August 2011 – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Prototypes, Samples and Keepers

It’s been a week of bits and pieces…trying out new patterns, practicing new techniques, making width samples and prototypes and then putting everything together into something I can keep and use.

Cochabamba and my teacher Maxima seem far away now as I sit here in shorts with the temperature and humidity rising. Only two nights ago I had the down sleeping bag on the bed. It makes me yearn for the “eternal spring” weather of the Cochabamba valleys but, then again, today I walked outside to the street and bought big glorious golden dripping slices of pineapple, saw tiny green mangoes up high in the trees and realized that the markets will soon be brimming with the tangy achachairú. I read recently that this fruit is now being grown in tropical areas of Australia with its name changed to the more manageable achacha.

This week I tried out a supplementary warp design that was on a bag at the PAZA stand in Cochabamba. This piece had not been woven by Maxima who seems to specialize in pebble weave. I hadn’t even noticed the pattern when I was there. It was, as usual, a bit of a case of information overload…a very intense three days of weaving, sights, colors and sounds.

It is fun for me now to slowly review the videos I had taken of Maxima weaving and listen to the birdsong and the melodies made famous by the Cochabamba band Kjarkas playing in the background…details that were obscured by my concentration on all that Maxima was teaching me. For that reason I did not see the lovely supplementary warp design until I came home and went through my photos.

You can just see the design on the bag on the ground in the picture above left. Supplementary warp is not one of my favorite techniques and I guess that is why I had not paid much attention to it but I was quite struck by the pattern when I got home and had time to examine my pictures. If I had run across this design on the internet I would never have thought that it was Andean.

I wove it into a small piece which I sewed into an eye glass case and then used it as an opportunity to practice a tubular band in pebble weave. Not wanting to complicate things too much, I just did plain pebble weave (that is, a pebbled background with no motif) for this band setting up the warp as I was taught in Peru and thus avoiding having to do any pick-up.

Maxima’s way of doing pebble weave would have her picking up threads even for a plain pebble band. The advantage of her method is that it can be worked more easily using just finger tension rather than having the band attached to the body by way of a backstrap. No doubt I will discover other advantages as I delve further into her method.

Here is the chart for the supplementary warp design if you would like to try it yourself. I have no idea if there is a standard way for charting these supplementary warp designs but this way works for me. I have also started a new page here where I will put charts for designs in this technique.

I have not done a tutorial on this pick-up method as there are plenty of good resources out there already. I believe that most inkle weaving books include it and Sue Foulkes recently did an online workshop in the Yahoo braids_and_bands group on Sami band weaving which uses the same technique.

If you would prefer to have a “real live” teacher with whom you can interact, Daryl Lancaster will be teaching an online class on this pick-up method for inkle loom weavers on Weavolution. Check out the details here.

You can just see the pebbles on the tubular band in the picture above.

So, this particular sample found a use. I would like to weave this design again having the pattern extend right to the edge of the dark blue section. I think that would look even nicer.

This meant that two of my three pairs of glasses were nicely accommodated in woven pouches. I had made an eye glass case from a discontinuous warp experiment many months ago. I figured that I may as well make the third one which would give me a chance to try out another experiment.

I wanted to make a pouch taking advantage of the fact that weaving a warp-faced double weave piece that doesn’t have motifs woven into it will create a tube. This meant that I could weave the front and back of the pouch simultaneously as two layers of cloth joined at the edges…..”instant pouch”!

It’s no big deal really! All this meant is that I would be saving a bit of seam sewing but I thought it would be fun to see what I could do with this. The tube, of course, is beautifully seamless! You can see, above left, a little sample I made a few weeks ago with some left over warp. There is no motif in that piece and so what I have created is two layers of cloth joined at the edges…a tube.

I sealed the bottom of the tube by weaving a pattern of triangles. Weaving motifs is what bonds the two layers in warp-faced double weave.

Although there was no need to do so, I decided to try to weave the triangles up the sides as well but soon discovered that the difference in take-up between the patterned and plain areas was considerable and that I would not be able to continue with that.

So I threw in a couple of supplementary weft figures woven in one of the ways I was taught in Guatemala with the turns of the weft outlining the motif. Then I just managed to get away with squeezing in three more triangles to balance things out. I was really just making it all up as I went…not like me at all!

I created another row of triangles at the top with a supplementary weft (next time I will put the weft turns on the inside of the tube so they won’t be seen). I couldn’t weave them in double weave as they would have sealed up my tube. Finally, I twined along the bottom to secure the weft and then I cut a fringe.

Probably the most fun part was creating the “flex” closure and I have my online weaving buddy Bobbie to thank for that.

