The Pouch of Damocles: Livin' On The Edge

S'up.

(Disclaimer: this post has rather a lot of turgid weaving detail.)

When last we left off, I was dithering about how precisely to do the edges, cords, etc. on the pouch.  Rather than trying to solve everything in one swell foop, I thought it as well to do a test weaving, both to get myself back in the tablet-weaving swing and also to see if I could replicate the cord on the Polish purse.  So I pulled out Crockett and Collingwood and started flipping through patterns.  (Why did I not already have a sense of patterning?  Because the couple of tablet-woven edges I've done thus far were for strength, not decoration; I wasn't working any kind of pattern--just two or four tablets threaded the same direction, turning in the same direction until I had to reverse because the warp twist was getting onerous.)  

After a deal of flipping and mumbling, I reckoned as how I needed four tablets with four threads each, alternating S and Z-threading from tablet to tablet.  The original cord only had one color, though, and I wanted to do two; after some more flipping and mumbling, I figured that the two bottom holes of the two center tablets needed to be threaded in the contrasting color.  So I set up my warp an' all, using scrap fabric and DMC floss, and astonishingly it worked out exactly as it looked in my head:

Gentlemen, BEHOLD!

Heartened by this success, I felt mentally ready to tackle the topography portion of the question.  I mumbled and scribbled and looked at photos and evolved some theories:

• Option 1: start on pouch lower corner, go up the side; when you run out of side, convert to normal weaving to make the hanging cord; when you have 50% of as much hanging cord you want, wrap around a post and come back the other way; rejoin the other side of the pouch & go the rest of the way down, finishing at the other lower corner. (I think the V&A pelican purse and the Met's oak tree purse are both done this way)
• Option 2: start on pouch lower corner, go up the side; when you reach the top, split your weave into two separate paths, each of which will go along a top half of the pouch; rejoin when you get to the other side; then go back down the other side.  Hanging cord is then a separate entity, either tablet-woven or finger-looped. (Polish purse, definitely; maybe the Patient Griselda purse)

(As a side note, some purses have tablet-weaving across the bottom as well, but I think that mostly happens if the front and back are separate pieces--for instance, if they're both heavily embroidered--rather than the purse being a piece of fabric folded in half.) 

Anyways, both of these options make good sense because, in tablet-weaving, setting up the warp is a laborious, time-consuming, and annoying task, so you want to do as much weaving as possible in one continuous run.  I decided to go with #1 because I wasn't confident in my ability to split and rejoin the weaving, and I wasn't going to have time to set up another practice run.  Also, believe it or not, I hadn't had a go yet at doing regular tablet-weaving (the kind where you are making a flat band, rather than attaching it directly to a piece of fabric), and this would give me a nice long opportunity to do that.

Here's a previous version, when
I was doing an edge on a gown

The work begun

So I set up my warp and plunged in.  The first segment was more or less old-hat, and both the technique and the pattern came along nicely.  I should note that I don't have a proper loom or even the standard kludge of the modern tablet-weaver, which is two C-clamps attached to a table or a board or some such; I usually tie one end of the weaving to a table leg and the other end to a chair or something else that can be moved closer as the weaving progresses, and I sit on the floor to weave.  This is un-ergonomic and back-breaking in the extreme, but it works OK, and I hadn't felt like I'd committed to the technique enough to go out and actually buy (or construct) better technology.  However, this project illuminated several major flaws in settling for "good enough".  

First of all, as I started coming back around the other side, keeping the tension firm became more and more of an issue (though this was more due to the furniture items I was anchoring to, i.e. a not-heavy-enough lamp and a cart on wheels).  If your tension isn't at the right point, your weaving may start looking untidy and uneven, but worse, the tablets can flop around and then your pattern will get screwed up.

The tablets are starting to wobble.
This is not good.

 But more importantly, you must choose very very carefully what you are going to use as the pivot point to reverse directions if you are weaving a contiguous loop.

Very very oops.

Oops.

RÅSKOG has been a wonderful asset to my sewing life, as a modern and flexible replacement for the traditional mending basket, but the frame is cast out of a single piece of metal and it simply could not be taken apart in such a way to free up my knitting.  After the requisite amount of fiddling and thorax-thumping, I saw there was no choice but to cut the Gordian knot, as it were.  However, several pouches with extant hanging cords have a decorative bead at the top, so I dug one out of my collection of random findings and jammed the ends through.

#thereifixedit

The next step was to finish the top edges, front and back.  I considered whether to just do the same pattern, but I thought it would be too heavy (as I was only binding two layers of fabric instead of four), so I reduced the pattern to two tablets--in essence just using the two center tablets from the side pattern.  That was fine, but I ran into tension problems of epic proportions, because the "turn" was so tight; I was doing this bizarro mess of pinning the pouch to the fabric of the couch, which only barely worked, and the tablets got twisted and turned and botched the pattern and argh. 

Never do this.

I also ran into problems trying to finish the end of each piece of weaving.  You might think that at least the bottom corners could (with some help) be turned into tassels, but in most cases the tassels appear to be completely separate entities (more on tassels next post).  I ended up just kind of binding them off any ol' way with extra needle and thread, but it's not very tidy and I think there has got to be a better way.  It probably involves planning.