Decorah, Iowa, is the home of the Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum. This gem in America’s heartland houses thousands of samplings of fine, decorative, and folk arts that document the Norwegian-American immigrant experience. Their textile collection includes several belts brought to this country from East Telemark, some dating from the mid 19th century.

I and two fellow members of Scanweavers trekked to Decorah, Iowa to take a closer look at the belts in the museum’s archive. Laurann Gilbertson,  the museum’s textile curator, graciously allowed us to spend the whole day examining and photographing the belts. In this post I’ll describe the weaving technique used and common patterns found in these samples.

Weaving technique

These belts are woven with a delicate pattern that I’ve not seen in tablet-woven bands anywhere else in the world. The weaver must have been not only a good designer, but also a master tablet weaver who can manage very long belts woven with over a hundred tablets.

The belts we saw were tightly woven, warp-faced and tablet-woven using from 90 to 144 4-hole tablets. The fiber is a finger-weight wool, resulting in a sett of 25 to 30 tablets per inch. Their woven lengths were between 73″ and 103″. On one end the fringe was cut very short, the other about 10″ long.

Using a technique normally found just on the selvedge borders of tablet-woven bands, the weaver turns all of the tablets continuously a quarter turn forward for each pick. Eventually the twist buildup beyond the fell forces the weaver to reverse the turning direction (or turn the warp upside down).  This photo shows the reversal point in a belt woven with 102 tablets.

The length of intervals between reversals varies greatly, from a few inches to over 40 inches, perhaps influenced by the skill of the weaver and the working length of the loom used.

Design patterns

[First, some tablet-weaving terminology: Each card is threaded with four weft threads, one in each corner. As the card turns and the weft passed, it creates a four-strand twined cord. How the card is threaded (left to right or right to left), and the direction the card is turned, affect the direction of twining.]

Patterns are all symmetric, the left side being a mirror image of the other. These belts are designed by combining a few basic patterns. Typically a belt combines several warp sections with elaborate designs, optionally separated by border sections either solidly colored or having a simple design. For example the belt shown above is comprised of

• A solid brown border of 6 cords: two brown and four with brown and red stripes,
• a fleur-de-lis pattern of 10 cords,
• a two-cord, three-color border,
• a zig-zag pattern in brown and black of 16 cords,
• a four-cord border of red and light pink stripes,
• a 26-cord central section in a complex pattern around a centered fleur-de-lis,
• patterns repeated symmetrically out to the other selvedge.

Patterns are built with pairs of cords oppositely twined

A defining characteristic of the design of belts is the “V” pattern running across their width. This pattern results when tablets are threaded the same in pairs, alternately thread S,Z,S,Z,S,Z…, and turned continuously forward.

Occasionally the threading pattern is broken for a different design effect. Here for example, the 8 cards shown are threaded Z,S,S,Z,Z,S,Z,S to make one of Vs upside down.

Borders

Borders appear both at the selvedge and often, but not always, separating adjacent design sections. Borders can be solidly colored or simply patterned as stripes or chevrons.

 Section patterns

We observed that a few styles of sectional patterns repeat among the belts:

A central six-cord fleur-de-lis surrounded by expanding “halos” of different colors, each two or more cords wide. The edge of the section may end with a partially cut off fleur-de-lis shifted two picks from the central one. The previous photo shows this pattern. At right, the halos are alternately 2 and 4 cords wide.

A zig-zag pattern of two or four cords. The pattern may be included as a separate section, as shown here, or as part of the halos as shown above.

What’s next?