When I met her in Portland last year, she showed me a bag made by a friend in which a closure had been created using pieces of an old tape measure. You probably know this kind of closure….you squeeze the sides of the bag and the top pops open. I am trying to show that in the picture above left.

My boyfriend patiently dismantled our tape measure, cut off a length from the inside end, wound the tape back up and put the case back together. No harm done. We didn’t need all ten feet!

I cut two pieces of the tape a little shorter than the width of my pouch. I then cut them down to about two thirds of their original width and rounded the ends. I turned down the top edges of the pouch and sewed them with the lengths of tape within and yes, it works! Above you can see a picture of a commercially available and far more sophisticated version and one of our Ravelry group members provided this link to various sources of these “flex frames”.

That was another experiment that can be used. Nevertheless I think I will make another taking into account lessons learned and with much more planning in the design.

I resisted starting on that straight away as I had another idea bouncing around and so, this is a prototype for a new set of mug rugs that I would like to make…seen here dappled with sunlight…

Actually the prototype turned out pretty well and so it may be a keeper.

I edged my little 4 x 4 1/2″ piece with a tubular ñawi awapa. I am thinking of mounting the mug rugs on cork as the reverse color combination on the back doesn’t really work alongside the other colors in the tubular edging.

The cork will also serve to hide the raw end of the tubular band.

It was so nice being able to sit beside Maxima in Cochabamba last week and weave tubular bands. I had already learned how to weave and sew them but mostly through various brief observations of indigenous weavers over the years as well as through a large group class I took at the Tinkuy last year.

It was wonderful being able to have this one-on-one experience and watch how Maxima held her work, placed her sewing needle and tensioned the warp, smoothly coordinating all the moves. I was so absorbed that the sewing part was the one part of my instruction that I completely neglected to video or photograph! (although you can see a Bolivian and Peruvian weaver doing so in my videos here).

However, I did take video of many other things and have put some bits and pieces together for this post.

This first clip shows Maxima using her spindle to put extra twist into some plied yarn so that we would be able to weave with it.

I had been complaining during the Tour de Fleece of an aching thumb which developed from the way I was turning my spindle for plying. I really need to practice the Andean way of setting the spindle in motion for plying or respinning commercial yarn.

Maxima tied for first place with a Peruvian lady in the speed spinning contest which was held one night during the Tinkuy de Tejedores in Urubamba, Peru last year. The two ladies spun over six meters in two minutes.

The various segments in the next video show the stages of setting up a warp for weaving. Maxima winds a warp using her finger and big toe as warping stakes. You can see her winding two colors together with which she will pick her designs and then the final single edge warps. After tucking the end of the warp into her waist band she rearranges the warp cross separating the two colors into different sheds. Then she makes her heddles.

This final piece of video shows how Maxima opens her sheds and then forms a picking cross from which she selects the colored warps for her pattern. Not a stick in sight!!

If you would like to hear more of the music that can be faintly heard in the background of some of the video segments, check out this powerful live version of Wayayay by Kjarkas.

Before we leave Cochabamba, I would like to pass on Dorinda’s thanks to all those who visited the PAZA blog last week some of whom helped out with donations. Postscript: I see that Dorinda has just posted a thank you note on the PAZA site.

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The Ravelry Backstrap Group Weave-Along starts next week. We have a good bunch of people all ready to go. I am especially happy to see an old online weaving buddy Franco joining in.

Sharon aka Fiberaholic1 wove a bunch of 8-rev patterns from my Andean Pebble Weave book and did a beautiful job but this is a pre weave-along project as there will be no pick-up patterning in this latest weave-along. We are going to play with stripes and color.

And here are some more pieces to inspire our Weave-Alongers….my online weaving friend Caroline, in Australia, sent me this picture of a striped and ikat patterned textile from East Timor and JaQueline Keller on Weavolution allowed me to show her cheery bag made by sewing several plain-weave inkle bands, made with yarns of various weights, onto canvas. Such wonderful things can be made with plain warp-faced weaving!

And to finish I was just given this link from a Ravelry member to a book by Mirja Wark of The Netherlands about the weaving of a special belt called the si’ira by the Wayuu people of Colombia and Venezuela. Colombia seems to be making its way bit by bit into my life…a little contact, a little information from here and there. I wonder where all this may lead?!

Backstrap Weaving – Cool Tools and Implements

“All those sticks! Where in the world do they go and what do they all do?”

I have written posts about all those mysterious sticks and wooden implements, from the basic loom bars to the heddle sticks, shed rods, coil rods, stabilizing rods, shuttles, beaters, swords, pick-up sticks, even “poking sticks” (my own name for an implement my Guatemalan teachers used to create inlaid brocade).

