You’re drawn to fiber arts, weaving in particular. Intrigued by the title, you pick up a book on card or tablet weaving at a bookstore or online, and learn how to do it. Later you find another book, but the instructions and diagrams are different. Undaunted, you try to weave a pattern and it just doesn’t appear as the book shows. What’s wrong? Most likely the two books use different methods, notation, and terminology for for creating a warp. A veteran tablet weaver can translate the terminology to the system they know, but beginners will struggle and, in the worst case, give up.
In a series of articles, I will try to clear the fog. First, I will describe an emerging “standard” way to describe the various aspects of warping and weaving a tablet-woven band. The word “standard” is quoted for good reason: There is no standard! Formally, no organization has given its blessing to any convention. Informally, the conventions of several popular books in print differ markedly. Nomenclature, however, appears to be converging. Here I’ll standardize on Collingwood’s Techniques of Tablet Weaving. Many card weavers consider it the de facto standard reference. John Mullarkey, an accomplished and well-known tablet-weaving instructor and author, uses this standard in his books, videos and online references
Next, I will compare these standards to the nomenclature in popular literature on the craft. Many are out of print, but often available in libraries or on line. You can find these articles under the “Nomenclature” tab at the top of this page.
Armed with this information you can translate your book’s conventions into “standard” notation.
These articles assume that you understand the basics of tablet weaving. If not, you can find an excellent but abbreviated introduction at John Mullarkey’s web site. Even better, learn from John’s excellent video series, “Tablet-weaving Made Easy“.
Consider the entire technical field of tablet weaving predates, by a long time, reading and writing by a majority of the population. This naturally spawns many different alternatives in paper/screen and print notations. Understanding in this field, now in the paper/screen and print era, is about understanding the notations. Switching back and forth between different notations is useful to get the gist of a technique, it’s worth the effort to see it from more than one point of view. And, in so doing, you can pick which aspects of which notation make the most sense to you, and make your own. Eventually you’ll “own” the pattern, internalize it, and convert it BACK into that pre-literate level of experience.