On finally finishing tablet weaving

In the summer 2017 our museum village maintained a garden for the garden excibition IGA 2017. Besides maintaining a garden full of plants of the 12th century, this also involved three special events where volunteers demonstrated different crafts:

• Mai: plant dyes and medicinal herbs
• Juli: harvest time
• September: threshing and eating - the food chain of grain

while I was very much involved in the first two, other people were the centre of focus for the third date.

So I used this time to warp and start weaving a tablet woven band. It seemed convenient to warp across the plot - only later did I realize that this meant that I had warp threads that were more than 6m long and that this meant that I had to weave >5m of the same pattern.

The pattern is pretty cool. It's a reconstruction of a pre-roman iron-age find in Hallstatt. Hallstatt has amazing textile finds, because it is a salt-mine area and the ground stops textiles from disintegrating. So from Hallstatt we gain a massive set of understanding from what people wore and made 2500 years ago (in Austria). Conveniently for me, Symposia were held on the textile finds and some of the results were published and are now accessible online - without this publication I probably wouldn't have known where to look and wouldn't have found the textiles. This tablet woven pattern however is perfectly documented in this symposium publication (page 93, internal numeration page 85) along with wonderful other information on iron-age textiles from Hallstatt (materials, weave patterns, sewing stitches, etc.). It's well worth reading.

Sidenote to any university-archeologists who may be reading this: we amateurs are a central part of educating the general public, as people usually want to understand by seeing and touching. At the same time we don't usually have full access to your publications and even if we do, we don't always know where to look. If you can, please consider publishing online and free of charge (I know, the system is not set up for this...).

I didn't really have a purpose for the band. 5m would be ideal for the edging of a garment, however our garb guidelines only allow tablet-woven belts and I really don't want to wrap a belt around me five times for it to fit. So after the event I basically dropped weaving on it. The unfinished band has been across town multiple times and even all the way up to Denmark without me making any progress worth mentioning. Hence it took this long for me to get around to actually finishing it. But now it's done! Approximately 5.2m worth of tablet weaving all finished and proudly rolled up to a coil awaiting a purpose...

Formalities:

• Wool in natural gray and slow-dyed poppy green
• Sheep breed unknown, this wool used to be available as brand "New Jazz" from "Midara", however it's no longer produced in natural colours
• Weaving speed averages to approx. 1cm/minute