Usually tablet weaving is done with square tablets that have 4 holes, but 6 hole tablet weaving is known from various times and places throughout history. It opens up tons of possibilities for new color patterns and strength. The late great Peter Collingwood's book The Techniques of Tablet Weaving goes into some detail about it, but the patterns are quite daunting! As you can see in the pic, though these are 6 hole tablets, I'm only using 4 of them for now. Working my way up lol. Not even a particularly fancy pattern on this practice piece:
I couldn't find any hexagonal tablets for sale that matched what I wanted, so I 3d printed these ones. The design has changed since:
The pips around the outer holes helps you keep track of which thread you're on. The idea with the center hole is that you can put a star shaped rod through it that holds everything still as needed. I thought I'd be able to use the rod to make turning easier, isolate out individual tablets easier, etc. However, (obvious in retrospect) the threads just get wrapped around it and make it hard to remove after turning. Whoops!
I've since been told that you can use a central hole to give each plied warp of the finished work a core thread/wire for super strong fabric! So that's pretty cool.
Has anyone else experimented with non-square tablets?
