Twisted + Worsted

Guest: That's a big box. Wonder what's in it.

Me: A custom handmade quilt on an oak quilt rack.

Guest: Really?

Me: Yup. Wanna see?

Guest: Sure.

Me: *shows pics on my phone*

Guest: Wow. You made that?

Me: Yep. Finished it last night.

Guest: That's amazing. Very purple.

Me: Yeah, (bride) asked for that.

Guest: Oh, she knows about it?

Me: I worked with her on the design. But she hasn't seen the finished quilt yet. It's a surprise.

Guest: So you take commissions? Could you make one in, say, two weeks?

Me: That depends. Do you have ten thousand dollars?

Guest: What.

Me: Materials, labor, overtime to make that deadline--yeah, it would start at 10K. Might be higher if you wanted expensive materials or some really fancy technique.

Guest: That's a lot of money!

Me: It is.

Guest: Did you charge (bride) that much?

Me: No. Hers is a gift.

Guest: A ten thousand dollar gift?

Me: Well, to the extent that I am part of a quilting tradition at all, the tradition I'm part of is that quilts can ONLY be given as gifts. Anyone who could casually afford to pay for the amount of work involved in a quilt is probably not someone to be trusted with art.

Guest: Art?

Me: ART.

Guest: ...

Me: I also made her a nice satin dressing gown, which she wore for hair and makeup earlier.

Guest: Is that art, too?

Me: I mean, it's got pockets.

Lace bugs. 500 designs for Mexican drawn-work. 1893.

Double face tablet weaving is a technique where the same pattern appears on both sides of the woven band. The cards are threaded with two light and two dark threads, and if you weave two forward, two back, you will create a band that is one colour on one side and another colour on the reverse. To make patterns, instead of reversing the turning direction after two picks, turning in the same direction again will make the other colour appear on the face of the band.

This is a technique known in the archaeological record, we have several instances of both simple and complex patterns, such as this example from Ladoga, Russia (source).

Nowadays these patterns are often woven using a grid pattern, where the pattern is shaded in to indicate which tablets should alternate to produce the background and which should show the pattern colour.

For example, this is chart of a heart motif.

Today, lots of complex patterns have been created, meaning you can weave almost any picture, including letters.

Most fonts require dozens of tablets and complex turning sequences (and aren't free), but I created a simpler upper case alphabet that only needs fourteen cards. The alphabet, numbers and several symbols can be found in 4 parts for free here.

Here are some examples of bookmarks I have made with this font:

And the first result is a useful forum post, and the second result is a useful-ish Reddit post, and the third response is a little spreadsheet, and the fourth response...

the fourth response is this

I would argue that this is not a scarf

Pattern is Isabelle by wiola Knits. A well written and surprisingly easy pattern, I enjoyed it!

I'm hoping to bang it out by the end of the summer.