Last weekend I went to the highlands to the city of Cochabamba to experience the ultimate in “stickless” weaving – what I named “barefoot weaving” in a previous post and am now able to add yet another handy dandy tool to my backstrap weaving kit….my humble big toe!

I used to have rather fierce-looking, blister-proof ready-for-anything feet in my old trekking days. They carried me up and down mountains in many places across the globe but I am ashamed to say that they have now gone “soft” on me even though I rarely wear shoes in this climate that I find myself in. So, I didn’t last long with the hard-spun coarse wool chafing my toes and I shall have to put them into training for barefoot weaving.

maxima soraida and nilda — Maxima, daughter Zoraida and granddaughter Zuni were my weaving companions for my three-day stay in Cochabamba. Maxima was my teacher while little Zuni played at spinning on her "pushka". Zoraida was making a hat for daughter Zuni in tapestry crochet.

I met Maxima at the Tinkuy de Tejedores in Urubamba, Peru last year. She was my roommate along with American ex-Peace Corps worker Dorinda Dutcher. Dorinda, who lives and works with the weavers in the town of Independencia here in Bolivia, had raised funds which had enabled her to take Maxima to the event. You can read about Dorinda’s work and her PAZA foundation here.

Dorinda, Maxima, Zoraida and Zuni were in the city last weekend selling weavings from their cooperative at a handcraft fair and this was a great opportunity for me to make a quick visit and have some classes.

PAZA stand — The weavers are recovering the art of dyeing their handspun wool with natural substances and creating large and small bags, pillow covers, hair bands, belts and other woven items which they sell at three such craft fairs that are held in Cochabamba each year.

handspun alpaca for knitting — I was excited to be able to buy almost a kilo of handspun and plied alpaca yarn from a neighboring booth at a very nice price . As it has been spun for knitting, I will need to respin it for warp-faced weaving on my backstrap loom. I hope to be able to dye a lot of it too.

cristo and view — I spent the mornings walking around the city on this my first ever visit to Cochabamba. I went up the hill to see the Christ the Redeemer statue which is just that little bit higher than the more famous one in Rio de Janeiro. Although the location is not quite as exotic as Rio, there was a nice view of the city in its pleasant valley surrounded by mountains.

That left the afternoons for weaving classes. Our only tools were our fingers and toes, scissors (am I the only one who uses her teeth when no one is looking?!) and a needle for sewing the tubular bands or bordes that we made.

Here are the lovely yarns we got to play with…handspun and dyed with natural substances. A few of the colors were not ready to weave with yet as they had only been lightly plied and so Maxima picked up her large plying spindle and gave the yarn the extra twist needed for weaving. I have some nice video of Maxima doing this seated on the ground using that typical sweeping motion between her two hands to set the spindle in motion. I will show the videos in a future post once I have edited them.

You can see the very high amount of twist in this yarn. The bands, when not under tension, will spiral and the unwoven yarn curls up on itself in an alarming mass.

Above left, Maxima is twisting the yarn and on the right she has started warping for a tubular band using her forefinger and big toe as her warping stakes. As she does not have two central stakes around which to separate her colors, she winds her two colors together as doubled strands and then rearranges the cross once she is done. She tucks one end of the warp into the waist band of her skirt while the other ends stays wrapped around her toe. This leaves her two hands free to rearrange the warps into their two sheds.

Maxima then secured one side of the cross in a shed loop and made simple string heddles around the warps on the other side. Once the set up was complete, she removed the warp from her waistband and tensioned it between her forefinger and her toe…no backstrap or waist string was used.

what I learned — On the first afternoon, I asked to learn tubular bands. I was so absorbed with filming, photographing and noting everything down that I didn't realize that the first band she taught me was actually pebble weave! Her set up and way of doing the pick-up is so completely different to the way I had been taught in the western part Peru. It threw me off at first and I got really confused! Fortunately we started with the design which is known in the Cusco area as "mayo k'enko" and which Maxima calls "linquito" and so it wasn't all totally foreign to me and I was then able to pick it up quite quickly. Maxima's method definitely has its advantages for weaving pebble weave as a finger-tensioned tubular band.

You can see the first pebble weave edging we made in the picture above left. The yarn was way too chunky for the little bag we were edging but it served as a learning exercise. Then we made a much simpler style for the second project. Above right you can see the three pebble weave bands, or huatos, on which we worked on the second and third days of classes, starting narrow and gradually working up to wider designs.

weaving together — Weaving together on the grassy area behind the market stalls was cool and peaceful. Last Saturday was my birthday and this was a lovely way to spend it. There is a reason why these sensible ladies always wear hats. My poor lips are now a swollen mass of blisters from the dryness and high altitude sun.

