I have woven samples and wet finished them at 80° C .

First, my conclusion:

The middle sample weaves, feels and looks best. The warp and weft are the same yarn. This yarn gives good stitch definition. The ‘brick pattern’ stands out well. The band is 7,5 mm wide. the book states the find as 8 mm wide. That seems close enough.

The yarn thickness is like my khaitu (hand-spun Andean weaving yarn), but with a little bit more singles twist and less ply-twist. The holes (two threaded tablets) make the fabric nice and thin and flexible, the tubular selvedge would make a good sturdy edge to any woven fabric.

The two bands on the outside:

Those are woven on the same warp. I used the thicker yarn. The band is 8,5 mm wide. As weft I used very thin leftover singles.

The thin weft makes the band much to thick and inflexible, as the picks are much to close. The stitch definition is miserable.

For the sample most left, I changed the weft, to be the same yarn as the warp. That made huge difference. With the picks less close to each-other, the stitch definition improved dramatically. The band became more souple and the ‘brick pattern’ half, became markedly thinner. This sample might do, but I have better samples.

The dark blue band:

This was the first sample I made. I made mistakes in the turning of the tablets. And the dark blue colour prevented me to see well what I was doing. The band is 7.5 mm wide. For weft I used a singles that was only a little bit thinner than the warp.

The warp is made of dark blue khaitu. That does not work well. Khaitu has lots and lots of (ply)twist. The large amount of twist gives at least two problems in tablet-weaving.

Khaitu has so much twist the structure looks ‘pearly’. That interferes with stitch definition. Stitch definition is poor.

And also: The khaitu has so much twist already, that the added twist of the turning of the tablets, is just too much. The sample is inflexible, and thick. Not a good edging for any fabric. This sample makes clear that very high twist yarn like khaitu is not a good  choice for such a tablet weaving project.

The band second from the right (the smallest band):

This band is made from the thinnest of the three spun yarns. The weft is of the same yarn. the band is 4 mm wide. That is half the width the find was.

On the plus side: The band does have beautiful stitch definition. And it feels very nice, and souple. This band would be a great starting band for a very fine fabric, but maybe not for an apron (as the find was). Tablet weaving with such a thin yarn is well possible, it just requires more careful handling.

On the other hand: To spin this thin a yarn from a medium course crimpy fiber like Swifter takes much more energy. Spinning yarns is largely a tactile-driven activity. This thin yarn involves more effort from the eyes. That makes it rather tedious. Not something I would want to do all the time. I would certainly go for a finer fiber if I wanted a yarn this thin.

In conclusion: I will aim for the middle yarn as in the picture of the previous post. The one I used for the middle sample.

This is a post about weaving Finnish Iron Age bands with spindle spun weaving yarn. I weave the bands listed in the book ‘Tablet Woven Treasures, Archaeological Bands from the Finnish Iron Age’ by Karisto & Pasanen (2021), one by one in the order of the book.