The Narrow Band

The narrow tablet woven band on the hood was made using six tablets and the finished band was just 2 cm wide. The yarns on this band were varied in colour and thickness but were not fine work. There were two yarns on the left hand side of the band not threaded through a tablet, which were incorporated in the weaving at the top edge to form a selvage. The first was a two ply yarn using a light and dark yarn together, the second was a thick single spun dark thread. The first tablet next to the selvage had four holes and the yarn was fine and dark brown, the second was another four holed tablet this yarn was light brown and a little thicker. Two two holed tablets were used next threaded with the same light brown yarn as the pervious four holed tablet.  

The final tablet was four holed and had a finer yarn threaded in a mid brown colour. Lastly a single fine mid brown thread was used to create a fine selvage on the right hand side of the band. The weft threads were 2 mm thick two-ply mid brown yarn and were used double to speed the weaving development. This double weft technique is sometimes used to simplify the tablet weaving process as it is much quicker than using the weft singly as the tablets only need to be twisted once to incorporate the two yarns. However the weaver made this process unnecessarily complicated by making the crossing point of the two yarns after the first tablet instead of at the ends ( illus 5 ). This band was 84 cm long and was spun and woven in 12 hours.