While Maxima finishes off my edged pouch, I am weaving the first narrow pebble weave band. You can see how Maxima taught me to use my two fingers in the warp as my “picking cross” (I explained a little about the picking cross in last week’s post).

rearranging the cross and weaving — On the left Maxima is using her fingers as cross sticks to rearrange the warp cross. I took my bands back to my hostel to do my homework...yes, there was homework! My bed had a convenient bar to which I could tie up and there would always be my toe if I hadn't been able to find anything that would do. On the third day we worked on wider motifs on the band pictured on the right. Some of the motifs were completely new to me and fun to learn with this "new" way of doing the pick-up.

In my Andean Pebble Weave book I show how I was taught to create a border for pebble weave of the same thickness as the design area. Maxima also creates a thick border but in a completely different manner. This is the fourth way that I have seen pebble weave being woven…all so VERY interesting!

CdcGroup — Maxima with the Club de Chicas. This photo is from the PAZA Bolivia blog written by Dorinda Dutcher.

Maxima was a wonderful teacher. When I asked her if she enjoyed teaching she laughed and told me that when she had taught her daughters she would lose patience and want to slap them! Now she says that she is used to teaching and enjoys starting the young girls in the “Club de Chicas” in Independencia on their first weavings. I have made a tentative date to visit her in Independencia next March during the peach season.

I gave her a couple of key fobs, one of which was in double weave and I think she would like me to teach her that when I visit. I was surprised as there were double weave belts on sale in her stall but she told me that they had been made by other weavers. I have come across this before…weavers learn what their mothers and grandmothers can teach them but are unwilling to ask non-related weavers and their weaving peers to teach them other techniques.

Back at home I wanted to put things I learned into practice but I started off slowly by simply using one of the new designs I had learned in a cell phone pouch. I have made many cell phone pouches and realized that not one of them has been made with a pebble weave design which is, after all, my favorite technique.

Here is my latest cell phone pouch with the new design. You can see it on the pink bordered huato. I wove and sewed a red tubular edging and used a snap closure. I know that we like to apply nice names to these motifs but, of all the designs that Maxima taught me over the three days, only one had a name, the aforementioned linquito and she had no name for pebble weave either to distinguish it from the other weaving techniques practiced in the area.

cell phone pouch on shadow weave — Here is the cell phone pouch on my other finished project for this week - the shadow weave piece.

The shadow weave piece also came off the loom this week. You might remember that I had only wound a one-yard warp as it was an experiment. I am ridiculously pleased with it! However, no matter how I tried to photograph it I couldn’t get the shadowy three-dimensional effect to show up so, here it is looking rather flat.

shadow on loom — Here is the warp on my backstrap loom with its bamboo reed, three sets of string heddles and shed rod and on the right you can see it in progress.

off loom and wet finished — On the left you can see it as it came off the loom and on the right after having been wet finished.

The two doubled black edge ends I used looked a lot better after wet finishing but I am still not sure if doing that was such a good idea. Now, what do I use this piece of cloth for? I am actually thinking of using it as the lining for a bag…would that be nuts?

I LOVED making this! I have another four-shaft draft that I might tackle and then there is the eight-shaft one that has been calling to me for some time now…do I dare?

We are less than two weeks away from the start of our Ravelry group weave-along and I found some wonderfully inspiring pictures today from the Education and More site. Kareanni who works as a volunteer for this organization is in our backstrap group on Ravelry.

education and more guatemala — These bags are just a few of the latest fair trade products from Guatemalan weavers being offered by Education and More and are wonderful inspiration for our weave- along which will be all about using color and stripes in plain-weave.

I have had a wonderful array of completed backstrap projects coming into my inbox as well as posted in the Ravelry group this week. Where do I start?

And here are his simple warp float pieces…beautiful!!

You will recognize some of these designs from my tutorial while others were designed by Andreas. I do hope that we keep in touch as it would be great to learn about traditional weaving in Greece. Andreas told me that there is no warp-faced tradition. How in the world did he shape the bottom of that center band?? That is so cool!

Amber aka lavitaaj on Ravelry has been weaving outdoors making a renaissance design pouch for her sister using the “warp floats galore” technique.

And I am happy to see that she has just posted the finished pouch so I can share it this week…

All that is left to add is the toggle. She has edged it with a tubular band and I love the tassels she has added.

Here is what Jerome aka HeyZ has shown us in his first appearance in the group…a great combination of small pebble weave motifs and a simple and very effective warp float design of his own invention.

anne kateri yonat — Anne and Kateri are working their way successfully through the first lessons in pebble weave while Yonat, who wove with me in Santa Cruz California last spring, has been doing a study in simple warp float patterns with beautiful results.

