Ancient Web: Shelagh Lewins Kept the Bad Weaving Experiments on Display

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Shelagh Lewins has a gallery section called 'Bands with Problems.' That is an unusually useful thing for an expert craft site to keep.

Visit Shelagh Lewins's tablet-weaving gallery.

Tablet weaving uses threaded cards to produce narrow patterned bands, a technique with a long history in European clothing and decoration. Lewins's gallery shows her own attempts in wool, linen, and silk, with explanations of where patterns came from and what went wrong.

An early band, which she thinks dates to around 1990, had fuzzy edges and cheap knitting wool. Another tried to weave runes before she understood the double-faced technique. A patterned band called 'Running Dog' taught her why colors need contrast. These are not before-and-after marketing pictures. They are working notes kept in public.

Research, reconstruction, and uncertainty

Later work ranges from Scandinavian motifs to Anglo-Saxon and Viking-age finds. A linen belt pattern is based on a fragment found in Cambridge; Lewins explains that scholars disagree about whether its date is Anglo-Saxon or medieval. Another band interprets decorative weaving from a grave at Køstrup, Denmark.

Her separate notes on the Køstrup reconstruction, copyright 2017, trace several failed threading arrangements and the eventual decision to change the ground weave. She is careful to say that her result is an interpretation based on photographs, not something proven by examining the original artifact.

The companion Patterns from the Past page goes further, assigning authenticity grades to patterns. Some are designed as reconstructions of specific finds; others deliberately simplify a historical technique to make it practical for reenactors. Older instructions remain in an archive even after improved versions replace them.

This is a later specialist website rather than an untouched 1990s homepage. Its preservation value comes from keeping a craftsperson's long chain of experiments, dated notes, and citations attached to the work instead of presenting a frictionless finished pattern.

There is even a curious collision with the game world: Lewins suspects one of her band photographs appeared as a texture in Assassin's Creed Valhalla. She treats that as an observation, not a verified credit.

The website records how knowledge gets made by people repeatedly turning little cards, getting the result wrong, and trying again.

Explore the gallery and its reconstruction notes.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.