unicornduke | Happy Pride!

A rainbow striped band is laying horizontally all piled up on a grey background. The rainbow is wiggly.

My fiber arts stuff has slowed way down as work is busy and I’m busy. I think I knitted a hat recently and I’m 2/3 through my current spinning project which I’ve been working on for a while. Oh well.
But this! Oh what fun!
So this tablet weave is made with Maysville carpetwarp and I got it specifically for this project although I’ll use it for other things too. I bought about $100 worth of the yarn and it was $8 per cone. Each cone has 1600 yards. I have a lot of yarn to play with and a whole bunch of different colors.

I also thought it was time to figure out a longer warp. This time I doubled my warp length, making it about 8 feet long to start with. Previous projects only started at 4 feet long and were just secured on both ends. The longer warp plan was to make it continuous, tying the ends onto warp sticks then securing them to each with the warp looping around a warp stick attached to a solid object.

A warp runs from a dresser to the bottom of the photo where the tablets are threaded on.

This would have worked brilliantly except the tablets need more working space than a normal weaving project which could just work on one plane more or less. The tablet weave needs to be a triangle of warp so I figured out another solution: a box of books held by my feet on top of the warp. Weird but worked. You can see the end warp sticks in the photo below.

The warp runs up and down in the photo with the tablets at the bottom. My legs are on either side of the warp and my feet are on a bright pink box.

The warp runs up and down in the photo with the tablets at the bottom. My legs are on either side of the warp and my feet are on a bright pink box.

It took me about 5 hours of warping, threading and fussing with tension, then 8 hours or so of weaving time. The pattern was pretty simple, here is an example of the idea, not a good actual pattern since I haven’t fixed the edge tablets in the pattern but you get the idea.

The bottom section is how you thread the tablets and the top section is the pattern that forms. The dark shaded tablets are where you turn the cards backwards. The edge tablets didn’t get turned backwards, I just didn’t feel like fixing the pattern image if I just knew what to do.
Plus an hour of braiding ends but I did that during a work meeting so does it really count?
The total length is about five and a half feet long with the braided ends beyond that and I love it so much. The back of it looks pretty cool too.

Rainbow wavy band plus the backside of the band which is blocky rainbow squiggly.