Celtic Cards for Tablet Weaving

Tablet weaving (also known as card weaving) is an ingenious technique for taking long bundles of warp threads and passing them through perforated tablets, then manipulating these to make strong patterned bands. Historically this was done with either a back strap method or a structured loom.To weave with this technique, each card is normally threaded with four warps, although it can also be done with sets of cards with two, three or six holes. The wider the band, the more cards you would need. Looking at the diagram below, for example, the holes 1 and 2 are up, while 3 and 4 are down. But after one pass of the weft through this small shed, some or all of the cards can be either flipped over or dialed forward or back. This will create a new shed with a different combination of warps up and down. It is a surprisingly creative and flexible method, because unlike a solid loom with fixed heddles, here the weaver has a nearly limitless number of choices for arranging the re-arranging the warp