A Loom with a View.

I made a loom today, oh boy.

This make was not for me and my ego. We have had a specific request for someone to do weaving at a forthcoming event and the wife has experience but no loom, any excuse for me at the moment to have a go at a make. So I found the plans for a simple lap loom here and took a few pointers from the other half (I've never used a loom or weaved so I bow to her experience). A few things could have been done better but I shall explain as we go on. I also have fewer photos this time as it was freezing out in the yard and I forgot I had to assemble the workbench as it was still in the packaging before I could begin.

Ingredients

• 2m length of wood
• 1m dowel
• 1m length of thinner wood
• Saw
• Workbench
• Drill
• Hammer
• Dremmel style device.
• Sandpaper

Note no glue or nails or permanent fixings, and all the wood came to less than £5 at B&Q.

The first bit was easy, or at least it was easy once I'd assembled the blasted workbench. I cut the wood into two 11" and two 16" lengths and the dowel into lengths long enough to go through the width of wood twice. Then I drilled holes at the corners to take the dowel to join them together. The drill bit I had was unfortunately much narrower than the doweling, whereas we want it to be slightly narrower, too much of a difference can, and did, cause some splitting of the wood, as you can see on the lower pieces here. 

Splitter!

Improving slowly

I remember watching my father chipping a dowel into a wedge or taper to make a rawl plug (I don't think he ever bought a plastic one in his life), so taking this lead I attempted to reduce the extent of the splitting by not only doing this but also by carving a notch in the dowel along it's length to the centre of the diameter deep in the hope that this would allow the dowel to compress a little and this was at least a partial success, however I didn't think to do it until the last joint. Yeah, yeah, I know.

So my final contribution to the exercise was making a shuttle which the wife wanted to have two slits (one on each side) on which to wind the weft (I like the sound of that, wind the weft, wind the weft).  Looking something like this one, but with my own limitations of skill and materials. So I cut a 12" length of the thinner wood, cut a channel at each end beginning with the drill and then the dremmel. Then I took some sandpaper to thin down the ends and make them smooth to feed through the warp on the frame.  Here I pass on to my good lady as she understood and did the next bit.

First I warped the frame (wove the vertical strands of wool onto the frame). Firstly I tied my wool to the top of the frame and pulled this to the the left hand corner. Each strand has to go over one end of the frame and under the other as shown in the lap loom plans linked above and below. When I had finished I tied the end of final strand to the frame. Depending on how wide a piece of fabric you want to make it takes some time but it is worth being careful to make sure each strand is secured the right way to avoid flaws in the finished cloth.
Before beginning the weft I wound the wool for this around the shuttle. Normal I would use a different colour, especially for demonstrating to other people. But as I didn't have one I used the same wool as for the warp. As for pulling the wool down, a school ruler or chopstick works well. If I was doing this for a long time I would look for something to angle it against as you might a large book when reading.

Me again, it should be noted that this frame was not glued or nailed in any way. This was not just to add authenticity to it but also so that the frame can be at least partially dismantled in order to remove the finished weaving without cutting the warp off at the ends. How many such dismantlings and remantlings this frame will survive (or indeed how this may be accomplished without a docker and his crowbar) remains to be seen. Still not a bad for a prototype.

Lessons learnt

• The shuttle is too thick, even at a quarter inch.
• The doweling holes need to be closer in size to the doweling to avoid the splitting issue. For the record the wife thinks that it should be possible to cross tie the corners securely enough for our purposes. 

Links
B&Q. Source of wood, sandpaper, workbench etc.
Hallnet. For the original plans.
Bikkel en Been. Suppliers of re-creation equipment. I'm given to understand their English is very good if you want to email them.
Abakhan. I keep forgetting to mention these guys. The place we get most of our linen, wool etc.
NUT Cymru. I'm not a member but they gave me a free ruler. Yes, I am a corporate whore.

I'm the Chairman of the Board.

This time around I have been exceptionally busy in anticipation of our first moot of the year at the end of January and in order to meet demand have created a production line of game boards. My intent was to make a number of different cloth boards for games using some modern equipment but hopefully techniques that would have been familiar to the medieval man. So here are my ingredients;

• solid block rubber stamps consisting of a 2x2 with foxed edges, 3x1 with straight edges and one large single (unused this time around)
• three ink pads, brown, burgundy and peach (again unused)
• a school geometry kit (to make me feel old)
• needles and thread (not pictured)
• and a couple of metres of coarse linen.

 

The reason for so much fabric? So I've got enough to make a complete hash of it and still recover in triumph.

 Hnefatafl

So to begin I set out to draw a 9x9 Hnefatafl outline using the 3x1 stamp, using the set square to allow me to get the angles right. As the more astute of you may no doubt have noticed by now this did not go wholly according to plan. I discovered that even with the set square the corners were just ever so slightly off which meant a very cramped central grid with overlapping squares. So I had to draw in demarkation lines on the grid with a Sharpie (very period), hopefully it will do as a spare for the children.

Rescued by Sharpie.

The next ones I built up a line at a time which proved a lot more successful as you will see from the picture below.

9x9 Hnefatafl

This Hnefatafl board is a simple 9x9 grid as commonly specified on the geek and elsewhere as one of the possible configurations for the game. Rather than creating a chequerboard pattern as per chess or draughts, picking out alternate squares in a contrasting colour, here I have chosen to pick out the starting squares of both sides in the game in the burgundy shade. 16 attackers around the outside and 8 defenders and one king on the centre square. From this I went on to make a second larger board for the Welsh variant Tawlbwrdd.

