[Ansteorra] Card Weaving

[Haraldr Bassi]

What types of patterns are you looking for?

What I normally use for beginning weaving lessons is to have people make a two color warp. You 
would do that with 2 spools of thread of two colors. Take all of your cards as a single pack, 
pull one thread of each color through a hole with the color pairs next to each other. Now that 
you have the four threads, tie a knot in the end of the four threads and then attach that to 
your loom. Then, simply wind your warp around your loom, dropping off a card in the same 
location as you wind. I assume you are using either an upright loom or a modern inkle loom. Each 
time you pass through where you dropped the first card, drop another. When you use up all of the 
cards, tie to two ends of the warp to each other.

Now that you have a four color continuous warp, your choices of what to weave are endless. The 
simplest basic weave would be to initially turn successive cards so that the color pattern 
advances around the four holes of the cards. Split your warp in half and have the left half 
threaded in one direction and the right hand side threaded the other direction.

You should end up with a warp that will make chevrons. If the angles don't match, look under the 
weaving and you should see the angle lines properly. If that happens, you can swap the threading 
direction of the two halves.

Another style you can use with a two color single pack warp is the double faced double turn. 
This technique uses all the cards lined up with the same colors around the four corners in every 
card.

The base understandings of all techniques is that whatever color passes over the top is what 
will appear at the cloth line. For a double faced double turn you would start with the two 
colors in the vertical position. By taking two turns forward and two turns backward you will 
have the color that started closest to you on top and the other color on the bottom. By 
continuing some cards forward when the rest turn backwards you will bring the other color up to 
the surface for that position. This will allow you to use the color changes to make letters or 
animal or abstract designs. You can plot things out on graph paper or just wing it.

The final technique for two color warp is a much more advanced technique called 3-1 broken 
twill. I'd prefer to work with people directly, after they have worked some of the less 
complicated techniques.

As for websites, google will bring up many very good quality pages for searches of "tablet 
weaving" or "card weaving".

I know there are several weavers up in Steppes who should be able to assist you in working with 
these techniques.

Good luck,
Haraldr



Fiona the Needleworker wrote:
> Can anyone point me to someone or a website that can easily show me how 
> to set up patterns/create them, and set up my loom for doing card 
> weaving?_______________________________________________
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