Tablet Weaving

Description

http://www.thepathfinderstore.com

Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

morning folks I'm Dave Canterbury with the Pathfinder school and what we're going to do today is we're going to discuss a waist belt or strap loom and we're going to combine that with tablet weaving so that you can open the sheds very easily using these tablets as the heddle and these tablets also allow you to make intricate design patterns in the material that you're weaving stay with me we'll get started so I'm just using a couple uprights at my camp and a strong stick and I just cut all of my lines loop them over in larks head knot over this stationary pole and this pole is going to be where I'm going to weave from in the beginning so this is going to be attached to my waist with another strap or a back strap belt the other end of this will put to a stationary object weaving these tablets in is pretty simple you just take the lines and you're going to take four lines and run them through the tablet so I've got the first one here has got the first two sets of strings which is two and two one above one below what's important is that they're coming out the front side of this tablet like this and that they're half of them are going to come out the front here and half of them are going to come out the front here so it meets in the middle what you're ready to pull it together I'll show you what that's like but what I'm talking about here is they all need to go through the same side halfway through and then the other half of the strings need to go through the other side and I'm just weaving them on and pulling them up tight for right now to get them out of my way I've got one more card to put in and I'll show you how I do that so what I do with these tablets is this is one of my sets of two that's coming off that larks head and they have to come through this direction so I'm going to put one line through here and one line through here both of those lines are going to go through the top and I just put a loop of cordage through there pull that line through it like this and then I pull that loop of cordage through that way don't have to try to feed a line through that eye which can sometimes be a pain depending on the type of material that you're using

and then I just feed that lip through the eye again this is just 36 bank line I'm using here but it's easier to feed that through the eye because it's fairly stiff then it is to feed this softer material like this jute then I can just pull it through so it looks like this and I'm going to take the other two lines and put them through on the bottom and these happen to be the same color but you could get to a point where you've got two different colors going through here at the same time depending on what you're working on with your project and depending on the pattern that you're trying to achieve and that's a pretty complicated thing to try to get into so we won't try to get into that today I just want to show you the basic technique for this today and just like any other weaving project you know getting the loom set up even if it's a self illumination getting these tablets set up is the most tedious part but once you get that set up you're in pretty good shape so it's going to sit like this and it'll be turned this direction and this is what's going to change and open your sheds by rotating this tablet this way it'll open one shed this will open another shed and depending on how you rotate this tablet you could get different color strings on the top of your warp and remember that this type weaving is more faced so you only see the warp strings you don't see the lefting strings so rotating this in different manners depending on the colors of strings you have strung up can change dramatically the pattern of what's on the top of this when you're done and you can make some very very intricate patterns this way if you have enough strings to do it with okay so once I've got my lines strung up I'm just going to kind of comb them down and make sure that they are straight and that they're all tight I'll walk up the line and pull the cords down kind of combing them with my fingers to make sure that they're all the same taut that's important to make sure that all these lines are getting tight when we start this project then I'm just going to take an iron ring and pull my tails through that iron ring just like this and I'm just going to tie a loose slipknot in here that I can get undone easily when I want to and this is going to go to a stationary object and this is going to be my base and I will be on the other end of this with my waist strap and I'll show you that in just a minute okay so now I've just taken a length of paracord wrapped it around my waist and tied it to the stick with a loop on one end and just a knot on this side that I'll be able to get out when I need to very quickly this is going to put tension on the warps I'm going to make sure that all of my cards are correct to green on the bottom to 10 on the top other sides to 10 on the top two green on the bottom I've got basically three facing in here and three facing in here and how I rotate these cards is going to make the difference on what color is at the top of my warp and remember that this type weaving is warp based weaving or warp faced weaving so you're going to see the warps not the left the left that goes through your shed is just tying everything together you're only going to see out on the edge so we've got a couple opportunities here to make some type of pattern on the strap by how we move these cards because we can bring green cords to the top by turning these in different directions the rest of these are all solid for green for brown for brown for green but these are two of each out here so those are going to dictate any pattern that we have now we've already got a starting shed opened up right here now we're going to start weaving against

now as you are doing this you're gonna get to the point where it's that's gonna be further and further away from you so you're gonna have to start to roll up your warps

so just unlatch your sticks roll your warps up on two sticks just like this and then you'll just replace that strap again from underneath so that it's pushing it this direction and you'll come around and grab that other side and hook it on as well just like this and then you can just tighten it up for it's comfortable on your body again and you'll basically have two sticks sitting there and then you can just tie that off the same way you did before once you're comfortable with where it's at so like I said I wasn't really shooting for any standard pattern of any conure I just kind of been trying to play with the cards going back and forth but and I'm not keeping really good track of what I'm doing but you can see I'm starting to get kind of a wishbone here down in the middle that's kind of cool with a crosshatch here and a green line down both sides and every once in a while you get green to the outside so there's a lot of things you could do with this to make intricate patterns and you can look different patterns up on the internet of how to get these cards set up and which ones to turn when and how many times and it's hard enough for me just to remember so many clockwise did so many counterclockwise then to try to keep track of a bunch of cards but you could put as many cards in here as you wanted to you could make this thing as wide as you want to as wide as your waist is if that's what you choose to do you know it's not a problem to weave something a lot larger and scale like this and you can weave like this exactly like we did on the ankle loom by creating a shed with string and a beater stick and we'll talk about that in the next video

but I wanted to show you just a quick demonstration on how you can use tablets or cards to create those left's and just a close up view for you real quick so you can see we're here is the one that we just wove through and if we turn the cards like this it changes completely the left when we go back it doesn't matter which way we turn these cards it's going to change and give us a new shed to put a weft in so again this was our original right here that we just went through we could rotate any of these cards and it would change things and that would give us a different shed look every time where we can rotate them all at once and that's what I've been doing so far pretty much today is just rotating them like three this direction three times and then three directions in the OP three times in the opposite direction and that's kind of what I've been playing with because that's about as much as I can keep track of but if you had the time to write it down and change certain cards a certain number of times you can come up with really really elaborate patterns on a strap like this