Sponsored by TWIST - Tablet Weavers International Studies & Techniques If you are like me, you are completely unable to remember which way to set up your tablets to get smooth diagonal lines on the _top_ instead of the _bottom_. I know this is an extremely common problem among beginners, and (obviously) for at least one person who's been weaving quite a while.
I've been learning all sorts of things (many of which I thought I knew) while working on a big research project - Grand Unified Theory of Tablet Weaving *grin*) but a quick and easy way to tell whether your diagonals are right may be the most useful. (Someone probably knows this, but I don't think I've ever seen it written.) Let's say your tablets are S-threaded (in the Collingwood sense) so that if you have your warp in "standard position" (horizontal, cloth end toward you, warp end away from you, looking down on the tablets) the warp threads will be entering on the right side of the tablets and leaving on the left, like this (vertical lines are the tablets): warp end \| \ \| |\ \ |\ \| \ \| \ |\ \ |\ \ \ \ \ \ weaver/cloth end For anyone not familiar with the terminology, that's S-threaded because the warp threads passing thru the tablets follow the same diagonal as the center stroke of an S. The opposite direction is called Z-threading. And for anyone using Staudigel's book, I believe he decided to call S and Z the opposite names, for reasons completely unfathomable by me (weavers have been using the terminology I just defined for a very long time). Anyway, back to diagonals... To get a smooth diagonal, the colors in the top two holes (the warp threads shown on the above sketch) need to follow the same diagonal as the threading. That is, for S-threaded tablets one color needs to be in the hole closer to the weaver on the right-hand tablet and in the farther hole on the left- hand tablet. For that pair of tablets, the color sequence is following the same direction as the warp threading - closer on the right, farther on the left. If you use o instead of \ to distinguish colors: o| o \| |o o |\ \| o o| \ |\ o |o \ \ o o \ This is really easy to pick out looking at the top of your pack of tablets. I'm not going to draw the little sketches, but the idea is the same for pairs of Z-threaded tablets: the warp passes thru the tablets from the near left to the far right, so one color needs to be in the near hole on the left tablet and the far hole on the right one. Just to be contrary, a pair of S-threaded tablets set up this way will give you a smooth diagonal in the Z-direction on the top face of the band when you turn them forwards, and Z-tablets will give you a S-diagonal. (The diagonals reverse if you change the turning direction.) I realize this is a bit difficult to explain in words. I'll put some nicer color pictures on my web page as soon as I get a chance. Hope that helps! Phiala Lady Phiala O'Ceallaigh Seneschale, Shire of Nithgaard Kingdom of AEthelmearc http://www.stringpage.com -- __________________________________________________________ Sign-up for your own personalized E-mail at Mail.com http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup CareerBuilder.com has over 400,000 jobs. Be smarter about your job search http://corp.mail.com/careers Send private reply to "Sarah Goslee" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----------------------------------------------------------- To stop receiving tabletweaving (not tabletweaving-digest), send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: unsubscribe tabletweaving. To stop receiving tabletweaving-digest, see the end of a digest.