Tawlbwrdd

Tawlbwrdd, the Welsh connection.

As those of you who are more familiar with this variant will no doubt have noticed this is where I made my second mistake in the construction. I had miscounted the size of the grid and ended up with a 13x13 instead of an 11x11 board. However the light of my life in her inimitable, practical way said all I need do was mark the starting squares as per an 11x11 board and, at somepoint in the future, decorate the outer ranks and files to distinguish them as not part of the playing area. She is a genius.

 Latrunculi

Latrunculi

Finally I decided to make an 8x8 Latrunculi board (sometimes known as Ludus Latrunculorum) which although a Roman game did survive until the late medieval period. Now, as this is an 8x8 board I elected to make a standard chequerboard as this will work for a number of other games as well. I could have made an 8x7 board instead which was just as widely used but why cut off your nose to put mud in your eye. This then is my Latrunculi-come-Chess-come-Draughts board.

Hemmed.

So having printed all the boards quite neatly (eventually), the next obvious stage was to tidy up the edges by simply hemming them in with a quick back stitch.

Nice effect for six stitches.

I also wanted to highlight certain squares on the tafl boards such as the kings starting and finishing squares, short of using the Sharpie again as I had on the abortive first board. I considered carving a potato as a stamp until once more the flower of my desert came to my aid teaching me what I believe is called a daisy stitch. This simple stitch has allowed me to pick out a rough triquetra on certain of the squares with embroidery even I could do.

Eventually the idea will be to mount these cloths on wooden boards as probably would have been done in the middle-ages. This move will have to wait though until I have both wood and the glue with which to do it. The next stage however will be to make the playing pieces to go on these boards, and when I come to do that, I'll keep you posted.

Links

Crest Co-operative. The shop where I picked up the stamps.
Traditional Games. Really useful site.
Tawlbwrdd Great PDF from Damian Walker
Ludus Latrunculorum. Another of Damian Walker's great PDFs
Cyningstan A quick plug for Damien Walker's website where he sells a lot of thes games.
Game Cabinet Articles on Hnefatafl and Latrunculi.
www.heroarts.com Makers of my rubber stamps.
www.sharpie.co.uk  Occasionally useful

Fox and Geese and Alquerque - Travel Edition

These were my first attempts at making some game boards. They were done in a bit of a hurry in the couple of days before my first re-creation event.

I had a stroke of luck a few days before the event in a charity shop called Crest. Whilst wandering around I discovered a bin of furniture remnants including a leather seat cushion cover. The outside surface of this was tanned to within an inch of it's life, however the inside was still a very nice dark chamois like leather. Lacking paper and card medieval game boards were often on scraps of cloth or leather for potability's sake. So this was perfect for my first make.
I picked apart every stitch in it which left me with a good few pieces of usable leather, two of which I cut into circles with a radius of about 8cm. This left me with a good size board for a travelling minstrel and gambler like myself. Then it just came down to the board markings.
Fox and Geese
This is one of the more remote members of the Tafl family of board games, and was familiar throughout Northern Europe through this period. The board on which it is played is probably more familiar to people these days as the Solitaire game where marbles or pegs are used to hop over one another until you only have one left (this is more of a puzzle than a game and a much later invention).

The above picture is the basic board for Fox and Geese, you play on the intersections or points. A good geometric design which is easy to reproduce with a ruler and pencil. All I needed was a method with which to mark the board on the leather. I had always pictured doing this with a touch of pyrography, however the leather I had from the cushion cover was a rather dark colour beggars not being choosers. So I wracked my brain for a while to try to balance what would be available to a medieval person with what I had available to me. Then I had a flash of inspiration, I not only had my own arts and craft box, but there is also a small boy in the house with his supplies. So I ended up with a white wax crayon, which marked out the board clearly although it's permanence may not be the best or indeed the most permanent.
The pieces are modelled from air drying clay as a handy little shortcut. The geese are represented by thirteen crude cones and the fox is a simple fluted cylinder which, if I'd had more time, I would have painted with poster paint.
The game is played with the geese attempting to trap the fox so he cannot move and the fox needs to eat enough geese to prevent this. The fox jumps over the geese draughts style to eat them. For more info on how to play see the links below.
Alquerque
This is a precursor to draughts played on a 5x5 board however as with fox and geese above it is played on the points of the grid. I used exactly the same method for marking the leather as above. For this game however I needed two sets of twelve pieces, but only had one colour of clay. Thankfully my graduation gift from my mother is a seal ring that, along with my wedding ring, is the only thing I always wear. This seemed a fantastic opportunity to finally put it to its intended purpose. The picture I'm afraid do not do it adequate justice, for twelve pieces have a small Welsh dragon standing proud on them.

The other refinement to this board was to take a hole punch and puncture a series of holes around the outside of the leather disk (yes, I know I did one too many. Measure twice etc.). Through these I threaded a cord, courteousy of the piping on the seat cover. This means that all sides of the board can be drawn together around the pieces to form a self-contained travel pouch. Alquerque is played by moving one space or jumping over an opponent's piece as in draughts following the lines on the board. Multiple jumps are allowed.

So there we have two very successful boards to start off with. They were certainly very popular with the visiting horde of children, but some lessons learnt;

• These soft boards are great for travelling and transporting around but they need to be laid on a board or table to be played. Layed on the ground the pieces are liable to knock around everywhere.

Links

Crest Co-operative. The shop where I picked up some arts supplies and leather.
Traditional Games. Really useful site.
Fox and Geese. Great PDF
Alquerque. Same