Ethiopian Curtains

The ROM in Toronto Canada and the British Museum in London England, both contain giant silk tabletwoven curtains that were "obtained" from the throne room in Ethiopia.
Michael Gervers, a professor at the University of Toronto, went to Ethiopia and located  a number of additional curtains.  Some of these curtains were still being used within cave churches.
He was kind enough to give me access to his photos, and thus began a very long weaving process.

I decided to weave the curtain from Abba Yohanni.  I liked it's geometric motifs, plus it was woven in much more affordable cotton.   As  the bands are so large, I had to work out the patterns mathematically.  The  original curtains contain a number of errors as well as missing some sections.  Therefore, my bands  should not be consider replicas.

The bands were woven in  4/8 cotton which was colour matched to a sample of the original band.  The curtain consists of 3 tablet woven panels  of 353 tablets each, with plain weaved bands in between the panels.  All of the patterns are woven in double-face.  Each "line" (two turns of the cards) takes about half an hour, or approximately an hour per centimetre.

Panel 1 - Central Section  (2006 - 2017)
I believe that the original band was woven by 3 apprentices at the same time.  Especially in the diamonds, there are errors that occurred by someone turning the cards the opposite direction then called for in the pattern.  In one particular case, the error is followed by a horizontal line as the pattern was re-set.
I decided not to try and include this pattern variations, as I would make enough mistakes on my own.  The band has huge tension issues, and numerous problems where a loose thread ended up on the wrong side of the shed.  I have repaired some of these problems, and fortunately they do not detract much from the overall appearance of the piece.
The original loom broke when I took away the tension for an article in Handwoven magazine.  I designed a new loom with a ratchet system to try and fix my tension issues.

353 cards
330 cm long
approx 38.5 cm wide

Panel 2 right hand panel (2017 - )
Confused while dealing with covid and cancer, I wove this backwards, starting with motifs borrowed from other bands.  This means my last two sections will not match the sizes of the original.

Panel 3 (2026???)
Now that I am going to retire, have more experience, and a grown child, I'm hoping the third panel will be completed much more quickly.  I still haven't decided what motifs to weave to fill in the missing sections