Leigh's Fiber Journal: Tablet Weaving: Ladoga

Tuesday, August 01, 2023

Tablet Weaving: Ladoga

Ladoga was a Norse settlement in Russia. The original band was discovered in 2010 at the Ladoga Burial Mounds about 70 miles east of St. Petersburg. It has been dated at sometime between the 10th and 12th centuries.

The Pattern

Credit: Lady Elewys of Finchingefeld
The accompanying video is here.

My earlier blog post, Tablet Weaving Notes, explains how to read the pattern and thread the tablets.

Yarn

Artiste #8 Crochet Cotton

I substituted ivory for the yellow and turquoise for the green.

My Band

It turned out much, much better! This is because of what I learned about the border cards (below).

What I Learned

Split pack - when some of the cards are turned one way, the others are turned the other way. In this pattern, only the four center tablets of the warp reverse direction. The tablets on the edges are only turned forward.
Turning the border cards only the same direction creates a neat, smooth edge to the band.
Turning the border cards only the same direction also creates over-twist in the unwoven warp.

You can see the over-twist in the purple warp threads on the left.

There are two ways to deal with this:

Reverse direction of turning the tablets to untwist the twist. (This is what we did in the first pattern.) But this creates yarn bumps on the edges.
Flip the border cards, so S becomes Z, and Z becomes S. Then continue weaving as before. It's shown in this video, Tablet Weaving Tutorial: Untwisting Warp Threads. Creates a smoother selvedge with no bumps.

Observations

This was a good second tablet weaving project.

Learning how to make neater selvedges was encouraging.
Keeping track of the cards turning in different directions was relatively easy to follow with this pattern.

For some reason, I made several mistakes anyway. Perhaps it was mistakes in turning the tablets, or perhaps I didn't always get a clean shed because I wasn't paying close enough attention.
Consequently, unweaving mistakes is more difficult with a split pack!
Learning samples are the way to go! No grief if I just simply start over from the mistake.
Also, I'm seeing the appeal of an inkle loom for tablet weaving. When measuring with a warping board, there are a lot of tangles to deal with, especially after threading the cards. That problem seems to be eliminated with the inkle loom. However: