The Penelope Project: The Setup for the Setup

Believe it or not, the first thing you do to set up a warp-weighted loom is to weave the border of the cloth. The border anchors the warp threads (the vertical structure of the cloth), and the ancient Romans used tablet (or card) weaving to achieve this border. If you've never heard of tablet weaving, I highly recommend this weaver's explanatory video, "the Mechanics of Tablet Weaving." She uses popsicle sticks to demonstrate how to determine the pattern! (Bonus points for the name of her YouTube channel: Impending Looms. Seriously, watch this video before you read on.)

Years ago when I started teaching Roman Technology, I had seen tablet weaving done by a friend of mine who wove tiny belts for a costume she researched and created for her historical character in the Society for Creative Anachronism. She demonstrated the process on an inkle, a small loom used specifically for tablet weaving. I'll be honest - it looked complicated, and I was worried. I hemmed and hawed about whether or not I really needed to weave a border, but I promised that I would try the WHOLE process. And once again, I turned to my heritage education queen, Sally Pointer, for a simple tutorial on tablet weaving. I used cardboard tablets bought for cheap on Amazon, and they worked fine. However, after I got them going, I was sorry I didn't buy the pretty wooden ones because tablet weaving was actually pretty simple and something I want to do more of.

I wanted to be true to the Romans so I went searching for more info on Roman tablet weaving. Strong and Brown's marvelous book, Roman Crafts, has a whole chapter on Roman textiles that mentions tablets weaving with pictures of bone tablets (below). Amazing to me how some tools never change even after thousands of years. Above are some triangular tablets made of bone from the Roman occupation in the British Museum. 

The square tablet in this picture looks almost exactly like the ones I used on our classroom loom.

Here are the tablets I set up to weave our border and anchor our warp yarns (ignore the paper bags of hand-held looms for my students in the background):

Here's a closeup:

Just a simple quarter turn on the tablets and a pass-through with the dark thread wound around that white bobbin to the left, and the pattern begins to emerge. 

I chose a simple herringbone pattern that I learned from Sally Pointer's video.

Ignore that big white thread that I'm moving out of the way to show the pattern. That's where I messed up! Not bad for the first time, right?

Now that I had an anchor for my warp threads, I started adding them in as I tablet-wove the border.

In this picture, you can see the tablet-woven border attached to the top of the loom and the warp threads wrapped around the bottom of the loom.

Side note: Around this time in the blog, you might be asking yourself, "Why does Nathalie have a small swimming pool and a cat litter container in her classroom?" And I would say...mind ya business. (We need them for cardboard Argo races and storage for catapult baskets. You should know this. LOL)

When I showed my progress and process to my students, they were aghast at the complexity of the tablet method. "How did the Romans figure this out?" they asked. But as with anything craft related, generations of weavers surely passed down their knowledge to their apprentices and children. The knowledge was embedded in the computers of the time - craftpeople's brains. This type of knowledge transfer didn't need books; thus, we have little to no ancient sources explaining how weaving happened.

I was surprised how long all of this process took. Factoring in watching Sally's videos (numerous times) and actually doing the weaving, I would say this setup took about 4 hours. I'm a newbie to this process so I'm sure it took longer than it would have for an experienced weaver. Ok, so I'm now ready to weave, right? Wrong. Miles to go before I weave...stay tuned.