear that the issue centers on interpretation of a Birka band, not a band from some other site.

An Old Band-Woven Bookmark

A while back, a private book collector in the Midwest sent me a textile to examine.  It had come to him as a bookmark in a sixteenth-century bound manuscript.  With his permission, I am sharing my analysis here.

The bookmark is what's known as a "portable register" type.  Rather than being attached to the binding or a page of the book, it is removable.  Specifically, it's a multiple-strand bar anchor bookmark.  Several textile strips are secured to a bar (the "anchor") that is designed to rest on or at the top of a book.  See this article for an introduction to medieval bookmarks, and see the sources at the bottom of this post for more information.


Description:

This bookmark is composed of what appears to be a hand-whittled wooden bar anchor around which are sewn five lengths of band-woven textile.  The strands vary in condition from bright, flat, and flexible to crusty, dirty, curled, and stiff.  Only one of the ends has any finishing treatment; most are quite ragged and torn. 

The anchor is is about 2-1/4" (56mm) long by 1/4" (6mm) at its widest diameter.  The carved away portion of the bar is about 1-1/4" (32mm) long.  The wood is a light-colored, fine-grained hardwood, slightly bowed along its length.  Wear has chipped and pitted the surface at the two ends, which were originally smooth.  The collars at either side of the carved away area are still sharply cut into the wood, as if by a small but very sharp knife.

The five individual lengths of band-woven textile have been looped around the anchor for an original count of ten hanging tails, the strands.  A line of coarse stitching worked with a naturally colored linen thread holds together the entire set of looped bands.  The sewing thread is wrapped several times around each of the two outside bands. 

Six of the original ten strands survive in a usable length.  Both sides of the middle strand have been torn away leaving nothing but frayed ends next to the anchor.  One entire side of each of two strands has also been torn away, again leaving frayed ends next to the peg.  Two strands are substantially complete although one end of each is shorter than the other end; both the shorter ends are also frayed. 

The two longest remaining ends are approximately 22" long.  One terminates in an overhand knot.  The other has some broken warps and comes to what looks like a blind end.  It may be that these 22" lengths reflect the original lengths of the strips.  The book in which the bookmark was found is about 12.5" tall, which corresponds to the area of each long length that is comparatively clean and bright in appearance.

The textiles appear to be five strips cut from a single long narrow band.  The band is of warp-faced tabby, i.e., either rigid heddle or inkle woven.  The warp is two-ply linen of approximately 0.4-0.5mm diameter.  The band varies between 4mm and 5mm in width, and the beat is very regular.

one of the best preserved pieces of the band

The eleven warp ends are in four colors—bleached, golden yellow, light greenish blue, and dark blue—and the weft is more of the light blue linen.   The blue threads are finer than the gold and white ones.

weaving draft for band

Conclusions:

There doesn't seem to be a good solid hook from which to hang a specific date on this bookmark.  There is no reason to assume it was necessarily as old as the manuscript.  While some portable register bookmarks found in medieval books are likely to have been original (Swales & Blatt 2007, 167), others are not.  This bookmark could easily have been an afterthought, added to the book centuries after it was bound.  Perhaps someone retrofitted an existing anchor by giving it new textile strands in a later century.  Or perhaps the present bookmark might have completely replaced an earlier marker whose anchor was in poor repair but whose existence was helpful.

Although some parts of it are worn and dirty, proving that it's been around for a while, the linen for the most part is in extremely good shape, supple and not deteriorating.  It is hard to imagine linen strands would be in that fine a shape after hundreds of years closed between two layers of vellum; over so long a period of time surely the pH of the vellum would prove damaging to the linen.  Also, the use of several colors in the linen tape is, as nearly as I am aware, more likely to be a product of the eighteenth or nineteenth century than of the sixteenth or seventeenth.  I could not find any examples in Swales & Blatt's catalogue that were even remotely similar to this one save #2, "plain-woven red/blue/white wool and linen tape," which the authors could not examine (Swales & Blatt 2007, 148).  A mixed wool and linen tape seems even less likely to date back that far than the one at hand.

Accordingly, I'm going to hazard a guess that the textile portions of this bookmark are nineteenth century, at the earliest.  About the anchor, I've no idea, but it seems to have been fairly amateurishly produced, perhaps by someone bookish who needed a replacement anchor for a special book.

I appreciate the opportunity to have examined this piece as well as the challenge it posed to my knowledge of historic bookmarks.  I learned a lot!


Appendix:

I created the weaving draft to match the original colors using KXStitch* and the Anchor color palette.  The exact Anchor colors I used for this draft are as follows.

• gold:  295 Jonquil
• white:  2 White
• light blue:  1062 Peacock Blue
• dark blue:  131 Blue

Sources:

Janzen, Jenneka.  "Mark Their Words:  Medieval Bookmarks."  https://medievalfragments.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/mark-their-words-medieval-bookmarks/.  Accessed 31 July 2015.

Kwakkel, Erik.  "Smart Medieval Bookmarks."  http://medievalbooks.nl/2014/09/22/smart-medieval-bookmarks/.  Accessed 31 July 2015.

Swales, Lois, and Heather Blatt.  "The Bookmark."  In Das Hainricus-Missale. Vollständige Faksimile-Ausgabe der Handschrift Ms. M. 711 der Pierpont Morgan Library New York. Kommentar, hrsg. von Hans Ulrich Rudolf, 165-175.  Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 2010.  (See also pages 179-181 in the German translation, which have the informative schematics and photos.)

Swales, Lois, and Heather Blatt.  "Tiny Textiles Hidden in Books:  Toward a Categorization of Multiple-Strand Bookmarkers."  In Medieval Clothing and Textiles, vol. 3, ed. Robin Netherton and Gale. R. Owen-Crocker, 145-179.  Woodbridge:  The Boydell Press, 2007. 


* KXStitch is an open source cross-stitch graphing program for KDE.  It comes pre-loaded with the Anchor, DMC, and Madeira color palettes.  When using KXStitch for graphing textile patterns, I habitually use the Anchor palette rather than the DMC or Madeira one; I find it better represents naturally dyed textile colors, which are the colors I am accustomed to using.

Jorvík 1307: This Project Grew in the Planning

Or, "what I did with the rest of that handspun warp."

