I have fallen down a whole series of rabbit holes, looking at posts and YouTube videos on tablet weaving and natural plant dyes.

One of the rabbit holes lead me all the way to Australia!! That is, via the YouTube Channel of Ylva the Red, a Australian reenactor of the Hibernian Viking Era in Ireland. Tablet weaving queries lead me to her lovely video, Tablet Weaving: Dublin Wool Band.

Unlike my first tablet woven band (see my September 9, 2021 post) which had a beautiful pattern, this plain wool band just has a subtle chevron design. It looks a lot like knitting but it is tablet woven and not at all stretchy like knitting would be.

Ylva the Red has excellent instructions about how to weave this belt on her video, so I’m not going to repeat them here. Rather I’ll tell you about my adventures, and how I jury-rigged a set up to weave this band. Spoiler alert: I stepped seriously out of the Viking period.

Inkle looms are a fairly modern invention (and I had a plain weave band loaded on mine) so I needed to find another way to do this card weaving. A back strap loom would be historically appropriate but so is a loom consisting of to upright round rods anchored in either end of a narrow flat board that sits on the floor. I didn’t have a back strap set up nor a medieval loom, so I created a combination of the two looms.

I used my Schacht warping pegs bolted onto my kitchen island (please excuse the clutter on the counter) . That put it a bit about waist height and the two upright pegs sort of simulated the two upright poles of a medieval loom. The back strap set ups I’ve seen have two wooden boards, bolted together to hold the weaving at one end. I decided that might be helpful and so I used an IKEA bag clip to hold the warp flat at both ends near the pegs. This set up actually worked very well.

Ylva the Red states that the Dublin wool band was woven with the cards only turning forward. That I just couldn’t do. My wool was on the coarse side (the Viking wool must have been coarse too) and the yarns in warp kept trying to grab the adjacent warp. I started off just turning the cards forward, but after about 2 inches, I was starting to have serious problems with twist beyond the tablets.

I suppose I could have untied the far end of the weaving and manually released the twist in the warp thread of each card. That may be how the Vikings solved that problem. I took the easy route instead, and opted to reverse direction, turning the tablets back until the twist was released, and then switched back again to forward turns. I had to do this every 2 to 3 inches along the woven band.

It does create visible intersection in the band. But that really doesn’t bother me.

Note the twists in the warp threads in the center of this band where I reversed the turning direction of the tablets.

As I got to the far end of my band, the twist beyond the cards eventually became insurmountable. It was time to stop weaving..

This picture shows how much twist there is behind the tablets when I reached to end of my warp. It almost looks like it has been woven too!

In order to lock the tail of my weft thread, I slipped a loop of thread into the shed. Then I passed the shuttle through, turned the cards and repeated with a second loop. Then I turned the cards and and passed the shuttle through the shed two more times. Then I cut the weft thread, leaving a tail about about 6 to 8 inches long.

I put the weft’s tail though the loop on the side where I had finished weaving and used the loop to pull the weft thread through the band. Then I repeated that on the far side. This firmly locks the weft thread into the band. The band just isn’t going to ravel apart. Then I trimmed off the excess weft tail and the edge of the band and cut the band off the warping pegs.

Ylva the Red has links to primary source information about this Viking Dublin Wool Band in her YouTube video notes, including a black and white photo of the original Dublin band. Go check them out!

I’m not a reenactor and I don’t belong to any historical groups. I wasn’t trying to create an historically accurate band. I was just plain curious and thought it would be fun to see if I could weave a band that was just a bit like the original Viking band. It’s a bit wider than the original by about 1/8 inch, but otherwise, it’s not too bad!

I had a lot of fun making due with the implements I had on hand, and I’m actually really pleased with my historically inaccurate tablet woven band!