A better braid
6 December 2020 01:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeMore experiments with tablet weaving, after having read http://www.stringpage.com/tw/basictw.html and http://www.shelaghlewins.com/tablet_weaving/TW01/TW01.htm and realised among other things that I was supposed to be working towards myself rather than starting at the far end!
I cut four more cards, making a total of eight, and threaded the two end border cards with all-white threads and the others with two white and two dark. I also made them alternately S-threaded and Z-threaded, because I'd vaguely acquired the idea that this would make the braid lie flatter. I tied the far end up with a length of spare wool and tied the wool to a pencil that I could wedge through a convenient vertical slit at head-height (the near end was just roughly knotted so that I could grasp it in my hand). And I used cotton sewing thread as a fine weft (still, alas, not entirely invisible!), wound on a lolly-stick to serve as combined shuttle and beater.
I ended up holding the end of the braid in my left hand and rotating the cards with my right hand while clutching the shuttle on one side or other of the braid with my left, then picking up the shuttle and passing it through to the other side of my left hand.
The first few inches were just as much of a disaster as my first attempt, if not worse, as the lightweight weft was not locking the warp threads in place to any useful degree. But it did eventually form messy horizontal stripes of a sort, rotating four turns forwards and four back. Then I somehow almost got an all-white and all-black strip without knowing how... and it was then (I think) that I tried setting the top edges of the cards into a spiral, with each offset by one quarter-turn, and magically got a beautiful set of double-sided diagonal stripes.
I think it was after that that I tried 'flipping' the rear four cards so that their backs were facing me, and got a sort of diamond and chevron pattern, but a very broken one; with hindsight, either the numbers didn't add up well (I had six rows of pattern, and I think that sort of thing wants an odd number) or else I simply missed a turn on one of the middle cards while shuffling them round one-handed.
After several inches of this I manually reset the spiral pattern (which had definitely wandered) and did eight turns forward followed by eight turns back, producing similar patterns to the rather smart one I'd had at the start, but one-sided (possibly because I'd retained the rear four cards as flipped)?
The one-colour border worked out quite well. After the first few chaotic rows I didn't try to do anything special with it. I simply turned all eight cards in unison all the time, although there were a few places where I did end up with weird double-length floats on the edge and have no idea why :-(
The main problem is that I still have no intellectual understanding of what I'm doing; I can't read the weave as I can with knitting in order to see what the effect of the current row will be and to plan what I want to happen next. All I can do is to repeat a given short sequence of actions often enough to see a pattern of some kind emerging from it, without being able to predict what it will look like in advance or where I need to change direction in order to get a given effect :-(
Weirdly, this eight-card braid is, if anything, narrower than my previous four-card attempt. I assume that this is either because the weft is far less bulky, or because I'd accidentally created a double-sided weave -- I suspect the latter, because in the more regular sections I can only really see four stitches per pattern row, plus border...
The next exercise is to try it with thread rather than wool, which sounds like a recipe for cat's-cradles... and an opportunity for the warp threads to saw clean through the holes in the cards.
Fic progress: I took chapter 2 out for an hour and a half's walk this afternoon, while the sun lasted, and came back with a whole 95 words, which I suppose is still more than I would otherwise have managed :-( I did *sort of* make some headway in my attempts to steer the chapter towards where it was originally intended to go, although I'm now a good page into the present day ("And we had made it [the marriage] work, I thought...") and still haven't quite achieved the scheduled clarification of "It was a long time since I’d seen Raoul de Chagny so alive" in Chapter 1, let alone the conversation about why, precisely, Raoul has never mentioned knowing Christine. And I'm still trying to teeter along the tightrope of what, exactly, Hertha feels for Raoul (and is aware of feeling for him and/or prepared to admit to herself).
Is she in love with him? At the point when they marry, she isn't -- but at the point from which she is looking back in chapter 2 at those events, I think she may be. At the end of the story, she definitely is, but I don't know at what point she realises it...
I'm not quite so despondent about this chapter -- and the prospects of finishing the story at all -- as I have been over the past few weeks, since I do at last seem to be making a tiny fraction of progress rather than simply writing and rewriting the same wretched scene, and I think the decision to scrap all the Chagny family development was the right one, which has calmed my subconscious distress a bit. (Unfortunately I can *never* tell whether it's actually the story or me just feeling awful anyway, and I've been feeling pretty sick about myself most of the time -- and then, of course, reacting with an instinctively defensive "I'm fine!" if and when anybody actually questions whether I'm all right or not.)
I do have an almost superstitious feeling that I was tempting fate by breaking the habit of a lifetime and uploading the first chapter without having finished or even adequately planned anything of what was to follow, which means that if I now fail to finish the story it will be horribly obvious -- my normal last line of defence being 'at least no-one will know if it turns out not to work out'. Although the latter doesn't work so well anyway when you start blogging about your work in progress :-(
I cut four more cards, making a total of eight, and threaded the two end border cards with all-white threads and the others with two white and two dark. I also made them alternately S-threaded and Z-threaded, because I'd vaguely acquired the idea that this would make the braid lie flatter. I tied the far end up with a length of spare wool and tied the wool to a pencil that I could wedge through a convenient vertical slit at head-height (the near end was just roughly knotted so that I could grasp it in my hand). And I used cotton sewing thread as a fine weft (still, alas, not entirely invisible!), wound on a lolly-stick to serve as combined shuttle and beater.
