Backstrap Weaving – Speechless

Well, you all know that I am on the road and haven’t had time to put a proper post together but I couldn’t resist posting a bunch of pictures here so that you can ooh and ahh over something that I got see up close and personal today. I even got to take it back to my digs for the night to enjoy and photograph.

My digs is a wee cabin on my friend Janet’s cousin’s winery in Santa Cruz, California…yes, one of the other Santa Cruces…..fields of grape vines flowing downhill and out of sight amongst a background of cypreses and redwoods with a view of the gorgeous Pacific Ocean with Monterey across the bay. There’s a whole lot more to that story, of course, which will have to wait but I thought I would post these pictures which really do have me speechless.

These pictures you have seen before if you follow my blog and you will, no doubt, remember that I became fascinated with the discontinuous warp technique when I met Pitumarca weaver Antonia at Convergence last year. There I got to see a piece being woven even though I didn’t fully understand at that stage what it was all about. At the Tinkuy de Tejedores in November in Peru I got to see more and even got to try out a plain weave piece of my own which I turned into the black and white eyeglass case above.

Well, now, I have gotten to see, touch and fully enjoy and appreciate, after having woven my own very ridiculously basic version, a finished piece…and what a piece! It was lent to me by Martha Stanley to take home overnight and really study. What a treat!

Okay, so I said I was speechless so, this is the point where I should really stop waffling on and just show you the piece!

It has been woven in all natural alpaca with twelve panels of supplementary warp pick-up patterning, each one being a four-selvedged piece…incredible! There is the tiniest terminal area in the top and bottom panels, which you can see below, where the weaver simply could not weave any more pick-up due to lack of space to manipulate the warps.

Each panel has a different traditional design of Pitumarca flanked by fields of either black, brown, grey or tan plain weave.

And, of course, it was woven as one entire piece on a backstrap loom.

There you have eight of the twelve panels of pick up patterning. Here are the last four…

This is how a four-panel piece would look once warped…

And here you can see how the warps from each color panel dovetail around a metal rod during warping which is what enables the weaver to have all these warp color changes within the one piece. Yarn is lying parallel to the rod which will stay in place to hold the dovetailing once the rod is removed.

So, this is one of many cool things I have to show. I was given a entire bin of textiles to take back to winery and pour over…but that is all for this week!

Oh wait, I have to show you one more picture of the woven edging on the piece….

And now I am out of here 🙂

Author: Laverne Waddington

I am an Australian who has recently returned to Australia after having lived for 32 years in South America where I was teaching English, weaving, writing, and studying indigenous weaving techniques. I have been learning and documenting traditional textile techniques of various Latin American countries with indigenous weavers since 1996. Although I have studied using several types of simple looms, my loom of choice is the backstrap loom. After many years of largely replicating, adapting and embellishing patterns that had been shared with me by my weaving teachers and friends, I now design my own unique pieces while continuing to employ the woven structures used by my mentors in South and Central America. In 2009 I decided to leave my English teaching job to focus on weaving and, since then, have self-published eight PDFs on technique and patterns which were sold on various websites over the years. I now plan to sell them here on this blog...coming soon. Please subscribe to this blog for updates. View all posts by Laverne Waddington