Many of my favorite tablet-woven pieces feature patterns illustrating intertwinement: helixes, Celtic knots, intertwined serpents. Indeed, such patterns are the major theme threading through my tablet-weaving work since late 2012. Some examples: This band with a double-helix pattern — my first effort to weave in 3/1 broken twill — was patterned after a Viking-era artifact.
This band, also in 3/1 broken twill, was inspired by Celtic-knot patterns.
My favorite is this variant of Ouroboros, an ancient symbol of a serpent devouring itself.
I wove a seamless pendant, in which double helixes circling the neck join at the pendant to create a Celtic-knot motif.
These pieces illustrate the major characteristics of my tablet-woven knots: Narrow bands, all in 3/1 broken twill. But then I discovered a Dutch weaver’s amazing work…
Living in the Netherlands, Marijke van Epen is an expert, prolific tablet weaver and writer of weaving monographs. Her work and her writing has been an inspiration to me for many years. A couple of years ago I saw Marijke’s intricate tablet-woven knots. Here’s one:
She wove the knot as a double-faced structure, threading all tablets alike (either all S or all Z), to most cleanly produce this rectilinear pattern.
At that time I was between projects, thinking about starting something large-scale (e.g. lots of cards). This was perfect. I would recreate this knot — my favorite of the six that Marijke wove — but in 3/1 broken twill. (Why twill? Because it’s my favorite tablet-woven structure. The observant reader will have noticed that all of my samples illustrated above are so woven.)
Not all patterns are suitable for weaving in 3/1 broken twill. The structure naturally creates sharp diagonal edges that are angled at roughly a 3:1 tangent. Vertical lines come out nicely also, but horizontal edges are quite jagged.
Not wanting to give up on weaving this pattern in twill, I modified the pattern by rotating it 45 degrees:
And wove it:
There is an irony here that I did not discover until recently. In an email message to Marijke I attached the above photo, noting her inspiration for it. She responded
It is fun that you turned my knot pattern 45 degrees. I was inspired by knot patterns in 45 degrees from the missed hole bands from Iceland and turned these to square!
Here is a sample, found on Pinterest of a recreation of an ancient missed hole band from Iceland, illustrating one of the knots that Marijke wove after turning it to square:
Back and forth, across the Atlantic, woven knots turn from 45 degrees to 90 degrees and back, verifying the truth of that time-worn saying: What goes around, comes around.