I ended up holding the end of the braid in my left hand and rotating the cards with my right hand while clutching the shuttle on one side or other of the braid with my left, then picking up the shuttle and passing it through to the other side of my left hand.
The first few inches were just as much of a disaster as my first attempt, if not worse, as the lightweight weft was not locking the warp threads in place to any useful degree. But it did eventually form messy horizontal stripes of a sort, rotating four turns forwards and four back. Then I somehow almost got an all-white and all-black strip without knowing how... and it was then (I think) that I tried setting the top edges of the cards into a spiral, with each offset by one quarter-turn, and magically got a beautiful set of double-sided diagonal stripes.
I think it was after that that I tried 'flipping' the rear four cards so that their backs were facing me, and got a sort of diamond and chevron pattern, but a very broken one; with hindsight, either the numbers didn't add up well (I had six rows of pattern, and I think that sort of thing wants an odd number) or else I simply missed a turn on one of the middle cards while shuffling them round one-handed.
After several inches of this I manually reset the spiral pattern (which had definitely wandered) and did eight turns forward followed by eight turns back, producing similar patterns to the rather smart one I'd had at the start, but one-sided (possibly because I'd retained the rear four cards as flipped)?
The one-colour border worked out quite well. After the first few chaotic rows I didn't try to do anything special with it. I simply turned all eight cards in unison all the time, although there were a few places where I did end up with weird double-length floats on the edge and have no idea why :-(
The main problem is that I still have no intellectual understanding of what I'm doing; I can't read the weave as I can with knitting in order to see what the effect of the current row will be and to plan what I want to happen next. All I can do is to repeat a given short sequence of actions often enough to see a pattern of some kind emerging from it, without being able to predict what it will look like in advance or where I need to change direction in order to get a given effect :-(
Weirdly, this eight-card braid is, if anything, narrower than my previous four-card attempt. I assume that this is either because the weft is far less bulky, or because I'd accidentally created a double-sided weave -- I suspect the latter, because in the more regular sections I can only really see four stitches per pattern row, plus border...
The next exercise is to try it with thread rather than wool, which sounds like a recipe for cat's-cradles... and an opportunity for the warp threads to saw clean through the holes in the cards.
Fic progress: I took chapter 2 out for an hour and a half's walk this afternoon, while the sun lasted, and came back with a whole 95 words, which I suppose is still more than I would otherwise have managed :-( I did *sort of* make some headway in my attempts to steer the chapter towards where it was originally intended to go, although I'm now a good page into the present day ("And we had made it [the marriage] work, I thought...") and still haven't quite achieved the scheduled clarification of "It was a long time since I’d seen Raoul de Chagny so alive" in Chapter 1, let alone the conversation about why, precisely, Raoul has never mentioned knowing Christine. And I'm still trying to teeter along the tightrope of what, exactly, Hertha feels for Raoul (and is aware of feeling for him and/or prepared to admit to herself).
Is she in love with him? At the point when they marry, she isn't -- but at the point from which she is looking back in chapter 2 at those events, I think she may be. At the end of the story, she definitely is, but I don't know at what point she realises it...
I'm not quite so despondent about this chapter -- and the prospects of finishing the story at all -- as I have been over the past few weeks, since I do at last seem to be making a tiny fraction of progress rather than simply writing and rewriting the same wretched scene, and I think the decision to scrap all the Chagny family development was the right one, which has calmed my subconscious distress a bit. (Unfortunately I can *never* tell whether it's actually the story or me just feeling awful anyway, and I've been feeling pretty sick about myself most of the time -- and then, of course, reacting with an instinctively defensive "I'm fine!" if and when anybody actually questions whether I'm all right or not.)
I do have an almost superstitious feeling that I was tempting fate by breaking the habit of a lifetime and uploading the first chapter without having finished or even adequately planned anything of what was to follow, which means that if I now fail to finish the story it will be horribly obvious -- my normal last line of defence being 'at least no-one will know if it turns out not to work out'. Although the latter doesn't work so well anyway when you start blogging about your work in progress :-(
no subject
Date: 2020-12-12 11:34 am (UTC)As you work your way along, your pattern will change direction, and so you change the direction in which you turn the cards.
You have two choices, either you continue turning the border cards in the direction they were turning before, or you change them whenever you change the direction of pattern turn. (both are valid, but it affects the way the border looks)
When you change the turning direction of the border cards, it will cause on of those double-length floats on the edge that you mentioned.
Diamonds and chevrons work best with an even number of cards. You need to have the S/Z half and half on each side of the line of symmetry. (And the visible colour in the top front hole alternating outwards from the centre, with the two next to the line of symmetry being the same colour)
Did you look at my earliest posts? I think you might find the 'mystery' tablet-weave useful.