It all started when I realized I'd spun a good bit more warp than I needed for my yard of  Jorvík 1307.  I thought I should probably try some other weft with it so I'd have a sample for teaching aids.

I should say here that I have a good-sized collection of samples I use as visual aids when discussing various weaving concepts, structures, treatments, and colors.  They're mostly offcuts from larger projects.  Once in a while, though, I weave something specifically for use as a teaching sample.  Jorvík 1307 was turning out to be the occasion for doing that again.

I looked through my stash of handspun worsted yarn in appropriate fibers—Icelandic, Manx Laoghtan, Shetland.  I noticed I had a fairish quantity of Shetland singles yarn in the 0.6mm diameter range, some Z-spun and some S-spun.  The yarn size was in the zone for Jorvík textiles, although not dead-on accurate for any of them when combined with the pre-existing 0.4mm warp.  But the Z-Z versus Z-S textile divide has been on my mind since I first read Lise Bender Jørgensen's work on spin direction nearly 25 years ago.  Here by happenstance I had an opportunity to experiment with it at period-correct setts using period-correct yarns.  I decided I'd weave some of the warp off with each of the two types of yarns so I would have an example of two cloths sharing the same sett, with the same size and fiber type of weft yarn but differing in their direction of spin.

Partly as a relief from the attentive work I'd put into making the first part of the textile as correct as I could, I decided to beat this part of the textile by instinct, until it looked and felt "right."  Purely subjective!  The 17-18 picks per inch of Jorvík 1307 was too loose for this smaller weft.  I didn't count my picks, but I worked hard to beat evenly, especially when it came to matching the beat I'd used in the S section when it became time to weave the Z section.  Overall the weaving went speedily and without incident.  I did not notice anything to differentiate the ways the two yarns behaved as weft.

It was difficult to get a good representative photo of the section woven with S-spun weft.  This washed-out shot (taken on the loom) shows the texture more clearly than any of the others I took.  You can make out the lozenges, but they're indistinct.

S-spun weft

When I switched to the Z-spun weft, the structure was immediately more clear.  Here's a shot taken off-loom that shows mostly the Z-spun weft area.

Transition from S-spun weft (below) to Z-spun weft (above)

Here's a better shot of them both together.

Z-spun weft at top, S-spun weft at bottom

After finishing, the S-spun section of the cloth has about 27 picks per inch, while the Z-spun section has only 25 picks per inch.  I am at a loss to know whether this result stems from my having failed to beat precisely across different portions of the warp or from some property of the weft yarns themselves.

I have let some other string geeks (mostly spinners) play with the finished cloth to see what they thought.  Everyone agrees that the Z-Z textile shows the weave structure most clearly.  That could explain why so many broken lozenge twills are woven with Z yarns in both systems.  If you're going to go to the trouble of knitting heddles for and then weaving a broken lozenge, I should think you'd want your work to be noticed!

But if that's the case, then why would Z-S broken lozenge twills even exist?  The answer to that question may have something to do not with appearance, but with handling.

The Z-S textile, like the Jorvík 1307 one, gives a thick and cushy impression.  Everything about it seems like it's smooshed a little more together, from the pick count to its appearance and handling.  It's more limp, less dynamic than the Z-Z textile.  It reminds me of a tablet-woven band with alternating threading:  the twists cancel each other out, leaving the textile neutral.  The Z-Z textile responds more quickly to movement, which gives it a more lively hand.

Refreshing my memory about the numbers and distributions of Z-S broken lozenge twills will be a research pleasure.  Perhaps it will even lead to some practical conclusions, or at least a testable hypothesis.  But for production purposes I will probably stick as much as I can to Z-Z spun twills, since I enjoy the look and dynamism of them.  Also, my Z yarns are much better spun than my S yarns!

Jorvík 1307: Finishing and Conclusions

Previous posts here and here.

After I finished the second part of the weaving (see next post), I cut the web off the loom.  I washed it by hand in warm water with gentle soap, then spun it out and hung it up to dry.  (Warp-weighted looms serve many useful purposes in the modern home; mine is also good for hanging string things up to dry.)  I gently ironed it, and then I played with it a bit.

Because this structure is so weft-faced, the weft yarn exerts a lot of control over the handling of the cloth.  The texture is supple, but thick and cushy owing to the soft weft yarn.  It isn't exactly felted, but it fulled together very nicely.

After I played with it for a while, I carefully measured it. 

Take-up and finishing gave me a 6% shrinkage rate in the warp and a 4% shrinkage rate in the weft.  I had expected a little more shrinkage in the weft direction, maybe 7%-8%, but at 26 ends per inch I was pretty close to my target warp count of 27.5 ends per inch.  As for my target weft count, it was 17.5 picks per inch.  In most spots I exceeded my target by a bit, sometimes getting as much as 20 picks per finished inch, partly because I underestimated warp take-up and partly because I incompletely compensated for my linen weaving habit of a firm beat.

Next it was time for the photo session!  With bright indirect sunlight and a grey background (yes, I know it looks blue, but it's grey), I got a pretty representative couple of photos.  Here's the whole five feet of cloth.

the two-yard piece

And here's the diva closeup shot.

detail

Conclusions and Other Thoughts

I'm really happy with how well this turned out; given my inexpertness with a spindle, it could have gone much worse.  I'm especially proud of how well my first foray into warp spinning succeeded; it's given me courage to reach for a larger project.  But I'm even more happy about what I've learned about relative yarn sizes.

Many factors led to me choosing Jorvík 1307 as my target textile.  One of those factors was definitely the size disparity between the yarns used in the two systems of this textile.  I wanted to examine the common premise that Viking Age textiles are best recreated with yarns of similar grist in warp and weft.  I already knew that most of the Jorvík wool textiles are woven with differently sized yarns in warp and weft.  With Jorvík 1307 I would be working with an extreme example of that phenomenon.

Jorvik 1307 displays a warp yarn is among the very finest of the Jorvík, i.e., Viking Age York, wool finds.  Of the 31 wool textiles from Viking Age York in Walton's catalogue, only four (1261, 1299, 1308, 1382) have warps as fine as Jorvík 1307.  Only one textile has a finer warp, Jorvík 1300, which has warps in the 0.3mm size range but is an unevenly spun warp with other yarns up to the 0.7mm size.

