Cynnabar Band: My First Tablet Weaving Pattern

Now that I’ve woven three bands from others’ patterns, I want to make my own tablet-weaving pattern. I think a simple, threaded-in pattern would best for my first. But I still want something relevant, so I’ve decided to try to weave a band in the colors/style of the Barony of Cynnabar. The barony’s device is pictured to the right — black, white, red, and green:

So after fiddling about using graph paper and an online weaving design tool (http://www.theloomybin.com/cw/index.html) I came up with a preliminary pattern using 16 cards and four thread colors, as follows:

First Pattern Attempt

So I threaded my loom with my pattern, noting the card-threading directions — a / means “S” threaded (from the front of the card to the back) and a \ means “Z” threaded (from the back of the card to the front). Then I tried it, with this turning sequence: four turns forward (entire pack), four turns back (entire pack). This was my result:

My First Pattern Result

Not bad — the color and shape is what I was looking for, but what’s with that green thread in the middle? Well by this point I was sleepy and went to bed, but all night in my dreams I was trying to work out how to get rid of this green thread. Finally this morning, I figured it out — I need to turn the two middle cards in my pack (#8 and #9) independently of the other cards, so that the turn happened BETWEEN the diamonds, but in the middle of them. So now I separated my cards into three packs — pack 1 (cards #1-7), pack 2 (cards #8-9), and pack 3 (cards #10-16) — and my turning sequence looks like this:

And here is the result of the modified pattern:

The Cynnabar Band

Hooray! This is what I was aiming for! Now I think I need to work on getting my threads tighter. I’m beating it down quite firmly, but I’m thinking I should put a little more muscle behind it. I’d like to see really tight threads in this band.

Tablet Weaving