Speaking of simple warp floats, I received some pictures this week of the weaver who taught me this technique in coastal Ecuador. Kathleen Klumpp, who continues to work with Trinidad and her family to document the ancient spinning, dyeing and weaving techniques used in the coastal region and find markets for their products, sent me these pictures of Trini’s latest work.

trinis new bags — In addition to the large satchel-like shoulder bags that Trini has been making she is now producing these cute purses using tagua nut buttons as closures. You can see her on the right weaving and sewing the edging band to the finished textile using her mother's handmade rigid heddle. I would so love to have Maxima see this way of making the "bordes"!

To finish, I would like to make an appeal on behalf of Dorinda, Maxima, Zoraida and little Zuni and the weavers of the Independencia area in Bolivia. The PAZA project is currently experiencing a funding crisis. Sales at the fair last weekend were disappointingly low. I would love for you to visit the PAZA site and see for yourselves that this is a project worthy of support. Even the smallest donation will be very much appreciated. If you have used any of the tutorials here on my blog and enjoyed reading my posts, remember that all the information I am providing comes via weavers like Maxima and Trinidad and this is one small way that we can all give back a little.

Thank you! 🙂

Backstrap Weaving – Sett and Match

In the mail this week…a book on “Tejido Huave” by Erica de Ruiter which is described as “Easy pick-up patterning on two, three or four shafts”.

I had quite recently seen images online of Mexican Huave textiles decorated with supplementary wefts and used a butterfly motif from one of them on a warp-faced sampler of inlaid brocade patterns.

I am interested in seeing the variations that Erica de Ruiter has developed using the Huave textiles as her inspiration.

It will be fun to play with more than three sheds on my backstrap loom and, to get into the swing of things, I set up my loom for a four-shed weave this week using three sets of string heddles, a shed rod and my lovely bamboo reed.

Finally this bamboo reed gets to do some real weaving with its new owner. I got two reeds like this at a stand selling textiles and weaving implements of Chinese minority groups at Convergence last year. My mind wanders off thinking about who may have been the previous owner/s of these reeds, what kinds of warp thread passed through their slots, what kind of weft they beat into place and the fabric they were used to produce.

I made a tiny sample a few weeks ago to see how suitable my thread was for the spacing of the slots and since then have been dithering over what kind of weaving I want to do. This reed is 23 dpi and I am using my #10 crochet cotton. I guess I am working backwards as one usually chooses their yarn, figures the sett for the desired technique and then uses the appropriate reed. I, on the other hand, have the reed and am figuring the rest out with that as my starting point.

You can see my tiny sample above. I wove just enough to be satisfied that my #10 crochet cotton works well in this reed. I was thrilled with how it looked after weft finishing.

I went ahead with a four-shaft, four-treadle shadow weave using a draft I found online. I made string heddles for the threads on the shafts for each of the treadles…three sets of continuous string heddles with threads for the fourth treadle held on a shed rod. So the threads for shafts 2 and 4 (treadle 1) went all together in one heddle and so on.

Of course the whole business is a lot more stable with this width. When I wove the tiny sample it was very awkward handling the wide reed on the narrow warp. The reed sits up nicely on this wider piece and it is really quite a comfortable set-up.

I mis-counted in the sequence at the start before things really got underway. Now I am really enjoying this!

I don’t care for the edges and have yet to find a good way to turn the two wefts. I warped two ends of double- stranded black thinking that that might make a good edge…well, not so much!

This has been all about the process so I had no thoughts at all in the planning stage about what this piece might end up being. I only wound a one-yard warp and now I am thinking that I might use it as lining for a bag.

It is odd for me having to wait to wet-finish this piece to see what it will really look like. In the kind of warp-faced weaving that I do, what you see on the loom is what you get. I am really impatient to get this off the loom, wash it and see the final product but, at the same time I am really enjoying weaving it…just raising heddles and passing wefts…such a change not doing any pick-up!

Two very different projects on the loom this week. One was all about matching designs and the other about yarn and sett for shadow weave…sett and match!

The other weaving I did this week did involve pick-up. I made a set of mug rugs in double weave to match the patterns on the four place mats I recently finished.

The patterns on the place mats were woven with simple warp floats and I tried to include elements of the various motifs in the matching double weave mug rugs.

I used weft twining on the edges of the mug rugs to match the finish of the place mats which also allowed me to incorporate the third color as each place mat had been woven in three colors.

The “Worldwide Weaving Web” has brought all these wonderful patterns into my home which I have seen mostly in images online. A wonderful book on Tejido Huave has come my way as a result of internet wanderings and a box of goodies arrived just today from an online weaving friend.