Differences also come to light when considering the weft yarn.  Among those 31 Jorvík textiles there are four (1257, 1258, 1296, 1297) coarse tabbies with thicker wefts than 1307; another (1379) with a thicker weft is a coarse 2/2 twill.  The herringbone twills 1264 and 1302 have weft the same size as 1307 but their warps are not nearly as fine, making them more evenweave.  Jorvík 1300 has wefts in the same size range as 1307, but again it is uneven, with the wefts varying between 1.0mm and 1.5mm. 

In other words, Jorvík 1307 has a finer warp than about 83% of the Jorvík textiles, and a thicker weft than about 74% of them.  The contrast between its warp and weft—with warp at the small end of the scale and weft at the large end—is remarkable even among its own peer textiles.  And that doesn't even take into account the question of sett; I'll have to take that up with another project down the line.

I will use the shrinkage and take-up factors from this textile to inform future projects.  I expect these factors depend to some extent on loom type, yarn diameter, and degree of spin.  I think I'll change yarn diameter first in order to see how that affects the overall picture.

I will definitely be spinning another wool warp.  Next time I'll pick a textile with a slightly heavier warp and less size disparity between warp and weft.  That still gives me plenty of Jorvík textiles to choose from even if I stick to my favorite period.

I will definitely be separating and spinning þel for weft again, too.  The uneven S-spun weft was, I think, the weakest part of this project; there's lots of room to improve that particular skill!  The processing of fine undercoat wool is somewhat of a mystery to me, since my big combs didn't work with it.  The cards I used are inappropriate tools for Viking Age textiles.  While I did not use them in the way that would have been typical in the Middle Ages, to produce rolags of coiled fibers for woollen spinning, it still bothered me that I was using them at all.  As an interim solution they worked pretty well to get the fibers straight, but I'd like to move to a less anachronistic tool.  Next time I will try smaller combs.  If need be, I will resort to hair combs to get the fibers straightened out a bit before I try spinning them.

I'll do at least one more piece on the table loom before trying my homespun on the warp-weighted loom.  I'd rather not push my luck.

In the final installment:  what I did with the rest of the warp.

Jorvík 1307: Warping and Weaving

 Previous post here.

I drew up a weaving draft for Jorvík 1307 based on the graphic in Figure 137a in Penelope Walton's Textiles, Cordage and Raw Fibre from 16-22 Coppergate.  Jorvík 1307 has a section that is regular broken lozenge twill and a bit that is point repeat lozenge twill.  Walton puts that down to warp disarray based on "muddled or torn areas" (page 331).  I suspect it was a threading error.  But either way, I don't think it was an intentional part of a greater pattern of broken and point repeats across the cloth.  Accordingly, I decided to make the entire textile a broken lozenge twill.

weave draft and draw-up I used

The loom I picked to weave this textile on is a Louet Kombo four-shaft table loom.  I would have preferred to use my Icelandic style warp-weighted loom, but it's in storage in the basement.  That's because the place on the dining room wall where I would have set it up is currently taken up with the project on my 7' ancient Greek style warp-weighted loom (see other blog).  But I've had good results weaving small lengths of Viking Age type textiles on the Kombo; at least for loom type, I was on familiar territory.

I worked out the math for the warp based on a thread count of 25 ends per inch (11 ends per centimeter according to Penelope Walton's analysis).  This got me within a couple of ends of the correct count, 27.5 ends per inch.  I figured the take-up and wet finishing at the end of the project would likely adjust the count to right about where I wanted it to be.

The Jorvík 1307 fragment did not survive with an intact selvedge.  Since I knew the selvedge of my textile would become the edge of a hat, I wanted it to be as strong as it could be without being too obviously modern.  I looked at other wool textiles from the same time and place as Jorvík 1307 to see what selvedge treatments might be appropriate.  All of the selvedges Walton mentioned were "simple," i.e., had no additional reinforcing threads or crammed ends or any of the other tricks modern weavers use to keep them strong.  All the twill ones suffered from the usual problem of the weft not always binding with the outside thread.  It was fun to see the different expressions of that problem in Walton's drawings.  In the end I decided to ply some of my warp double and use one strand of that as a floating selvedge at each side.  The thick weft would obscure it pretty much completely, but it would add structural integrity.

When it finally came time to wind the warp, I freaked out a little bit.  I had purposely avoided thinking about what might happen if I had critical warp failure.  What if the yarn were too hairy?  I hadn't considered using sizing on this project; for that matter, I'd never used it whether on linen or wool.  What if I got a lot of breakage?  Was there enough extra warp that I could handle several broken ends?  I didn't know.  But when I handled the yarn, it seemed to be very stable even with the high degree of twist.  I tied up the cross more securely than I usually do, just in case it wriggled once I took it off the warping pegs.  But it didn't!  It lay cooperative in my hands without twisting.  It wasn't the smoothest yarn of that size I'd ever seen, but I'd managed to work with several hairier ones in the past.  I was optimistic, and so I set to work.

My Kombo reed is ten dents per inch; I alternated sleying it 2 and 3 ends per dent to get my 25 ends per inch.  I threaded the heddles, triple-checking at the end of every lozenge to make sure I'd done it properly.  I added a couple of ends at each side just to give a little padding to the pattern.  Since I fully expected I'd lose threads at the selvedge, I figured I'd give the piece a few disposable threads.

I wound it onto the back beam without incident and tied it off.  The warp behaved beautifully throughout this process, better in fact than some of the commercial warps I'd used.  It also wasn't casting off fibers, which I thought was a good sign.

I was in a hurry to get a look at my handspun interacting on the loom, so I wove a complete pass (18 shots, one lozenge tall) right after the header cord, to see what it would look like.  The warp was not grabbing at all!  I felt like the Spinning Queen!  (I'll probably have to blog separately about this some day, because it's really sort of a rant about how people tend not to put enough twist in their yarn when weaving to period spec.)  But the warp was still not spread out as well as I'd like it to be, and the dark colors made the pattern hard to see.

