Tablet Woven Seal Tag

By Lady Iseabail inghean Domhnall mhic Donnchaidh

a Project by the Fibre Guild of Lochac; View All Projects

How I came to decide to do this.

A Call went out on the Scribes list that was echoed onto the Fibre Guild list, asking people to create a seal-tag, using aspects of the Lochac device to carry the kingdom pendant seal on important lochac documents.

A discussion ensued discussing differing seal tags, with the consensus being that there is a wide variety of seal tags covering various fibre arts such as fingerloop braiding, tablet-weaving and more. I liked the idea of doing a tablet-woven design as I was just then finishing a very difficult 3/1 twill pattern and had become enthused about this particular technique.

"What exactly is a seal tag", you ask?

A seal is used to make sure a document has been officially "sanctioned" by the person doing the sealing... A pendant seal is one that hangs off the bottom of a document... being attached to said document by the seal tag A seal tag is thus either a braid, ribbon or bit of vellum upon which said seal is attached.

Generally, when a document has been written up, there is a bit of a gap at the bottom. This is often folded up to the point where the writing finished, and then sealed so that everyone can be certain that nothing was added to the bottom of the document once "done" (this is important for stuff like wills and deeds).

If sealed with a pendant seal, a slit was cut through all the requisite layers of the paper/vellum of the folded section, and the seal tag passed through the slit. The ends were gathered at the bottom and the pendant seal encased both ends so that it was certain that it was sealed together.

My very small amount of research

I researched seal tags on the web (I'm a bit of a lazy researcher) but came across an article called "5 tablet woven seal tags" by Audrey Henshall, which seemed to fit my criteria. I read through it quickly and skipped to the pictures which were of some quite narrow bands with mini designs such as fylfots and other such things.

The tags were all made out of very fine silk and about 5mm wide. They were mainly done with double-turn, double-face, rather than 3/1 twill, but I figured it wasn't too much of a departure to use the alternative technique.

I liked the designs, but the call was to try to incorporate some items of the Lochac device. I played around with designs, but to find anything that fit the charges (and actually look like what they were meant to look like), I had to make the band a little wider (about 1cm wide eventually)... so as not to compromise my "artistic integrity" with boring designs ;)

First false start

By now I had become quite enthused about all this and went down to Lincraft and bought myself some sewing-machine silk - very fine - in red, white and blue.

I had decided to try to incorporate all three colours in by trying to learn 6-hole weaving... surely there's some sort of 3/1 equivalent for 6-hole, I thought...

I had a bit of a go at experimenting with the cards to see what I could come up with. I was imagining that you could put 2 threads of each of the three colours in and swap between each colour at will (with card twists) and thus come out with any arrangement of the three.

You see, the Lochac device (if you squint real hard and pretend it's a pattern) has three colours down each vertical bit... you go from white-on-blue to white-on-red to plain white down one side, and similar on the other side... it would be nice to be able to effortlessly change between all three colours (dream, dream)...

It was a disaster. I found that for six-hole weaving, you need it to be 4/1 twill - otherwise you get horrible long-floats on either the back or the front, which span the entire length of the section that you are doing the twill over. This means that with 2x2x2 colours you can't have nice, smooth blocks of each colour as you'd always have intrusions by one of the other colours... thus the three-colours ideal was out the window.

Back to four-hole

So I went back to the usual method that I was familiar with (and know how to make patterns for) and decided to have a go at hacking out the patterns.

I spent some time playing with the different elements of the device. The star was a bit tricky to get to look star-like, but I fairly quickly got a nice-looking crown done - even with the knobbly bits on top of the pointy-bits. The laurel took a few different goes and I redid the stars again when I realised they were 6-pointed mullets, not 5-pointed ones (don't know how I missed that).

Eventually I was happy and drew them up neatly on graph-paper (the tablet-weaver's friend) and did the two turning-patterns (one for if it started on the z-twist row, one for if it started on the s-twist row).

I loaded up the cards (which took forever, but everyone knows that's half the work in tablet-weaving). The pattern had ended up 31 cards wide to accommodate the laurel pattern - which needed to be that wide to make it actually look leafy and oval-shaped (instead of just a ragged-edged oval blob).

I decided to make the band red and white to match the centre-stripe of the lochac device where there are red stars/crown on white. I had decided that the laurel (while normally white on blue) would just have to serve as white on red - I was not able to do the three-colour stuff...

The edges carried the blue and I had made them checky so that they might feel like the blue/white quarters of the Lochac device.

Life through a microscope

I decided that I would beat it fairly hard as I wanted it to be a really even consistency, and the only way I could ensure that was to make sure I beat everything as hard as I could. I began weaving.

To my horror I discovered that the designs were coming out *tiny*. I had originally planned on making the design so that it would be: star-crown-star laurel and then repeat for the other side.

I quickly changed my mind and so the design became: star-crown-star laurel star-crown-star. I even did some swift "making up some room" stuff, some stripes on the ends (which would be covered by the seal itself) and in the fold-over bit (that would go through the slit in the page) - by adding some dodgy-looking chevrons, but it still looks a little bit shorter than I had expected.

However, the going was *very* slow. The very fine thread coupled with hard beating meant that each row made only minuscule progress. The complexity of the pattern, coupled with the incredibly fine (and therefore difficult to work with) threads meant that any mistake in the pattern was very difficult to spot which meant that I'd often gone past it by an hour's worth of work before I noticed it... which meant and hour-and-a-half of undoing before going back and re-doing that original hour's work... before finally being able to go on with the pattern.

I'm sure you can understand that I gave up in frustration several times along the way and let it just sit there gathering dust for many weeks before finally gathering up enough strength to pick it up again.

Finishing touches

Anyway, I did eventually finish the lot and I was very glad once I had. I decided to try a new finishing-off-the-ends idea. Previously I had just done a knot in each card's-worth of threads, but due to the number of threads/cards in such close proximity, the knots all elbow each other for room and the end looks knobbly and bumpy and not really as nicely-finished as it could.

So I decided to try to make a 4-strand plait out of the threads for each card (just like brides from bobbin-lace) and this worked out quite well. It meant that the finishing-knot was away from the worked-edge of the piece and thus the knots didn't all bunch up together but actually spread out the tassle-ends slightly which I think made a nice fan-shape for the threads.. I cut the thread ends into the tassles and voila!

Final thoughts

I think I don't like working with something so small - there is little sense of progress and it is much more finicky. It takes way too much time for me to try to repeat the effort with any frequency.

Even despite my best efforts, the beating seems to have been slightly different - evident in the fact that the "star-crown-star" sections all come out to different lengths, though it matches up in the end.

It's definitely wider than any of the piccies I've seen of tablet-woven braids - so that's artistic license rather than accuracy, but I hope the effect of the funky designs compensates for that.

Anyway, it took around 100 hours but it's done and I sigh that sigh of relief that eveyone does when they finish a long, involved project :) ... til next time.