[SCA-AS] Weaving (Artssciences Digest, Vol 54, Issue 2)

[Jan Ward]

See if you can get a copy of _Cut My Cote_ by Dorothy
Burnham, Royal Ontario Museum.  She has pictures of
some of the actual tunics, plus their construction.

_The Book of Looms_, by Eric Broudy, University Press
of New England, ISBN 0-87451-649-8, has photos of
ground looms of the type that were probably used to
weave the garments.

_Textiles in Egypt 200-1500 A.D., by Marianne Erikson,
Rohsska Museet, ISBN 91-970533-9-2, has photos of the
extant items in Swedish museum collections, with
closeups of the decoration and a description of how
it's done.

The warp threads are stretched between two beams
supported just off the ground.  The garment is shaped
on the loom as it is woven.  The two beams have to be
as long as the doubled length of the finished garment.
The warps run the width of the garment from sleeve hem
to sleeve hem, and the weaving begins at one sleeve
edge.  Only the width of the sleeve is woven, until
the side of the garment is reached.  Then the weaving
goes the entire double length of the garment.  At the
shoulder, double wefts or twining is inserted to
reinforce the neck edge.  Then the front and back are
woven with separate shuttles until the other edge of
the neck slit is reached, when it resumes hem to hem
weaving.  More reinforcing is inserted at the other
side of the neck edge.  The tapestry bands are woven
in as the garment progresses.  When you get to the
other sleeve, you will just be weaving the sleeve
itself, leaving the other warps empty.
On some garments, these empty warps are trimmed and
left as fringe on the side seams.

If this is too confusing, email me off list and I'll
see if I can scan in a picture or two and send them to
you.

Edwinna of Hawk's Bluff, weaver