One of the commercial yarns I considered using for a weft on this project is an undyed singles tapestry yarn from Wild West Weaver.  It was the correct diameter for this piece (1.2mm), so I used some of it as a high-contrast weft to help me establish my beat and weft count.  It also spread the warp out a little more evenly for the beginning of the usable portion of the cloth.

the first couple of inches

Once I tweaked my beat to get the weft count I wanted, the rest of the weaving went quickly and well.  Let's face it:  after you've gotten past sourcing and creating the yarn, weaving it up is the fun, fast, and easy part of a project.  The problem I've had keeping my place when I treadle a broken lozenge twill didn't occur when I was lifting shafts by using the pegs on the Kombo.  One of these days, after I get decent at weaving twill on the Icelandic loom, I'll have to try a BLT and see how lost I get.

Over the entire two yards of warp, I only lost three ends to breakage.  All of them were in the group of the two outermost yarns on each side of the warp, and they all snapped within the first few inches of the weaving.  Since I'd added a few extra yarns to the warp at each side, these breakages didn't even impinge on the lozenge pattern, so I didn't bother to replace them when they snapped.

I found it almost impossible to take photos of the cloth on the loom.  My weaving space for this project was in a darkish room.  The best condition for viewing the cloth, the conditions that allowed me to actually see the lozenges clearly, was when it was late in the day and the lights were off.  Both the indirect daytime sunlight and any electrical lighting washed out the surface; flash photography was even worse.  Here's the best photo I was able to take.

on the loom

You can see the contrast between the warp and weft yarn sizes at the top of the fell.

During the weaving I realized I wasn't entirely happy with giving away every inch of this cloth.  I wanted to keep a bit of it for myself, so I kept weaving after my target length had been achieved.  I used up all the weft yarn I had spun, down to the last four or five inches that were left on the shuttle after the last possible pick.  That gave me another few inches of completed cloth that I could keep for my teaching stash.

In the next installment:  finishing and conclusions.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

The weave draft and drawdown I created for this project were produced using the freeware drafting program, WinWeave.  I took a screenshot of the completed draft.  Using GIMP, I edited the screenshot to produce the .jpg for posting.

Jorvík 1307: Fiber and Spinning

I recently had occasion to weave a reproduction textile.  Since I only needed about a yard of 8" wide cloth, I decided to challenge myself by spinning the warp and weft myself.  Even though I am a slow and not very accomplished spinner, with no experience of weaving from my handspun before this project, it seemed like the best decision.  I wanted to make this project very memorable, to try something new.  Spinning my own yarns would also place within my grasp a much greater range of textiles from my chosen time and location (Period 4B at Jorvík, i.e., the mid-tenth century Anglo-Scandinavian culture of York, England) than I would usually have to choose from based on the availability of commercial yarns in the right fiber content, fiber diameter, spin direction, and yarn diameter.

After looking through my stash of spun yarn and spinnable fiber, I chose Jorvík 1307 to reproduce.  It was from the right period in a classic weave structure for the period, the 20/18 (or 10/9, if you prefer thinking of it that way) broken lozenge twill.  Although I've woven other BLTs (that's my shorthand for broken lozenge twills), I'd never done a 20/18 one before.  It was also apparently an undyed textile, although brown in appearance.  I decided to do it in naturally pigmented wool because I thought the recipient would appreciate that more than plain off-white.

The first hurdle was warp yarn.  According to Penelope Walton's book Textiles, Cordage and Raw Fibre from 16-22 Coppergate I needed tightly spun, smooth worsted singles yarn about 0.4mm in diameter of a hairy medium fleece type.  In mundane terms, that's a warp yarn about the size of a doubled piece of standard sewing machine thread, and I needed nearly 500 yards of it for my project.  (This project grew in the planning.)  The mode for fiber diameter in the Jorvík 1307 warp was 24 microns.   Luckily, I had plenty of Manx Laoghtan combed top which met that standard pretty well.  It's a heritage breed found only on the Isle of Man and believed to be period to the Viking Age.

Manx Laoghtan combed top

Although the Manx Laoghtan top was a little kempy, I succeeded in pulling out many of the kemps during the spinning.  Since I apparently like to spin small and tight, working to this fine a specification was significantly less of a problem than I expected.  I spun it to about 35 degrees of Z twist on a handspindle using a reproduction soapstone whorl; I set the twist with hot water and weighted drying.

warp yarn, twist set and ready to warp

So far, so good, and the project even managed to survive my energetic young cat's frequent "help" with the spinning.

I'm sure there's some cat hair in that yarn.

 Next I needed a really soft weft yarn.  The mode fiber diameter for wefts in the Jorvík 1307 textile was 20 microns, making them even finer and softer than the fibers in the warp yarns.  The original is very weft-faced, which would have accentuated the properties of the weft yarn.  Of the period-appropriate sheep breeds, only the þel (undercoat) from a purebred Icelandic lamb was likely to get me close to the micron count I needed.  After considering and discarding a number of possibilities, I bought an Icelandic moorit lamb fleece.

some of the washed locks

I washed some of it up, hand-separated the tog (guard hairs) from the þel, and spun only the þel into my yarn.
 

 separated tog (guard hairs) and þel (undercoat)

Manageable fiber prep was key to this part of the process.  The fluffy þel proved too unstructured for me to spin from the cloud.  I knew combing was the correct technology to use, but the þel was too short to mount properly onto my Indigo Hound Viking combs.  I gritted my teeth and tried using a flick carder on it.  That didn't work well.  Eventually I cursed and brought out my hand carders.  I used them to card the fibers parallel and doffed the carded fibers sideways.  I rolled the batts from the side edges too, making sure to keep the fibers parallel instead of coiling them into the more typical rolags.  This made reasonably manageable short lengths of not-quite-top for me to spin.  

The yarn needed to be 1.2mm in diameter, a "well-spun" S singles.  That's way outside the size range for the weaving yarns I am accustomed to use; it's more like a fingering weight knitting yarn (roughly a 4 ply size in the standard used at Ravelry).  I don't spin yarns as thick as 1.2mm by choice, and I rarely spin in the S direction either. I needed all the help I could get!  Fortunately I only needed about 150 yards of this weft.  I wound up doing a lot of park and draft spinning, and it took me about five times as long to spin as had the warp.  The result, while falling short of "well spun," was at least respectable enough to use for weaving.  I spun it to about 25 degrees of S spin, setting the twist with warm water followed by a light weighting.

