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Wednesday 30 December 2020

I have a new book to share!

Over the last year and a half or so, I've been working on the drafts for a tablet woven alphabet in the double-face structure and they're finally up for sale as Tablet Weaving in Theory and Practice: Double-Face Inscriptions

Black, white and red tablet woven bands that read "Psalmorum codex Anno domini 1457"
The image from the front of my new book, reading "Psalmorum codex Anno domini 1457"

You could say that this project began over a decade ago when I bought my copy of Linda Hendrickson's wonderful book Please Weave a Message, which remains one of the most well-thumbed volumes on my tablet weaving shelves (after Peter Collingwood's Techniques of Tablet Weaving, of course). I was utterly enchanted by her work and desperately wanted to follow in her footsteps and design a font of my own, but didn't yet have the know-how to do it. 

Tablet woven bands in black, red and yellow, woven with contrasting text
A group of bands I wove back in 2013 as competition prizes using one of the fonts from Linda Hendrickson's book (you can definitely tell that I didn't know what kerning was at the time)


Fast forward to the summer of 2017 when I had a number of long train journeys to while away (one of my favourite times to sketch patterns) and the idea took hold again. I drafted out full minuscule and majuscule alphabets based on a few pages from the Mainz Psalter that I'd found while searching for a suitable source (not a large enough sample size to make assumptions about the shapes of some of the minuscule letters, as it would later turn out). I then set aside the drafts until I had time to weave them. This was delayed by work on my first book in 2018, then again by my second book in early 2019. From August 2019, I was finally able to spend time on my letter drafts again. The original publishing deadline I set myself was November 2019, as I already had the drafts ready to go, but it coming back to them, I was able to see problems with their shapes, particularly the width of the lower case letters.

A photograph of a blue, yellow and red tablet woven band and a blue, black and white tablet woven band, each with differently shaped letters
The sample woven from my first attempt at the drafts (top) and the next sample after the redesign (bottom)


I stumbled upon the digitised version of the John Rylands Library copy of the Mainz Psalter online, which, after many hours of study, gave me the information I needed to re-work my letters. As the Rylands happens to be in the same city as me, I was able to become a library member and visit their Reading Room to look at some of their material about the Psalter (including a folio of hand written notes from 1888 by Russel Martineau, assistant keeper of the British Museum Library). I put off the launch date to March so that I could work in everything that I had learned.

Two black, red and white tablet woven bands featuring letters of different shapes
Two more sample bands, with the final one from my book at the bottom


Well, March came and March went. I had been almost ready for the first round of copy editing, when I started assembling words from my letters and directly comparing them to the Psalter, only to find that they really weren't right. I started to re-work the minuscule letters again, but when the pandemic hit, I decided to take a break. After all, it had been my free-time activity for 8 months at that point. I think the time it gave me away from the project helped me to come back to it fresh, with a more critical mind. It also helped that I had spent some of the intervening months doing further research on the Psalter.

A photograph of a jumbled heap of black, red and white tablet woven bands featuring different letters
The final black and white samples that are featured in my new book

From August this year I went back to it in earnest, using the chance to weave something from my unwoven patterns folder (I published the pattern as Tic Tac Toe elsewhere on this blog) as a carrot to help me to finish the sample bands. After multiple redesigns, 7 warps, a lot of graph paper and many, many hours staring at the digitised version of the Rylands copy of the Psalter, the drafts eventually took on their final form. I hope you enjoy them and put them to good use in your own weaving. They include full upper and lower case alphabets, with alternate versions of some of the letters, plus 17 scribal abbreviations, punctuation, ligatures, joined letters, and instructions for using the characters to construct Roman numerals. You'll also find details of the way the characters were used in the Mainz Psalter and instructions on replicating the way the compositors assembled words.

Monday 28 December 2020

Introducing Tablet Weaving Draft Designer v1.0

For some time now, the back end of Tablet Weaving Draft Designer (TDD) has been a mess. Each new function has been bolted on to it, on top of the previous new function, plus James has not been happy with the .json save file format. He's come up with a way to save drafts as a text based .tdd file that can be viewed by users, rather than the bundle of gibberish you get if you the pop the top off a .json file. You can open your old saved .json files from the previous version of TDD and convert them by saving them in the new format. We have no plan to remove this option to convert .json files, so there's no need to rush to change everything you have saved. 

