Our Wonderful World of Traditional Textile Techniques V

VELVET

Velvet is a luxury fabric with a short, densely piled surface traditionally Woven from silk. The pile may uniformly cover the face of a textile (solid velvet) or it may produce a pattern by only appearing in selected places (voided velvet). The pile can be very long (plush) or of two or more lengths (pile on pile). Velvet textiles are often of several colours, may have a pattern stamped onto them and may even be printed.

Technique 

The distinctive pile of velvet is produced by means of supplementary warps which are raised over grooved metal rods inserted into an open shed just like the weft. When weaving has proceeded far enough for the raised warps to be secure, they are cut along the groove in the rod with a sharp knife to form dense tufts and the rods are then removed. Sometimes the loops are left uncut for a coarser effect or patterns mat be made up from a combination of cut and uncut areas (cisele velvet)

Other piled textiles

Fabrics like velvet can be woven with a supplementary weft for instance, velveteen, which has a ribbed pile. Particularly interesting pile cloths are the embroidered Raphia textiles made by the Cuba of the Congo, sometimes referred to as Ksai velvet. The pile is created by sewing a fine Raphia strand under the warp thread of a ready woven base cloth, so that both ends are above the surface, and then they are cut off short with a knife.

The pile of many fine rugs and carpets is created by knotting or wrapping yarn around the warps of a ground weave. The denser the knots, the higher the quality of carpet.

TABLET WEAVİNG

Tablet weaving is an ingenious method of making narrow bands, belts and straps. The earliest known textiles that were irrefutably woven with tablets were found in a grave at El Cigarellejo in Spain and have been dated to around 375 BC. Although requiring only a small workstation, weaving in progress is not readily transportable as it is essential that tension is maintained to prevent twisting. The most sophisticated exponents of this technique are therefore sedentary rather than nomadic.

Technique

Warps are stretched on a long narrow loom or between the weaver and a fixed point and not threaded through a system of heddles, but through the corners of tablets made of card, wood or bone, which lie flat against each other like a pack of cards. The tablets are most often square, although many shapes including triangles, hexagons and octagons have been used. According to the intricacy of the pattern anything between seven and three hundred may be used to weave a single band. Each tablet separates the warps threaded through it, lifting some and forcing others down, thus effectively opening a shed through which to pass the weft. By twisting the tablets, individually or in groups, different warps are raised and lowered and different sheds can be opened. Each time a tablet is rotated. the warp threads twist around each other and so most tablet weaving can be identified by this distinctive warp-twined appearance.

Uses and distribution

The high ratio of tablets to warp threads (far higher than is practicable with heddles on a loom ) means that a diverse range of complex and intricate warp faced patterns can be woven, such as the magical cotton belts of Sulawesi in Indonesia worked with Arabic lettering. It is even possible to open two sheds at the same time and produce double weave.
Tablet weaving is employed all over the world from Norway to Morocco from China to Spain for the construction of narrow bands to be used as belts, sashes, straps and animal trappings.