During the Tour de Fleece on Ravelry our Backstrap Weaving Group organized a fiber gift exchange and here is what I got from Bobbie…some suri alpaca fiber to spin…so soft!! and four balls of cotton for my backstrap weaving. The colors were dyed by Bobbie herself. After having met Bobbie online I actually did get to meet her in person when I was in Portland last May.

The rigid heddle segment was not in this box from Bobbie but came to me from another online friend who I haven’t had the chance to meet yet in person…Sharon in Florida.

I have taken this heddle out in preparation for the Weave-Along that we are planning for the Backstrap Group starting at the beginning of September. (Read more about this in last week’s post.) It is a plain-weave Weave-Along in warp-faced or balanced-weave and some participants are going to use these bought plastic rigid heddle segments while others are making their own from sushi mats, popsicle sticks and plastic folders. Others are planning ikat designs, colorful stripes and horizontal bars for their warp-faced pieces.

Home made reed and rigid heddle by Dyggvi and Janet.

We have found some good sources online for the heddle segments for those who would like to do narrow weavings. Some people are going to use the heddles that came with their rigid heddle looms. Janet is planning a 24″ wide shawl.

The segments can be found here and here (this link was provided by Traudi) and Joanne from Glimakra gave us information about all the heddles that they have available including some beautiful traditional-style wooden ones for band weaving with handles.

And if these gifts aren’t enough from the “Worldwide Weaving Web”, a real live person arrived from the other side of the world…all the way from Doha, Qatar! Fellow Ravelry member Berta aka mountainbird is traveling across South America on her vacation away from the temperatures in the high forties (Celcius) that are typical in her part of the world at this time of year. She is Canadian but has been living in Qatar teaching English for eleven years.

Berta is friends with Tracy who is a Backstrap Weaving Group member and who has been learning to weave Bedouin-style textiles in Qatar and sharing her findings with us in the group. She sent me this wonderful piece of Bedouin weaving with Berta…

This fabric is part of a tent divider which has been cut up to make a bag. The black and white pattern has been woven using warp substitution technique as has the grey and orange “molar” design. You can also see small segments of weft twining which is what brought me to study these textiles in the first place.

I had learned weft twining with the Montagnard (Vietnamese hilltribe) weavers in North Carolina and google searches on the subject led me to fantastic images of Bedouin weaving which I was able to reproduce being already familiar with the warp substitution and twining techniques.

And now many months down the track I am holding a genuine piece of this weaving, a beautiful gift from Tracy all the way from Qatar…what a thrill. I was aware that the yarn used in the traditional pieces is quite heavy but didn’t appreciate how thick it actually is until now. I can now imagine just how terribly heavy a full tent divider must be in this yarn.

There is something so very wonderful about the coarseness and chunkiness of this piece not to mention the gorgeous wool aroma…definitely constructed to withstand some harsh elements

My reproduction piece below in the #10 cotton just doesn’t seem right at all!!

I had a fun couple of days with Berta who, in true Ravelry style, arrived with yarn and knitting in hand with a couple of pairs of socks already finished.

She is overlanding from Lima to Buenos Aires…many many bus hours in which to knit!

We spent August 6th together and invited an Australian girl from Berta’s hostel (home of Simon the toucan) to join us so we had an Argentinean, two Australians and a Canadian celebrating Bolivian Independence Day in a Brazilian restaurant!

Now she is on her way to Iguazu Falls on the border of Brazil and Argentina.

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To finish this week, I have put together some pictures and video for what will be the start of a new page on intermediate-level techniques and I wanted to start with a short explanation of what is meant by “complementary warp pick-up”. You will probably run into this term when you read about warp-faced backstrap weaving. Andean pebble weave is just one of the techniques that falls into this category.

The idea here is not to teach you a specific weaving technique but simply to show you how the weavers pick up the warps to form their patterns when weaving a complementary warp method. Irene Emery defines complementary weaves as those where “two sets of elements play equivalent and reciprocal parts on opposite faces of the fabric,”….

This creates a double-faced fabric. The design on one face of the fabric is mirrored on the other face with its colors reversed as in the pebble weave example below.

When weaving a complementary warp technique, the warps are generally arranged in two sheds with the colors separated as seen above. The warps in one color will go into string heddles and the other color will be controlled by a shed rod. In the example above, each black warp has a red partner. One black warp together with its red partner is called a complementary pair. In the example, the black warp sits on the right of its red partner. I have separated two complementary pairs from the rest of the warps so you can see how they lie.

Weavings like these Jalq’a textiles above from Potolo, Bolivia have been woven in a complementary warp technique using red and black threads on a warp that would have looked like my examples above. You can see that the faces of the textiles show red figures on a black background. The back of the textile will show the same figures except that they will be black on a red background.