I didn't take any photos of the completed weft yarn, and I used up every single scrap of it in the weaving, so I don't have any photos of just the weft to share here.

In the next installment:  warping and weaving.

Woad, Weld, and Madder Dyes

© Carolyn Priest-Dorman, 2004


The samples in my set are all commercial yarns.  The Icelandic wool single is "eingirni," imported from Iceland by Louise Heite in the late 1990s; it makes good hats and pouches.  The Persian wool is from Robin & Russ, where it is available in one-pound hanks of six-strand yarn; I unplied the last stage of plying to make a two-ply wool yarn for coarse Bayeux Tapestry-style embroidery.  The 12/2 wool was a closeout from Webs several years ago that I use for experimenting with new dyestuffs or recipes.  The silk organzine (a plied, reeled silk) is from HaBu Textles and is destined for tablet weaving.

The woad is from Bleus de Lectoure in France; nowadays it is carried by Carol Leigh's Hillcreek Fiber Studio.  The madder came from Earth Guild; I buy it in root form and process it myself.  The brazilwood came from Aurora Silks.  The weld is from my back yard.  The walnut hulls were harvested from the playground at my daughter's school. 

I always cold-mordant my silks, based on the recommendations in the Plictho and several other early dye compendia.  My wools are mordanted in a simmer-and-soak procedure adapted from Jim Liles.

None of the woad was pre-mordanted.  For the woad vat I use a recipe adapted from Gayle Bingham's article in Issue 29. 

detail:  woad

All the weld is mordanted with alum; my current weld recipes are refinements of the one presented in my article in Issue 29.

detail:  weld

detail:  weld/woad

detail:  weld/woad; weld/madder

The madders were mordanted with alum, and the brazilwoods were mordanted with alum plus tartar.  For the madder I use a slightly adapted version of Jim Liles' "Madder Red:  Wool" recipe.  For the experiments with brazilwood I followed Liles's general recommendations for making a brazilwood bath but did not expressly follow any of his recipes.  The brazilwood-madder yarn was inspired by several recipes in the Plictho for overdyeing madder with brazilwood.

detail:  madder (1-3); madder/woad (4)

detail:  brazilwood; brazilwood/madder

The walnut hulls were harvested green.  I let them stand in a stainless container about three weeks, until they were good and decayed, then removed them from the nuts and made a very dark brown decoction from them.  (The local squirrels were thrilled to eat all the leftover nuts, even in their fermented state.)  The resulting dye vat is very strong.  I let some of it sit until it had completely dried, which gave me nice dry chips of walnut concentrate-easy to store and to reconstitute.  Next season I'll experiment more with this technique.

Detail:  walnut; woad/walnut

Sources

Bingham, Gayle.  "Woad Dyeing (Isatis tinctoria)," Complex Weavers' Medeval Textiles, Issue 29 (September 2001), pp. 1-3.

Liles, J.N.  The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing:  Traditional Recipes for Modern Use.  Knoxville:  The University of Tennessee Press, 1990.

Priest-Dorman, Carolyn.  "'A Grass that Grows in Bologna':  Dyeing with Weld," Complex Weavers' Medeval Textiles, Issue 29 (September 2001), pp. 1, 6-8.

Rosetti, Gioanventura.  The Plictho of Gioanventura Rosetti: Instructions in the Art of the Dyers which Teaches the Dyeing of Woolen Cloths, Linens, Cottons, and Silk by the Great Art as Well as by the Common, trans. Sidney M. Edelstein and Hector C. Borghetty.  Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1969.

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This article was originally published in Issue 40 (June 2004) of Medieval Textiles, the newsletter of the medieval textiles study group of Complex Weavers.  It was part of a theme issue on medieval dyestuffs that included several sample cards.  I have photographed my sample contributions and added the images to the document for posting here. 

Gayle Bingham's recipe for dyeing blue using the Bleus de Lectoure woad can be found in this reprint.

"A Grass that Grows in Bologna": Dyeing with Weld

© Carolyn Priest-Dorman, 2001


Written dyeing records from various parts of medieval Europe cite the use of several plants to achieve a yellow color: young fustic (Cotinus coggygria) and saffron (Crocus sativus) for warm shades; and weld (Reseda luteola), broom (Genista tinctoria), sawwort (Serratula tinctoria), trintanel (Daphne gnidium), and buckthorn (Rhamnus catharticus), also known as "Persian berries,"  for colder shades.  This article focuses on weld, perhaps the most accessible medieval yellow to the modern dyer.  It is cheap, quick and easy to grow, and safe and easy to dye with; the astonishingly vivid yellows it produces can also be overdyed in an array of interesting colors.

Weld gives a rubfast, fairly lightfast bright lemon-yellow dye that is slightly soluble in hot water (Colour Index, 3586), and it softens wools as it dyes them.  In Europe it was one of the most common commercially utilized dyestuffs from at least the early Middle Ages onward, and William Partridge notes its popularity in England in the early 19th century (Partridge, 106).  The earliest Western written recipes for weld come from the Mappae Clavicula, a Carolingian manuscript much copied in the early Middle Ages.  Therein are found several recipes for dyeing skins, leather, horn, and bone green using weld, usually cooked in urine and sometimes in tandem with other colorants.  There is a modern conceit that the term "Lincoln green," found in later medieval fictional literature, refers to a green dyed with woad over weld.  So far I have not traced any reference that leads to actual historic proof of this identification; most significantly, there seem to be no surviving later medieval recipes for dyeing cloth green from the area of Lincoln.  It is true that weld makes excellent greens.  Medieval recipes often call for it as the yellow component of greens, but they also call for other yellows to be used as substrates for greens.  Additionally, weld was used either by itself, in combination with a warm yellow such as fustic, or as a component in oranges, tans, and "quince" shades.

The two major colorants in weld are a pair of flavonoids, luteolin and luteolin 7-glucoside (Andary et al., 34).  In the leaves, more luteolin 7-glucoside than plain luteolin is found; in the seed capsules more plain luteolin than luteolin 7-glucoside is found.  Neither is very concentrated, however:  reports put the concentration at anywhere from 1% to 6.4%.  The seed capsules carry the most color, followed by the leaf; the flower and stem have much less colorant (Andary et al., 35). 


