Tablet Weaving Advent 2023

This year I indulged in a little festive silliness and picked random drafts from my book Warp-Twined Angles and wove them up in festive colours. I used the same threading diagram as the book, but swapped red for the black, white for the grey and green for the white. I also changed up the colours of the selvedge tablets a bit too so that all three colours are represented in them. Instead of the black weft of the original, I used red to match it to the main motif colour in the drafts.

Of the two threading diagrams above, the top one is from Warp-Twined Angles and the lower one is the modified version I'm using for this project. The yarn I'm using is a sock-weight merino/nylon blend by Mothy and the Squid in the colours Ruby, Avocado and Snowdrop.

I released a video each day of advent of me picking a draft, then showing what it looks like woven up in the new colours. There's also a playlist on my YouTube channel that has all my advent videos gathered together. I also released the videos over in my Instagram account, where you can find me as @tabletweaving. You can watch the video for day 1 in the window below.

Countable Infinity

 A few weeks ago, James (my husband and the programmer half of our Tablet Weaving Draft Designer team) was looking wistfully at some of the sample bands in my workroom and asked if I could make him a tunic-style shirt with fancy trim on it. I showed him some of the things from the folder of unwoven designs and we picked one, then I played with it and adjusted it until it matched what he was hoping for.

The 10/2ne Lunatic Fringe tubular spectrum yarns I have were at the tip of his wishlist, particularly the yellow and green shades (#10 yellow, #10 yellow-green and #10 green), paired with their 10/2ne black. It's a combination I've used before and the colours pop really nicely, plus the yarn is a pleasure to weave with. I used a black sewing thread (rather than the same yarn as the warp) as the weft for this band to help me beat the threads into place tighter and get crisper pattern lines. Apart from the selvedge tablets, this band is twist-neutral, but you will find that you get less take-up on the two pattern tablets on each side, so you may have to retension your warp.

Link to text version

Link to TDD file

As with all of the free drafts/patterns on this site, you are welcome to weave them, sell bands woven using them, and use them to teach other weavers, just as long as you state where you found them.

Uisce

It's been a while since I shared a new free draft and I have a backlog to share with you, which I'm hoping to work my way through them over the next few months. The inspiration for this one is just a little different from my usual bands. 

Most days, when I take the dog for her morning walk, I go past several little utility hole covers and I've been fascinated by the keys pattern around the edge of them. When I decided to make myself a Viking apron dress to wear at Drachenwald's 30th Anniversary celebration, I wanted a trim that drew on something distinctly Irish (given that we've been living in Ireland since the end of 2021) and what could be more Irish than Uisce!

I took a photo of the hole cover and roughly sketched it out on a piece of paper, then drew the draft out. I chose blue, black and white, as they're my colours within the SCA and my arms have a blue river running across the middle, rather like the blue waves across the band. It's mostly a diagonals pattern, with a few areas of 3/1 broken twill double-face to produce white areas and blue lines parallel to the selvedge.

If you chose to weave this draft, it would definitely benefit from the use of a row marker of some type. The horizontal ruler in Tablet Weaving Draft Designer is excellent for this. 

Link to the Uisce draft TDD file
Link to the Text version of the Uisce draft

As with all of the free drafts/patterns on this site, you are welcome to weave them, sell bands woven using them, and use them to teach other weavers, just as long as you state where you found them.

Ginkgo

This little botanical draft popped into my head in the middle of the night a few months ago. It's one of a number of designs that have been sitting, waiting to be woven from when I was writing my book Tablet Weaving in Theory and Practice: Golden Diagonals. They don't stop arriving just because I'm already working on something else! I'm hoping to weave my way through some of them in the coming year and share them with you here.

The yarns I used for the sample band are by Mothy and the Squid in the colourways Frozen Leaves (an autumnal blend of warm greens and browns) and Silver Lining (a really pretty grey). They're gorgeous hand-dyed merino-nylon sock yarns and Frozen Leaves has a little sparkle for extra interest. I've used yarns from Mothy and the Squid for tablet weaving before and they were a delight, so when these colourways came up on her site, I knew that they'd be the perfect pairing for this draft. The golds and greens of Frozen Leaves really capture how ginkgo leaves change colour as the tree prepares for the end of the year.

Link to text version file for the Ginkgo draft
Link to the TDD file for the Ginkgo draft

As with all of the free drafts/patterns on this site, you are welcome to weave them, sell bands woven using them, and use them to teach other weavers, just as long as you state where you found them.

Book Pricing Changes

Blurb (the company that print my books) have announced that they will be increasing the price of hard copy books on 29/03/2023 to help cover rising manufacturing costs. I don't know how much the increase will be or exactly when it will come into effect on the 29th, so if you want to take advantage of the current price, I would advise doing so by the 28th. This increase will only apply to hard cover and soft cover books. All eBook and pdf prices will remain the same.

To view the books and formats that are currently available for sale, follow this link to my Blurb profile page.

Phoenix

I recently shared a little of the design process for a new draft over on Instagram and asked if people thought the motif colours (green, blue and purple) would look better on a black or a white background. The answer was two thirds in favour of black and one third in favour of white, so I decided to weave a second version of the draft to show what it looks like in additional colours.

I've named the draft Phoenix as one sample is the colours we think of for the mythical phoenix and the other is the colour of the Phoenicians, the purple people. The small diamonds at the edges of the draft are from the narrow Oseberg band that I've referenced before. I really like how they weave up in a simple threaded-in band. The draft would be highly suitable for a beginner as, once the tablets are threaded, the turning sequence involves turning all the tablets forwards for each row. You will find that you get a build up of twist behind the tablets pretty quickly, so when I was weaving the samples, I switched my turning direction after 60 pattern repeats (240 rows) to weave out the twist.

Click on the links below to download the .tdd files and text versions for this draft:

TDD file for the purple Phoenix draft

Text version for the purple Phoenix draft

TDD file for the red Phoenix draft

Text version for the red Phoenix draft

As with all of the free drafts/patterns on this site, you are welcome to weave them, sell bands woven using them, and use them to teach other weavers, just as long as you state where you found them.