The pick-up is done with the aid of the cross. The cross keeps the warps in strict order so that the weaver knows which warps are complementary pairs. If the weaver wants black to show on the upper face of her weaving she will pick up the black and drop its red partner. The dropped red will show on the back of the textile.

The way weavers choose to form the cross and carry out the pick-up varies greatly from region to region. There is no one correct way to do it.

Above you can see two weavers from Potolo with their red and black weavings. The first weaver has created a ”picking cross” down at the weaving line. She has a stick under all the red warps and has opened up the shed with all the black warps. From this cross she will select the warps she needs for her pattern. When she picks a red she will drop its black partner and vice versa. Like this, she will create a shed of red and black warps through which she will pass the weft.

The weaver on the right is doing likewise except that she has inserted a stick under the black warps and has opened the shed with the reds. From this “picking cross” she will select the warps for her design.

Both weavers are using sticks to pick up the warps.

This weaver from Tinkipaya, Bolivia uses her hands to pick and drop the warps for her design. Her weaving has bands of many colors. She has a permanent cross in her warp. You can probably just make it out in the picture. Two cords are holding her cross rather than sticks. She is working her way across the warp picking the color from one side of the cross which she wants to have showing on the front of the weaving and dropping the complementary partner in the other color which will show on the back of the weaving.

This is the way I was taught to do pebble weave in one region of Peru….picking from a permanent cross with my hands. The pick-up method varies from region to region.

Here is a video that I made showing the theory of complementary warp pick-up. This is how I pick one pattern shed of red and black warps through which I will pass the weft to form my design.

Here are several video clips of Bolivian weavers from Potolo, Isoso, Tarabuco and Tinkipaya doing complementary warp pick-up. See the hundreds of threads they are working with and see how fast they go! The first weaver you will recognize from Potolo, followed by a Guaraní weaver from Isoso, a lady from Tarabuco and one from Tinkipaya.

The second weaver in this video is my Guaraní weaving teacher here in Santa Cruz. The Guaraní weavers have their own very special way of doing the pick-up and are the only ones I have seen who don’t pick from a cross when doing complementary warp pick-up. Angela has her two colors, brown and white, separated into two sets of string heddles and simply pulls on the appropriate heddle when she needs a color. Somehow she manages to keep her complementary pairs in order and doesn’t mix up or cross the threads!

Well, I hope that these videos and explanations have been interesting for you. Those who have my Andean Pebble Weave book may like to see the theory of the pick-up I am describing therein with step-by-step pictures, in action here in my video. Note that none of the weavers in these videos are doing pebble weave. Pebble weave is just one of several techniques that fall into this complementary warp category.

I am off to the highlands tomorrow for some weaving lessons and will be meeting up with my Tinkuy roomies Dorinda and Maxima and seeing a bit of the Virgen de Urkupiña festival. I’ll be back next week with some new weaving knowledge and hopefully lots of pictures to share.

Backstrap Weaving – Preparing to Weave Along

Preparations are underway for a new weave-along in the Backstrap Weaving Group on Ravelry.

The rules are simple: no pick-up, only plain-weave.

We are proposing two options.

The first is for a warp-faced project playing with COLOR and stripes or maybe even ikat and we have been looking at the bright cheerful colors of Guatemalan and Mexican textiles, the washed-out tones of Central Asia and the gorgeous reds of Bedouin cloth…colors obtained from cochineal and indigo and other natural sources and those bright synthetic neons favored by many weavers in the Bolivian highlands.

Simple spots and chevrons can be programmed into a warp by tying and dyeing. Checkerboard designs, horizontal bars, comb patterns and stripes can be set into the warp on the warping board and weaving can then proceed without having to count, float or pick up a single thread or look at a pattern chart.

The second option is also about plain-weave but this time we are talking about a balanced plain-weave something like the loom bag that Jen put together, the scarf that Kathi made recently and the scarf that Nancy is pictured weaving all using a rigid heddle on their backstrap looms…

The Backstrap Group members have homespun yarn on hand after having completed the Tour de Fleece and so plans are afoot for making wool shawls and scarves with purchased or homemade heddles and reeds.

Janet has already made herself a reed to try out before we start the weave-along in September as has Kathi who made a hole-and-slot heddle. Phil is taking up the challenge to create a balanced-weave piece with his homespun without the aid of reed or rigid heddle.

With cotton, towels and place mats can be made very easily using one of the standard rigid heddles that come with a rigid heddle loom. I have three 12-inch heddles that work beautifully. Some of the color-and-weave type projects would be good for this weave-along too…log cabin or simple houndstooth patterns can be woven in plain weave using two weft colors. I wove the one at left with 13 wpi mercerized cotton.