Growing and Using Weld

So far I have not been able to find a commercial source for weld as a dyestuff in North America.  The seeds, however, are readily available; I got my start with a packet from Richter's.  Since weld is easy to grow but hard to purchase, it makes a good choice for dye gardens.  It's a biennial weed, a low-growing rosette with a taproot that can tolerate a range of soil qualities and weather conditions.  Partridge actually warns that it produces less colorant when grown in good soil (Partridge, 111).  In the first season it only produces leaves; in the second season it bolts, producing at least one long shoot and several subsidiary shoots covered with tiny yellowish green flowers that become seed capsules.  This stalk is likely the source of one of weld's nicknames, "dyer's rocket," as it really does look kind of like a slender yellow-tipped rocket.  The huge numbers of tiny black seeds it produces guarantee that weld can readily take over any plot of ground upon which they fall.

I always start a spring crop of weld indoors using peat pellets.  After the danger of frost is past, they can be transplanted.  If there is a cold spell after the plants are outside, the plants might get confused and think they're in their second year of life.  If that happens, they'll bolt in the first year, which is a bonus!  If you want to force bolting in the first year, you could try setting seedlings in the refrigerator for a day or so before planting them outside.  After second-year plants have bolted (around midsummer), you can pull them up and re-plant the bed for a fall crop of leaves; the plants will bolt the following year.

Weld leaves can be cut and used at any time; I've even used frostbitten ones successfully.  However, in order to take advantage of the highest levels of colorants, it's a good idea to harvest the flowering shoots in the second year, as soon as the seed capsules have formed.  As the capsules ripen, the leaves turn yellow; ideally you should harvest while the leaves are still green. If you harvest after the seeds have fully ripened, be sure and save some for the next planting.

Medieval sources do not specify whether weld was used dry or fresh, although given the proportions involved in some of the recipes I believe it must have been dried.  Partridge also mentions that it was habitually pulled up and dried (Partridge, 110).   Weld leaves and seed capsules, which are all I save when I dry it, dry down to about one-quarter of their fresh weight.  I haven't had any luck using dried weld yet, but that's probably because I have only tried to do so in extremely small quantities.  Instead, I prefer to use weld fresh from my garden. 


Mordanting and Dyeing

Medieval recipes for the use of weld usually call for alum as a mordanting agent.  A few mention lye (e.g., Titus D.XXIV) or urine (e.g., Mappae Clavicula), either by themselves or as an additional mordant; lye or lime is said to warm up the color (Brunello, 28).  However, I haven't been able to find any medieval recipes for weld over an alum and cream of tartar mordant.  All the yellow recipes I found that called for cream of tartar, even if they called for weld, also involved the use of fustic or sawwort.  Interestingly, I have found that my own experiments with weld over alum and tartar never come out as bright and clear as those using only weld over alum.  This fact also seems to hold true for all the other yellow-dyeing weeds I've used.  One of the apparent functions of cream of tartar as a mordant is to soften the hand of an alum-mordanted wool, which by itself can feel harsh.  Since weld naturally softens wools dyed with it (Partridge, 111f), cream of tartar may be safely omitted at least in weld dyeing.  Accordingly, I recommend that weld be mordanted with alum only rather than with alum plus tartar.

Spectrochemical analysis may have a contribution to make to this issue.  Two-dimensional thin-layer chromatography examinations of weld extract differ from those of weld-dyed wools that have been mordanted with alum and tartar.  Specifically, the luteolin 7-glucoside spot is much more faint in the profile of tartar-mordanted wool than in that of the weld extract (Andary et al., Figs. 5 and 6, p. 35), while the luteolin spots in the two samples are more similar in size and brightness.  I suspect that the presence of tartar may inhibit take-up of luteolin 7-glucoside.

The basic process for weld dyeing is simple: make weld soup, strain, and gently cook the yarn in the broth.  Although weld is not as notoriously sensitive to prolonged heating as many of the weed yellow dyes, nevertheless low heat always gets better results when working with weld.  The higher the heat, or the longer it lasts, the duller the result.  A potful of fresh weld (a pound or so of leaves) will extract very nicely in about an hour of simmering time, and it never takes me more than about 15 minutes to exhaust the bath.  Often as little as five minutes of dyeing time suffices.

Here's a tested recipe utilizing the quantity of weld you can easily grow in a smallish plot, say, 8-12 plants.  With this recipe you'll get very saturated yellows, like those at the bottom of the sample card.  Using the proportions of three parts weld to one part wool, or by including the stalks in your pound of weld, you'll get lighter yellows, more like those at the top of the sample card.

• 4 oz scoured wool (fine yarns give the best results)

• 1 lb fresh weld leaves and/or seed capsules

• 2 level tablespoons granulated alum (potassium aluminum sulfate)

Dissolve the alum in a potful of blood-warm water.  Add the thoroughly wetted yarn; slowly raise heat and maintain it below a boil until the yarn has been in the pot for two hours.  Let cool in the pot five hours.  Remove, wring, and dry without rinsing.

Cover weld with warm water.  Heat and simmer gently until the weld has been in the pot for one hour.  Strain out the weld and put the dyebath back into the pot.  It will be fairly light in color, with a greenish cast.

Rinse the mordanted yarn well and add to the dyebath.  Maintain a hot temperature in the dyebath but do not permit it to simmer hard.  Stir a few times and check the yarn in five minutes.  If there is still color in the dyepot, stir and leave for another five minutes, repeating if necessary.  After 15 minutes, the dyepot should be exhausted; if not, proceed until it is.

Weld can be overdyed to a number of orange and green shades using madder and woad or indigo; see the sample card for an assortment of shades.  Or you can simply stop at yellow.  You can level your dye job with Synthrapol, as desired.  However, heating weld-dyed yarn in water will remove some of the color, whether you're overdyeing with a hot bath or leveling.  In my opinion, it's worth the slight loss of saturation to level weld-dyed yarns.  Once your yarn is leveled, though, don't ever wash it again in hot water.

Detail:  Yellows and Greens

Detail:  Oranges

Sources:

Society of Dyers and Colourists/American Association of Textile Chemists and
Colorists.  Colour Index, Second Edition, Volume 3.  Bradford, Yorkshire/Lowell, Mass.:  Society of Dyers and Colourists/American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists, 1956 [1957].

