Dress Diary: A "Card Cheat" for the London Garters
Finished Garters, with inspiration
Originally uploaded by Ragnvaeig. When I ordered my black linen hose from Historic Enterprises last year, they came with free cotton twill "garters". I'm sure they'd be fine for pretty much anybody else, but I decided I wanted something better, and "garters" went onto my "improve my kit" project list. Having spun enough of the appropriate colours to the original in Z-spin S-ply, which wasn't much at all, these are handspun-handwoven.
I picked the London garters on pp. 142-144 of Textiles & Clothing because the rest of my 14th cen gear is also British, most of it from London. laurensa had kindly offered to lend me one of her band looms, but I got bored yesterday and didn't want to bother her with my last-minute hankering for garters, so using what I had on hand, I've come up with my own reasonable approximation of the original (which was probably woven on a rigid heddle loom) but done in card weaving. I did this with the understanding that the warp and weft interact rather differently in this kind of weaving, so the finished item wouldn't necessarily look exactly like the original, but I can get the same look. Hence, I'm calling it a "card cheat," because I am a dork.
I extrapolated from the reconstruction shown on p. 144. to get my threading:
(Click to embiggen, and for notes as to why I chose to thread this way.)
I used a warp length of about 72 cm, as that would go around the top of my (rather muscular) calf and dangle a bit, plus takeup and fringe, etc.
In poking around on the internet to see if I could learn from anyone else's mistakes, I only found one other project showing this particular re-creation, and he did it on a loom. I did take his idea to use a pointed stick, though (which was awesome!), and wove around a large-gauge knitting needle, since I had a couple laying around.
The weaving was tabby--180º forward, 180º back, repeat. I did this so that the two warps in the top holes would move together, likewise the bottom, approximating the original as best as possible with a totally different technique. The weft came through the warp, went over the top of the knitting needle, and then back through.
I needed to add a second needle partway through as my needles weren't quite long enough to give me the length I wanted (126 passes of the weft). Luckily, these things come in pairs and it was no problem to add the second. It may go easier with a circular needle, but I don't have one in large gauge. This weaving went very quickly--maybe two hours per garter.
Once I got to my desired length, I removed the cards and made a plied fringe of the rest of the warp, as that seems to have been one way to finish 14th cen selvedges and the ends of the original are missing. The other end stayed in a knot, which I re-knotted to incorporate the ends of the weft after I finished the whole garter, so I could tie the long fringe around something. I thought this might look more like the original, but I think I would prefer the look of a double-fringed garter.
Here, I've started to weave the weft back through the extended selvedge--I'd just left it as a tail while I anchored it with the twisted fringe. I picked up three loops every time, as that's the number that fit on the pointed part of the needle, where it was easy to pick up loops with the darning needle. I did pull the loops together by tightening the weaving weft, as that seemed to be what went on in the original. This is the third pass back through this triad of loops. After this, I pull these three loops off the knitting needle and do two more passes.
After this, I pull these three loops off the knitting needle and do two more passes before weaving back up the side of the fringy bit to the next set of three loops. I did five rows in all for each little wibble of fringe, then wove back up the side of the fringy bit to the next set of three loops, like on page 144. There were 21 little wibbles on the edge of each garter.
All told, these took me about 14 hours. I do think I'll eventually try this again on an inkle loom, but I'm generally pretty pleased with how these came out with the materials I had on hand.