Warp Speed

So I made short business of the Snartemo II weave.  I only warped up enough to make 1 3/4 yards, just as a test run, but I could have easily done 4 yards of the stuff.  It went really fast and was kinda brainless.  25 turns forward, 25 turns back.  Repeat to end.  The delightful thing is that it's 6th century Norwegian, so it's in the SCA period (or just about:  500 AD is just slightly pre-period, but would be easily accepted into the pre-17th century standard...at least any judges I've come across would shrug it off as being a pre-existing pattern that would more than likely have survived into the 600s.).

Zipping around the internet, I came across this band by Stell Michelsen on Weaveolution and thought I'd give it a shot. The warping pattern was simple enough, and it was labeled "Anglo-Saxon", although I didn't see anything that indicated whether it was in the style of Anglo Saxon weaves, or if it was documented somewhere.  It took a bit of time warping up 25 cards in two colors (white and peacock blue).  I loaded up my ruler/shuttle and tried running some string through it, and it looked awful.  I thought I'd try pulling the tension tighter.  Looser.  Beating harder.  Beating less.  Unweaving.  Re-weaving. It just looked like a dog's breakfast, no matter what I did.

Then I scrolled down and read the directions. I guess I had forgotten what my 6th grade science teacher had always said..."When all else fails, read the directions."  Thanks, Mr. Gasser, for always being in my head...he also said if you didn't, you'll "make a mell of a hess."

It said to split the cards into two packs:  first turn the odd cards, then turn the even cards.  Now it looks awesome.  BONUS:  It's double-sided!  Looks the same on the back as it does on the front.

They did, however, say that you should turn the first and 25th card on every pass to make the ends look right.  As an experiment, I didn't, and it turned out that it didn't want to grab the thread from the 25th card, but the 1st card was OK.  You can see in the picture to the left that the far right threads are twisted up, but pulled away from the weave--they're just laying there next to it.  I decided to snip the 25th card out rather than have to turn the first & last cards twice as often.  They're going to be twisted enough as it is without having to do double-duty on two of them. The alternative would have been to add a 26th card to the pack, but I had already gotten this far into the weave, so it was far easier to just remove the last one.  It'll have a slightly narrower trim edge on one side...that's OK with me.  I remembered as I was doing this that the same thing happened with the Saxon weave I did last year--the green one with the blue diamonds--it needed an even number of cards to accommodate the alternating card turning, and it has a wider border on one side.

I should have gone out to look for fishing spinners...I'm going to have to untwist the weave at some point, unless I try going backwards at some point.  Hmmmm...more experiments...