Right now we are filling up the thread in the Backstrap Group with ideas and hope to start weaving on September 1st.

In the meantime, I am itching to get at my shadow weave project using my bamboo reed. I recently saw some fabulous shadow weave pieces made by Dawn McCarthy on Weavolution. They are 8-shaft patterns and not the kind of thing I am willing to take on just yet! but her color combinations are what most attracted me particularly a black and light leafy green piece and those are the two colors that I have decided to go with on my four-shaft sample piece.

I would never have thought to put these two colors together in my project so, thank you Dawn for the inspiration. Dawn is offering online classes on shadow weave soon through Weavolution’s Cyberfiber. “Click, click” with the mouse and I got some inspiration from Dawn and a free shadow weave draft from Handweaving.net.

So these are all the future plans. As for what I have been up to this week, following my experiment with double weave edges and the motifs from Bhutan, I now have yet another cellphone pouch to add to my growing supply of gifts.

I sewed a band to make rather broad sides as this double weave sample band was only just wide enough for the cell phone. I cut and “stop frayed” the edge of the flap and then just simply sewed over and over it with matching thread and used a simple snap closure. It is quite a sturdy little pouch in double weave.

Sticking with double weave and my experiments with warping to create straighter edges, I made the first of a set of mug rugs to match my placemat set. This first one was actually supposed to be a sampler to see if I could make a good square and to test how well I had adapted the float design on the placemat to double weave. The lines of the design could be improved but the size and shape of the finished mug rug is just as I had wanted it to be so this one may be a keeper.

I wove this mug rug using #10 crochet cotton and it is thick enough in double weave to make an effective mug rug. I enjoy doing the twined finish which enables me to use the third color and I quite like the little tasseled ends that the twining produces.

So, each place mat will have its mug rug and I have just warped for the Mexican design one. I am also trying to figure the shortest warp length I can get away with using for these tiny projects.

I have also been warping, measuring, fiddling about and learning some lessons about tension for my chuspa project which I talked about last week. The sample has been made and I will probably get the real project going next week.

Above is the body of the bag warped up with the extension for the pocket.

Warping was easy. The main thing I learned was how even the very slightest variation in tension between the outer sections and the center will be immediately apparent in the weaving. This crochet cotton is particularly unforgiving for this. I will have to call in an extra pair of hands to help tie up the loom bar extensions and get this right next time.

Ha! Now I know that there was a real reason why my two teachers in Potosi set this up together!

There are a few more experiments I have been doing which I will talk about in a future post.

What I spent the rest of my time doing was setting up my tutorial on two-weft double weave here on this blog.

I actually prefer to give this my own name…“embedded double-weave” as there are bands of double-weave embedded in a plain-weave piece.

I consider this an intermediate level technique.

Sometimes it is nice to have bands of warp-faced double-weave patterns embedded in vast fields of plain-woven solid color or stripes. This means that one can have a large textile that is not entirely double-weave and, therefore, not thick and heavy and still be able to enjoy the crisp motifs on their smooth solid color backgrounds which are characteristic of double weave.

If the large expanses of solid color were woven as double weave, the two layers of cloth would not bond and the weaver would produce two distinct layers joined at the edges, in fact, a tube, as can be seen above.

Here are a couple of my “embedded double weave” examples…

The long black and white piece above left is a table runner in this embedded double-weave technique. Only the center band with the Abba Yohanni motif is woven in double weave. It is bordered by large areas of plain-weave. On the right, the Mapuche design is being woven in double-weave with plain-weave beige borders.

And one more…

Sometimes I choose to use this embedded method for narrow bands simply because I like the way it looks.

The plain-weave borders on these bookmarks nicely frame the double-weave patterned area both in color and relief. The llama motif pattern charts are in this post and lettering charts can be found here.

Weavers in Charazani often use this technique on their large carrying cloths while those on Taquile Island use it on their broad waist bands. They use extremely fine thread and are able to weave intricate detail in their double-weave motifs.

Well, I hope that you enjoy the tutorial. It has some video segments which I had posted to my Flickr page a long time ago. I am also going to set up an index page of intermediate level techniques and hope to add to that a video showing the basics of complementary warp pick-up soon.

To finish, this is what Amber in the Ravelry group has been working on…a beautiful double weave band and some supplementary weft patterned bands. She also made a white on white warp float band (on the left of the blue supplementary weft band) which looks great.

Now she is preparing her project for the weave-along. Come and join us!

Ooops! My subscribers will have received a message about a Pattern Chart post. Sorry, the charts are there but I didn’t mean to publish them as a post. They are on a page here.