(Fair warning: this is pretty brief and not super descriptive and also does not include nearly as many diagrams as it really should to be clear. But I wanted to share regardless because I'm having a good time)
I learned about tablet weaving a few years ago and got really excited about it: it's very portable, very ancient, and very new to me. I did a bunch of research (see the links section on my textiles page) and immediately jumped into attempting to use a backstrap-tied-to-my-belt-and-a-cabinet method for a very complicated skip hole pattern. I only got a few rows in before I decided that it was too difficult and also I chose bad colors for it so you couldn't even really see the pattern, so I gave up.
I've been wanting to get back into it since then — I keep thinking about making straps to carry my water bottle and new shoelaces and belts etc etc. And now I have! Here's what I've been doing.
Similar to my fascination with the ancientness of tablet weaving, I'm very interested in warp-weighted looms. I like the weights as this sturdy stone record of a craft that is otherwise ephemeral to the ravages of time and decay; I like how simple of a mechanism it is. Warp-weighted looms tend to be fairly large or require some kind of woodworking I can't do in my current space, though, so I was very excited when Lady Elewys posted this Youtube tutorial on making a warp-weighted tablet weaving loom from a chair. I'd seen people make tabletop warp-weighted tablet weaving looms, but this is the first one I encountered that truly only used materials I already had on hand.
My chair loom is pretty similar to Lady Elewys's, although instead of the binder clip + ruler I have a long stick that I sanded the bark off of (with the intention of using it for a proper backstrap loom at some point). It's longer than the gap between the legs of the chair, so I loop/tie the warp around the stick and then put it behind the front legs of the chair: the tension from the weights holds it in place. It feels a little more secure to me than the binder clips and does less damage to the wood of my chair.
For warp weights I used ... anything and everything, so long as they weighed around 100 grams. Here is an incomplete list of the materials used in my warp weights:
They work alright, although the large/irregular shapes of them mean they can get caught on each other pretty easily. It's not very disruptive though.
My "tablets" are just playing cards cut down to size, hole-punched in each corner, and labeled with number and the letters of the holes. I also colored the sides so it's a little easier to visually tell if they're all aligned.
For thread, I'm using some crochet cotton and mystery anonymous something or other I bought from a thrift store for around a dollar each. They're both a little old and slightly different sizes, which definitely alters the end result slightly but not in a way that I find undesirable. The spool I'm using for my weft is long and thin enough that I'm just putting the whole thing through the shed instead of using a shuttle, and I'm beating down using a old wooden ruler. And, I've stuck a paintbrush through the cards when not actively weaving so they don't get turned around.
Everything used for this was secondhand or just stuff I already had on hand: in total I only spent like $2 for the thread. (I think that this is pretty cool! It feels kind of magical to just be able to make something with what you already have.)
I wanted to do a double-face weave so I could make little pictures of little creatures and things. (big fan of little creatures and things.) I haven't done it before and wow I did not realize just how LONG everything gets. My initial pattern designs looked like this (highly recommend this site for designing btw):
But uh. yeah. If you've done this before you would realize immediately that this wouldn't work at all. I tried doing a little skull to test and it turned out comically wide. So I amended my pattern to this (ignore the red, that's just so I can more easily count the cards):
which certainly turned out better, but it's still not great and doesn't read super clearly as "dragon". I'm thinking that this whole band might just end up being me trying to iterate on just a few designs rather than doing a bunch of different stuff (we'll see — I'm okay with it either way).
I'm having fun! It's kinder on my wrist than something like knitting or drawing (which I can't really do either of right now at all) and it works up faster than I expected. I got a good 6 inches or so this morning in an hour or two that also involved me re-drawing patterns and undoing a couple of mistakes. I find the double-face weave very straightforward and easy to keep track of where I am in the pattern; any mistakes I've made have just been me like, accidentally moving the wrong card.
As far as technical things go: I really like the strategy that this resource suggests of moving the selvedge to whatever block of cards is moving forward — makes it really easy to keep track of things. Also, this pattern is very very not twist-neutral, so I found it helpful to stop every once in a while and "reset" the weights: using warp weights is good for patterns that include twist, but my weights get all wrapped up in each other and don't untwist without some active intervention.
Hopefully this continues to go well! If I manage to create some patterns that actually look nice I'll be sure to share them (with proper formatting and everything).
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