A screenshot of the new TDD control panel
The new TDD control panel, showing the arrangement of each of the tool categories

Additionally, we're made some changes to the interface. The biggest thing is the new control panel. As we added more functions in the old TDD, the control panel has been getting, well, a bit out of control, so we've sorted the functions under headings. To view them, click on the plus sign next to the heading to expand it. You can then hide them again by clicking on the minus sign that replaces the plus sign.

You'll find a few new functions in addition to the old ones. Firstly, you can now tell TDD the name of your draft using the box at the top of the control panel. This will also be the name your .tdd file will be saved as when you save it to your computer. It will also be the name of any image files you export and will appear in the text in the .tdd file. When you export images, you can now specify how large you want them and we've added the option to export as an .svg as well as .png or .jpg. When you click on the button for your desired format from the Export options, it will now download straight away without taking you to another page. Additionally, you can now use Visual Scale to make drafts smaller as well as larger, which will be useful if you're working on a large draft that's bigger than the size of your window, so you can see all of it at once.

The only function that hasn't been carried across is Pattern Repeat, as the way it currently stands, it's possible to use it to simulate bands that wouldn't actually work when woven. It may be coming back in the future, but it currently isn't at the top of our to-do list.

If you come across any bugs, please please PLEASE let us know in the comments here or at catherine.ward+tdd@gmail.com telling us what you did, what TDD did and what you were expecting it to do instead.

Wednesday 16 December 2020

Tic Tac Toe

Add caption

Over the last year I've been on Planet Double-Face, working on my next book (Tablet Weaving in Theory and Practice: Double-Face Inscriptions), and I needed a change of scene, so I went flicking through my folder of drafts I've designed, but not had a chance to weave yet and came across this one. It carries the same motif as one of my earlier published drafts on this site: Noughts and Crosses.

Apart from the six selvedge tablets, it's twist neutral, so you won't get any build up of twist behind the pattern tablets. I flip the selvedge tablets after every two repetitions of the draft. I wove it in King Cole Merino Blend 4-ply as it has a good range of colours and has the bonus of being superwash.

A tablet weaving draft for 46 tablets in black, red and yellow

You can download the TDD file for this draft by clicking here.

The text version of this draft is as follows:

  • Threading:

