A couple of years ago, in the beginning of this blog, I talked about making leg wraps for my husband. I mentioned that I didn’t care for the ace bandage style, mostly because I hate hemming and making those would involve approximately 86,000 years of hemming.
Now I have a floor loom. And the ability to weave complex braided twills. So now I weave leg wraps in a more traditional style. Well “traditional” anyway.
I have found no documentation for this particular pattern of twill, or even braided twills in general. Diamond, broken diamond, 3×2, 2×2 (less common)? Yes. Those patterns we have evidence for. This? Not so much.
The colors are also not period at all. But the person for whom they are intended picked the colors out himself and I’m not about to tell a guy who likes colors no.
I had to learn how to weave wool for this. I’ve only really worked in silk, and wool behaves Very Different. Initially I was getting almost a tapestry weave where the weft completely covered the warp because I was beating too hard and had it under too high of tension.
So here is my current project. 4 harness braided twill, roughly 10 epi warped, will wash out to about 12-14 epi. 9 yards finished length, or 4.5 yards per leg. About 13 picks per inch.
aethelfliedbrewbane 
I am eager to see what this looks like when worn on the legs.
I know this sounds odd, but will you post a picture of your lord husband’s legs? I would like to see how the woven result looks when worn as you have proposed.
And he is ok about wearing wool? It certainly looks soft. Will you handwash the end result? And will he wrap his legs each time or are the wraps to be sewn together?
I have seen pictures but I guess I had always assumed the leggings to be knitted for stretchiness, kind of like a sort of wrapped sock and then sewn together.
Things that make ya go, “Hmmmm!”
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So the previous ones I made for my husband I don’t have any pictures of him wearing them, but here is the documentation with bog body leg showing them worn: https://aethelfliedbrewbane.wordpress.com/2016/02/24/legwraps/ . These ones are for my boyfriend.
Most leg wraps are woven in a long band like this and wrapped every time. They go around the bottom of the pant leg, and are clipped in place. I’ve mostly seen them done in twills, which is a fairly stretchy weave, so they behave almost like knitted stockings. We have no evidence of Norse cultures having knitting, nor do we have naalbound (naalbinding can look an awful lot like knitting) leg wraps.
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