Igenlode Wordsmith

I've spent about five hours today attempting to thread up my 'tablets' with cotton thread instead of wool -- what with threads that got knotted inextricably together and had to be re-cut, threads that were too long, got trimmed, and then turned out not to have been secured at the other end and were now too short, the fact that tying a loop around all 32 threads and fixing this to a pencil wasn't sufficiently secure when using cotton instead of wool so the whole lot fell to the floor at the first tug and had to be painstakingly re-threaded, and the fact that after re-threading and setting up my spiral offsets with great labour I found that I was then entirely unable to make the first quarter-turn because some of the threads seemed to have got looped around the cards and could not be undone by any means.

So I have now unthreaded all 32 holes in the hopes that the problem was caused by my previous attempt to rescue the first three cards *without* taking them off the remaining threads (I had to redo the others one corner at a time anyhow), and combed out the tangled warp threads yet again, leaving one end knotted together. I'll see if it's possible to make the turns if I rethread the cards very carefully, making sure the threads are absolutely straight and free of movement to start off with.

Otherwise, it's entirely within the bounds of probability that the thread is simply too fine and/or the tablets too large in proportion. And I have virtually nothing to show for all that time spent (just a hank of coloured threads with a knot in the end...)

My very belated attempts at tablet weaving (because I suddenly had a need to generate a cord of user-definable width).



It was an almost unmitigated failure... the mitigation coming when I took down the end of the strip that was jammed in the crack of the door, and discovered that my attempts at creating varied patterns had at least been bearing some fruit, but all on the back of the work -- as illustrated!

Admittedly I was working with very inadequate equipment (clothes pegs and a big knitting safety-pin fastened to the back of my jumper to hold the other end), only four cards instead of the recommended twelve, and had handicapped myself by starting with too much wool, so that my arms weren't long enough to reach the far end of the warp. But it's rather disappointing that the only really presentable rows were the stripes right at the start, and it just got messier and messier from there on, even when I tried simply going back to the start sequence (two turns left, two turns right).

I used a different colour for the weft, on the grounds that it would make it easier to keep track of what I was doing. It definitely does make a difference what colour you use!