First try at Tablet Weaving

When we last left off, I had finally gotten the hang of the inkle loom. Not being one to make things easy for myself, and often biting off way more than I can chew, I decided that my next endeavor should be tablet weaving.

Oh boy, was I in for a wild ride. Tablet weaving, you see, is orders of magnitude more complicated than inkle weaving, and provides the potential for making many many more mistakes, which I definitely did.

All in all, after some missteps, I was actually pretty happy with the results of my first tablet weaving project.

It all started when a friend of mine let me borrow the very beginner-friendly book Card Weaving by Candace Crockett.

Looking through the books, there were many simple patterns to chose from. So of course I chose one of the more complicated ones (the rams horn pattern that is so popular). A couple of hours of warping later I realized I basically had done everything wrong and had to completely give up on that misguided attempt.

Finally realizing that I am not superhuman and actually need to take realistic steps, I chose a simpler (though still challenging) pattern, the Greek Key!

It actually took me a few hours to get this warped since I was basically going from written descriptions on a book. I had read some horrors about the build-up of twist, but being as stubborn as I am, I decided that I did not want to just switch the card turning direction, so I warped it in such a way that I thought would make combing out the twist easy.

It did not make it easy, not even a little bit. Mostly because the way I chose to warp this was stupid and honestly I could not repeat it if I tried. Anyway .... much frustration and several very scary near misses later, I had somewhat of a rhythm going.

Side view of the warped loom. If it looks a bit off, it's because I did it in a very weird way.

Close-up of the pattern.

About one foot away from completing all of the 6 feet or so this loom can handle, however, I had a major mishap which led to the thread I was using for tension snapping and sending the tablets flying in every which direction. Rather than try to clean up the tangled mess that resulted, I decided to end my adventure there and called it complete. Since this was to be a major learning experience however, I also decided to braid the warp threads as a finishing touch. How hard can it be right? Well, it took a few hours, and I realized after a fact that I tied them off in a very stupid way, but I managed to finish it and it even looked really nice!

About halfway through the tedious process of braiding the warp threads.

Finished product:

Closeup of the pattern.

Closeup of the braiding.