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Thursday 24 October 2024

Bulgarica

A photograph of a black and white tablet woven band decorated with black, red and green spirals hanging in a hedge

This draft is a reproduction of a piece of Bulgarian national dress. It is a variation on a school of designs generally called Kivrim that has been assigned to the Anatolian region of Turkey. Tablet weaving is an important part of folk costume in Bulgaria, providing many an intricately patterned belt or piece of trim. Bulgarica also happens to be the name of a genus of land snails, which I thought fitted the spiral nature of the motif rather nicely. I've included a picture/link to the original Bulgarian band on Facebook that inspired this one below. If you know anything more about its context, please do get in touch! Bulgarian tablet weaving is a rich tradition that I would love to know more about.


I wove the sample band, at the request of a friend, in King Cole Merino-Blend 4ply in the colours black, white, grass and red (instead of the original pink) with black as the weft. Unlike many of the drafts you'll find on my blog, this design (picks 1-8) is not twist-neutral, so I've included a reversed version from picks 9-16 to if you want to weave out a build-up of twist.

A tablet weaving draft consisting of two grids to explain how the tablets should be threaded and turned. It shows a design of swirling black, red and green lines on a white backgroud.

Link to text version

Link to TDD file


As with all of the free drafts/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.

Thursday 10 October 2024

Counterchanged Diamonds

Two tablet woven bands hanging in a green hedge. One band is black and white, the other is black and rainbow. Both are decorated with a series of diamond motifs.

This design is a based on a band I wove back in 2011 (the black and white one in the picture above) to use up the last of the long-discontinued acrylic crochet thread I learned to tablet weave with. I set up a warp to weave two thread wide diagonal lines and improvised the design, changing the turning direction of pairs of tablets in a technique often known as Egyptian Diagonals (despite it being extremely doubtful that it has any historical link to Egypt). I had been planning to share it with you unedited, but when I came to draft it out in TDD, I found a number of odd decisions that could be improved on. The new version I'm sharing here has two more pattern tablets and 2 more picks, retaining the twist-neutral design of the original, while making it make rather more sense.

Counterchanged is a term used in heraldry to mean that two colours have switched position on either side of a dividing line, the motif colour becoming the background colour and vice versa. In combination with the weaving technique, it comes together to make a pretty fun design. The yarns I used in the sample band were King Cole Merino-Blend 4-ply in the colours black, blackcurrant, sapphire, grass, mustard, cinnamon and red, with black as the weft, the same as my Rainbow Triangles band.

If you would prefer a shorter turning sequence, repeating only the first 24 picks will give you just the simple rainbow diamonds and repeating only picks 25-48 will give you just diamonds on the background of diagonal lines.

A tablet weaving draft consisting of two grids to show how the tablets should e threaded and turned to produce two diamonds formed from rainbow and black stripes

Link to the text version

Link to the TDD file

As with all of the free drafts/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.