This band was made for Mistress Margret Everskaya's Laurelling outfit, specifically as the trim across the top of the apron dress. It is woven in a fine silk (whose specific size I don't have to hand, but it is finer than 40/2 linen). The band has 39 pattern tablets and two selvedge tablets on each side. It came out at just under a centimeter wide.

Mistress Thora Sharptooth dyed the silk for this project. She provided me with the following information about the silk:

The silk thread is 21-denier/10x2 organzine, i.e., plied reeled silk; it came from Japan. It is the most beautiful and appropriately authentic raw material for tablet weaving that I have yet purchased, and it gave me great pleasure to dye some of it for the occasion of Margret's Laureation.

The yellow is mordanted with alum and dyed with weld from my garden. The orange is some of the same yellow silk overdyed with madder. The blue is dyed with French woad from Bleus de Lectoure.

Margret has a rabbit on her arms, hence the rabbit on the trim. There are six rabbits running across between the brooches. I'm hoping that there will be pictures of Margret in her entire outfit so you can see it in its intended context; I think it came out very nicely.

The rabbit figure was a combination of my mental model as informed by two rabbit figures in Here Be Wyverns, one of which was on a piece of 14th century cloth. Drafting the pattern was a learning experience (in the good sense). I'll be sharing that here in the very near future.

The diamond figure was inspired by the E-417 band from the Elisenhof dig, although my pattern draft is somewhat different from the one in Hansen.

Here's the whole band with a ruler in the picture. It's about 23 inches long in total. The "front" has the yellow background with orange figures.

Front and back of the rabbit figures.

Front and back of the diamonds.

Margret provided a closeup of the trim on the dress but it seems to have stopped working; you can even see the transition where the "center" of the twill chevron moves from dead center to offset for the rabbits..

Updated 31 March 2003. Copyright 2003, Michael Houghton.