Tablet weaving is an ancient craft and art. Where most weaving starts from a base of threads passing over and under each other at right angles to form orderly lines, tablet weaving twists the warp to create rhombus-shaped 'stitches' that wind together in flowing lines and reversals.
It starts with squares of cardboard, leather, wood or bone, with four holes punched through each and threaded with yarn, then brought together into a pack. As the tablets are turned, the four lengths of warp yarn running through each tablet twist to form a cord. Each cord is bound to its neighbours by the weft yarn hidden within the warp, creating a woven band.
A band might have an elaborate pattern, motifs of animals, birds, vases and plants, zig-zag lines, ram's horns, crashing waves or just two undulating lines mirroring each other. Clusters of four 'stitches' in a diamond shape can be used like pixels to create pictures as complicated as the number of cards the weaver can manage. Sometimes the back of a band is a chaotic flurry of angles - the pattern on the front reflected in a disco ball - and other times a simple pattern on the front can turn over to reveal a baroque stained-glass window in yarn. In double-faced weaving, two colours are used to create a pattern mirrored exactly on the back of the band with the colours reversed.
The four-card version is the standard but it gets a lot more complicated than that. The tablets might be triangular or hexagonal, with more or fewer holes than corners, there might be yarn running through two or three of the holes and skipping the others to create a textured band, or elaborate structures can be created by splitting the pack to criss-cross the band, bringing the edges together to form a tube instead, or adding in beads, feathers and other extras.
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Yarn and fabric with the tablets still attached have been found in ancient bog burials over two thousand years old, Viking grave sites and other graves all over northern Europe, and there is a similarly ancient tradition of tablet weaving in Iran, Turkey and other places around the world. But where it fell out of regular use in Europe before being revived in the late 1800s, tablet weaving has been in continuous use for centuries in South America and Indonesia, for practical or ritual use, or just to make something beautiful.
Modern tablet weaving (or card weaving, depending on where you are) often uses printed, laminated cards, sometimes with an inkle loom – small enough to fit in a shoulder bag or big enough to accommodate metres of woven band – but you can also attach one end of the warp to a tree, the other to your belt and weave with wood or leather tablets like your ancestors might have.
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It's complicated, weird and faintly magical. The smallest thing changes everything – from a basic set-up (two colours and fourteen square four-hole cards set up step-wise, maybe), shift the point where you reverse the direction of the cards by a single turn and you've got something completely different flowing out from under your hands.
Additional tools that may be useful: fishing swivels, those ceramic insulators from electric fences, popsicle sticks, a limitless supply of patience.
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Sources:
Otfried Staudigel - Tablet Weaving Magic
Candace Crockett - Card Weaving
Peter Collingwood - The Techniques of Tablet Weaving
Years (not nearly enough)