Andary, Claude; Prunac, Stephanie; and Cardon, Dominique.  "Yellow Dyes of Historical Importance, II: Chemical Analysis of Weld and Saw-wort," Dyes in History and Archaeology, no. 14 (1995), pp. 33-38.

Brunello, Franco.  The Art of Dyeing in the History of Mankind, trans. Bernard Hickey.  Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 1973.

Buchanan, Rita.  A Dyer's Garden: From Plant to Pot, Growing Dyes for Natural Fibers.  Loveland, Colo.:  Interweave Press, 1995.

Cardon, Dominique.  "Yellow Dyes of Historical Importance: Beginnings of a Long-Term Multi-Disciplinary Study; Part I, Yellow dye-plants in the technical and commercial literature from Southern Eruope: Italian, French and Spanish sources of the 13th-18th centuries."  Dyes in History and Archaeology, no. 13 (1994), pp. 59-73.

Liles, J.N.  The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing: Traditional Recipes for Modern Use.  Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990.

Partridge, William.  A Practical Treatise on Dying of Woollen, Cotton, and Skein Silk with the Manufacture of Broadcloth and Cassimere Including the Most Improved Methods in the West of England, reprinted with an introduction by J. de L. Mann and technical notes by K.G. Ponting.  Edington, Wiltshire: Pasold Research Fund Ltd., 1973 [1823].

Rosetti, Gioanventura.  The Plictho of Gioanventura Rosetti: Instructions in the Art of the Dyers which Teaches the Dyeing of Woolen Cloths, Linens, Cottons, and Silk by the Great Art as Well as by the Common, trans. Sidney M. Edelstein and Hector C. Borghetty.  Cambridge, Mass.:  The M.I.T. Press, 1969 [1548].

Smith, Cyril Stanley, and Hawthorne, John G.  "Mappae Clavicula: A Little Key to the World of Medieval Techniques."  Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 64, no. 4 (July 1974).

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This article was originally published in Issue 29 (September 2001) of Medieval Textiles, the newsletter of the medieval textiles study group of Complex Weavers.  It was part of a theme issue on medieval dyestuffs that included several sample cards.  I have photographed my sample contributions and added the image to the document for posting here.

This early work with weld became the seed of a research project that I wrote up for delivery at the Colour Congress 2002:  The Art, History, and Use of Natural Dyes, an international conference on natural dyes and dyeing held at Iowa State University on 19-21 May 2002.  You can download that revised and greatly expanded paper here.
 

Yes, But What Does That Mean?: A Synoptic Tablet Weaving Lexicon for Beginners

© Carolyn Priest-Dorman 2002-2003

   
A number of excellent instructional books are available for beginning tablet weavers.  However, they don't all use the same words to mean the same things.  Teachers of tablet weaving don't all learn from the same sources, either, so you can't avoid this problem simply by learning from gurus instead of books.  It can be very frustrating to learn one set of technical vocabulary and then discover that another instructor or book uses a different set! 

Among the influential sources for vocabulary in English are the works of Mary Meigs Atwater, Peter Collingwood, Candace Crockett, Russell Groff, Egon Hansen, and Otfried Staudigel (see bibliography).  Most other sources derive from one of these five.  This article is designed to compare and contrast the beginner terminologies used in these sources (with occasional references to other sources) in order to help you translate vocabulary from one version to another and, in the process, figure out what it all means.  It's aimed at beginners, so only some vocabulary terms are included.  Yet the included terms should suffice to get you off and started on your first few projects.  If you have trouble wading through all the terminology, just remember that you're, in effect, reading a dictionary.  Look up what you need and ignore the rest until you need it, and you'll get along fine.

Atwater's book is the oldest of the group (1954), and Groff's and Crockett's the second-oldest (original publications 1969 and 1973).  Most of the plethora of books from the early 1970s that include tablet weaving use vocabulary like either Groff's or Crockett's.  Collingwood's terminology is generally the most rigorous from the perspective of structural analysis, although Hansen's analysis of a few of the early techniques has turned out to be the more insightful.  Also, Hansen's terms are frequently shorter and punchier, making them easier to drop into normal conversation.  However, while Collingwood wrote in his native English, Hansen's terms were translated from the original Danish.  Sometimes the translations resonate, sometimes they don't.  Staudigel's terminology, the youngest of the group, stands Collingwood's on its head, for reasons that will become clear below.

A Basic Assumption – Most works on tablet weaving assume that the weaver sits at or near one end of the warp, looking toward the far end of the warp, and that the weaving proceeds away from the weaver.  This is not the only way to tablet weave, by any means, but it is the most common.  Accordingly, most sources leave unsaid this basic assumption.  Thus you will need to keep it in mind as a spatial reference.  Once you've internalized it, it will become easy for you to adapt this frame of reference toward the less common weaving orientations.

Direction the Cards Face – Commercial weaving tablets are generally printed on one side with letters for each of the four holes.  Many authors take the sidedness of tablets into account when explaining their setups, and it is critical to the success of their patterns that you follow their expectations.  However, there is even less consistency on this point than elsewhere.  Beginners, don't be discouraged if this paragraph seems confusing; just look for the author you need to know about and ignore the rest for now.  Now then, climb aboard and hang on!  Atwater says that the tablets should face right, with Card 1 on the far right of the pack.  Hansen agrees with this, but only for right-handed people; he says left-handed people should read his patterns upside down and backwards!  The Snows and Staudigel say that the tablets should face right, with Card 1 on the far left of the pack.  Crockett says the say the same thing, only mirrored: the printed side of the tablets should face the weaver's left, with Card 1 on the far right of the pack.  Groff says the tablets should face left, with Card 1 on the far left of the pack.  But Collingwood transcends the entire question, expecting you to figure out everything based on his very informative graphs and threading instructions.  If your mind works like that, it's a very liberating approach; otherwise it's unbelievably confusing!

Threading Direction – If you want a tablet to be able to turn in the way that is common to tablet weaving, then there are only two (opposing) ways it can be positioned on its four warp threads. These two possibilities are called threading directions.  See the left half of each illustration below for the two possibilities.  You will note that the two tablets are labeled in their centers with an S and a Z.  These stand for "S-threaded" and "Z-threaded."  The S- and Z-threaded terminology is extrapolated from international conventions for describing textiles, and was first popularized for use in tablet weaving by Collingwood.  It describes an unambiguous visual clue you can find for yourself by assuming the Basic Assumption position and then looking down at the warp.   The slant made by the thread as it goes through the tablet, viewed from above the warp, goes in the same direction as the stroke in the middle of the letter:  \ for S-wise and / for Z-wise. See the right half of each illustration below for examples.  [Note:  weaving would take place from the left or down side of each photo, with the unwoven warp stretching away toward the right or upwards.]

S-threaded	S-threaded from above
Z-threaded	Z-threaded from above

Many tablet weaving instructional books, however, use different words to describe these two possible threadings.  Confusingly, Staudigel also uses the terms S- and Z-threading, but he uses them to mean the opposite of Collingwood!  That is, he uses the terms to describe the appearance of the tablet (again, when viewed from the Basic Assumption position) rather than the direction the thread takes through it.  However, other authors (e.g., Hendrickson and Spies) who use the terms S- and Z-threading follow Collingwood's usage.  Groff and the Snows use "threaded up" for S-threaded and "threaded down" for Z-threaded. Crockett, on the other hand, uses L for "left-threaded" and R for "right-threaded."  This system works if you look at the face of each tablet; the preponderance of visible thread (to the left of center, or to the right of center) tells you whether the card is left- or right-threaded.  Peter Collingwood's mnemonic for "translating" his understanding of Z- and S-threading (as opposed to Staudigel's–are you confused yet?) to R- and L-threading is "SaLaZaR," i.e., S=L and Z=R.  Accordingly, Crockett's or Hansen's "left" threaded equals Collingwood's S-threaded.  Crockett's or Hansen's "right" threaded equals Collingwood's Z-threaded.

So here's a table of equivalents.  Keep in mind that it's Collingwood's terminology I have illustrated above, and you should be able to work out what you need.

Table of Equivalents

Collingwood	S threaded	Z threaded
Atwood	threaded Down	threaded Up
Crockett	Left threaded	Right threaded
Groff	threaded Down	threaded Up
Hansen	from the Left	from the Right
Hendrickson	to the Left	to the Right
Snows	threaded Down	threaded Up
Staudigel	Z threaded	S threaded

Alternately threaded – Tablets alternating Z and S (or S and Z!) threading across the warp; accordingly, each tablet will be threaded in the opposite direction from its two next-door neighbors.  Hansen sometimes calls this "back to back"  In other European writings it's sometimes called "threaded left and right in pairs."

Home Position – The position the tablets take before weaving begins, specifically with reference to which holes go "up" when viewed from Basic Assumption position.  Not all sources use the term, but often the ones that do so rely on designs in threaded-in techniques, i.e., Atwater, Crockett, Groff, and the Snows. Atwater, Groff, and the Snows call for holes A and D to be uppermost, with the tablets facing the right.  Atwater calls this "beginning position," and Groff calls it "beginning position."  Crockett calls for holes A and D to be uppermost, while the printed side of the tablets faces left.  Hendrickson, in her instructions for double-faced weave, calls for holes B and C to be uppermost.  Any translations of one person's patterns into other arrangements should take this into account; otherwise they won't look at all like the pattern draft.

Turning Direction – Usually expressed as "forward" or "backward," or even F and B for short. Crockett uses "away" for forward and "toward" for backward.  Atwater uses "clockwise" for forward, and "counter-clockwise" for backward.

"Plain weave" – This term can be confusing because some of the less structurally sophisticated sources (e.g., Atwater, Crocker, Groff) talk about the normal or standard way of weaving as four forward, four backward.  But the weave structure of four-strand warp twining, continuously turned in a single direction, is what sets tablet weaving apart from any other type of band weave.  Accordingly, from within the context of tablet weaving "plain weave" defines this basic weave structure.  Outside the context of tablet weaving, however, "warp twining" is the preferred term, so as not to confuse it with potholder weaving! Also called "ground weave" by Hansen and "plain tablet weave" by Staudigel.

Threaded-in patterning – Hansen calls this "patterns as per diagram set-up."  Collingwood calls them "threaded patterns." 

That's more than enough for one issue!  Stay tuned for another installment in an upcoming issue.


Instructional Works Cited

Atwater, Mary Meigs.  Byways in Hand-Weaving.  Coupeville, Wash.:  Shuttle-Craft Books, Inc., 1988 [1954].

Collingwood, Peter.  The Techniques of Tablet Weaving.  London: Watson-Guptill, 1982.

Crockett, Candace.  Card Weaving, rev. ed.  Loveland, Colorado: Interweave Press, 1991.

Groff, Russell E.  Card Weaving: Complete Instructions plus 53 Patterns for Card Weaving or Tablet Weaving.  McMinnville, Oregon: Robin and Russ Handweavers, 1969.

Hansen, Egon.  Tablet Weaving: History, Techniques, Colours, Patterns.  Højbjerg, Denmark: Hovedland Publishers, 1990.

Hendrickson, Linda.  Double-Faced Tablet Weaving: 50 Designs from Around the World.  Portland, Oregon: self-published, 1996..

Snow, Marjorie, and Snow, William.  Step by Step Tablet Weaving.  New York: Golden Press, 1973.

Spies, Nancy.  Ecclesiastical Pomp & Aristocratic Circumstance: A Thousand Years of Brocaded Tabletwoven Bands.  Jarrettsville, Maryland: Arelate Studio, 2000.

Staudigel, Otfried, 1960-61. Der Zauber Des Brettchenwebens, or Tablet Weaving Magic:  Patterns from Oriental Countries and 25 Patterns in Plain Tablet Weave. Libri Books on Demand, 2001.

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This article was originally published in Issue 3 (August 2003)  of Knot Now, the newsletter of the Worshipful Company of Narrowworkers of the East Kingdom, SCA.  I have replaced the drawing in the original with photographs of a warped tablet, largely because neither my husband nor I could figure out whether one of us had drawn the original drawing.  I did not want to use someone else's work uncredited, hence the new illustrations.  

I don't have any notes on what the follow-up article was to contain; it never even reached the outline phase.