    1. S threaded tablet
      1. Yellow (#ffff00)
      2. Yellow (#ffff00)
      3. Yellow (#ffff00)
      4. Yellow (#ffff00)
    2. Z threaded tablet
      1. Red (#ff0000)
      2. Red (#ff0000)
      3. Red (#ff0000)
      4. Red (#ff0000)
    3. S threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Black (#000000)
    4. Z threaded tablet
      1. Yellow (#ffff00)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Red (#ff0000)
      4. Black (#000000)
    5. Z threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Yellow (#ffff00)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Red (#ff0000)
    6. Z threaded tablet
      1. Red (#ff0000)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Yellow (#ffff00)
      4. Black (#000000)
    7. Z threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Red (#ff0000)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Yellow (#ffff00)
    8. Z threaded tablet
      1. Yellow (#ffff00)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Red (#ff0000)
      4. Black (#000000)
    9. Z threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Yellow (#ffff00)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Red (#ff0000)
    10. Z threaded tablet
      1. Red (#ff0000)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Yellow (#ffff00)
      4. Black (#000000)
    11. Z threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Red (#ff0000)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Yellow (#ffff00)
    12. Z threaded tablet
      1. Yellow (#ffff00)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Red (#ff0000)
      4. Black (#000000)
    13. Z threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Yellow (#ffff00)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Red (#ff0000)
    14. Z threaded tablet
      1. Red (#ff0000)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Yellow (#ffff00)
      4. Black (#000000)
    15. Z threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Red (#ff0000)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Yellow (#ffff00)
    16. Z threaded tablet
      1. Yellow (#ffff00)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Red (#ff0000)
      4. Black (#000000)
    17. Z threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Yellow (#ffff00)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Red (#ff0000)
    18. Z threaded tablet
      1. Red (#ff0000)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Yellow (#ffff00)
      4. Black (#000000)
    19. Z threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Red (#ff0000)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Yellow (#ffff00)
    20. Z threaded tablet
      1. Yellow (#ffff00)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Red (#ff0000)
      4. Black (#000000)
    21. Z threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Yellow (#ffff00)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Red (#ff0000)
    22. Z threaded tablet
      1. Red (#ff0000)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Yellow (#ffff00)
      4. Black (#000000)
    23. Z threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Red (#ff0000)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Yellow (#ffff00)
    24. S threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Red (#ff0000)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Yellow (#ffff00)
    25. S threaded tablet
      1. Red (#ff0000)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Yellow (#ffff00)
      4. Black (#000000)
    26. S threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Yellow (#ffff00)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Red (#ff0000)
    27. S threaded tablet
      1. Yellow (#ffff00)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Red (#ff0000)
      4. Black (#000000)
    28. S threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Red (#ff0000)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Yellow (#ffff00)
    29. S threaded tablet
      1. Red (#ff0000)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Yellow (#ffff00)
      4. Black (#000000)
    30. S threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Yellow (#ffff00)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Red (#ff0000)
    31. S threaded tablet
      1. Yellow (#ffff00)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Red (#ff0000)
      4. Black (#000000)
    32. S threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Red (#ff0000)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Yellow (#ffff00)
    33. S threaded tablet
      1. Red (#ff0000)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Yellow (#ffff00)
      4. Black (#000000)
    34. S threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Yellow (#ffff00)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Red (#ff0000)
    35. S threaded tablet
      1. Yellow (#ffff00)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Red (#ff0000)
      4. Black (#000000)
    36. S threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Red (#ff0000)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Yellow (#ffff00)
    37. S threaded tablet
      1. Red (#ff0000)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Yellow (#ffff00)
      4. Black (#000000)
    38. S threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Yellow (#ffff00)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Red (#ff0000)
    39. S threaded tablet
      1. Yellow (#ffff00)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Red (#ff0000)
      4. Black (#000000)
    40. S threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Red (#ff0000)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Yellow (#ffff00)
    41. S threaded tablet
      1. Red (#ff0000)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Yellow (#ffff00)
      4. Black (#000000)
    42. S threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Yellow (#ffff00)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Red (#ff0000)
    43. S threaded tablet
      1. Yellow (#ffff00)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Red (#ff0000)
      4. Black (#000000)
    44. Z threaded tablet
      1. Black (#000000)
      2. Black (#000000)
      3. Black (#000000)
      4. Black (#000000)
    45. S threaded tablet
      1. Red (#ff0000)
      2. Red (#ff0000)
      3. Red (#ff0000)
      4. Red (#ff0000)
    46. Z threaded tablet
      1. Yellow (#ffff00)
      2. Yellow (#ffff00)
      3. Yellow (#ffff00)
      4. Yellow (#ffff00)

  • Turning:

    1. 15F 16B 15F
    2. 15F 16B 15F
    3. 15F 16B 15F
    4. 15F 16B 15F
    5. 15F 16B 15F
    6. 15F 16B 15F
    7. 15F 16B 15F
    8. 15F 16B 15F
    9. 3F 8B 24F 8B 3F
    10. 3F 8B 24F 8B 3F
    11. 3F 8B 24F 8B 3F
    12. 3F 8B 24F 8B 3F
    13. 3F 8B 8F 8B 8F 8B 3F
    14. 3F 8B 8F 8B 8F 8B 3F
    15. 3F 8B 8F 8B 8F 8B 3F
    16. 3F 8B 8F 8B 8F 8B 3F
    17. 3F 8B 4F 16B 4F 8B 3F
    18. 3F 8B 4F 16B 4F 8B 3F
    19. 3F 8B 4F 16B 4F 8B 3F
    20. 3F 8B 4F 16B 4F 8B 3F
    21. 11F 4B 16F 4B 11F
    22. 11F 4B 16F 4B 11F
    23. 11F 4B 16F 4B 11F
    24. 11F 4B 16F 4B 11F
    25. 11F 8B 8F 8B 11F
    26. 11F 8B 8F 8B 11F
    27. 11F 8B 8F 8B 11F
    28. 11F 8B 8F 8B 11F
    29. 11F 24B 11F
    30. 11F 24B 11F
    31. 11F 24B 11F
    32. 11F 24B 11F
    33. 3F 12B 16F 12B 3F
    34. 3F 12B 16F 12B 3F
    35. 3F 12B 16F 12B 3F
    36. 3F 12B 16F 12B 3F
    37. 3F 12B 16F 12B 3F
    38. 3F 12B 16F 12B 3F
    39. 3F 12B 16F 12B 3F
    40. 3F 12B 16F 12B 3F

As with all of the free patterns on this site, you are welcome to weave them, sell bands woven using them, and use them to teach other weavers, just as long as you state where you found them.