June 2014 – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – The Boomerang Effect

I am supposed to be in Miami airport right now awaiting my flight back to Bolivia. I have had a wonderful month in Australia and it is time to go to my home (the real home in Bolivia).

Off I went to Sydney airport yesterday to get my flight to the US. I put on a brave face after sad goodbyes to family. But here I sit today back in my brother’s Sydney home…it’s a long story!!

Orange banksia give a warm glow to the bush in mid-winter.

The Boomerang Effect! It is common in Australia when lending someone something, to hand the item over while emphasising that it is “a boomerang”. That is to say, it is expected that the item will return to its owner in the same way that a properly thrown boomerang will.

Well, I am feeling rather boomerang-ish today having bounced from home to airport and back again.

Looking on the bright side, this unexpected turn of events means that I can spend more time with my nephew as well as write a blog post today.

It also means that I can go back to the Blue Mountains tomorrow for the gathering of weavers at Helen’s place in Springwood. Yay! All her floor loom weaving friends will be there in the morning for Show and Tell.. I wasn’t expecting to see any of these weavers again on his trip, yet here I am boomerang-ing back there!

I love the Blue Mountains! I got to spend even more time up there this last week exploring 4wd back roads and doing a bit of hiking through the beautiful Australian bush.

The banksias that we saw that day make me think of the little ridged baubles that I learned to make with a Guild friend the last time I was here in Sydney…

We walked to lookouts with lovely over Lake Burragorang.

Perched on the end of that rock, I felt like I was sitting in the tree tops…

The real winter suddenly set in and it was cold!

Last weekend it was still warm enough to take things outside for a bit of warping. I had a group over to my brother’s home for two days of Andean Pebble Weave. We enjoyed the chance to stretch our legs in the fresh air while winding some more warps for sampling and designing.

Kelcie gets a new band started with palin pebble weave. — Kelcie gets a new band started with plain pebble weave.

The group comprised Kelcie and Jen, who had woven with me last November, Pam, whom I have known online for years and who had come over from southern New Zealand (Sydney weather was relatively balmy for her!) and father Kyriakos who came up from the monastery in Bombala.

We wove together for two days.

Father Kyriakos, as you may know from having seen his work in previous blog posts, had more than just dabbled in Andean Pebble Weave and has been designing and weaving his own pebble weave patterns. I am so glad he came. We have been corresponding for some time and I really wanted to meet him as well as see his projects “in person”. He said that…While your videos have always been a big help and enabled me to do as much as I have so far, having personal demonstrations and answers to my own questions has already helped me to be more efficient and have more understanding of what this weaving is about.

Above,you can see his partly woven backstrap from a photo that he sent me some time ago. The design is one that Julia had created and father Kyriakos added his own elements to it at start and finish. He brought the finished piece along to Sydney to show along with narrower and samples and examples of his own “sotis” work of East Timor that he had studied on floor looms with Australian weaver Kay Faulkner.

Kelcie had brought examples of East Timorese weaving when we had woven together last year…

Father Kyriakos also brought a Latvian belt, woven using a supplemental-warp technique, that a friend had bought in Latvia and brought back for him. I have seen plenty of pictures of these but never one “in person”…

Jen brought in pieces that she had bought on a trip to Peru where she had studied tapestry techniques with Maximo Laura. This is a striking embroidered belt that had been made for the tourist market in Arequipa…

I love the color ideas that these pieces give…I would never think to combine those colors!

Father Kyriakos has been working on and refining a kangaroo motif using the Andean Pebble Weave structure for some time. He also brought along his progress with that to share and I thought that it would make a nice project as a souvenir of my Australian vsit.
One of the tasks that I had set myself for this trip was to investigate the kind of cotton that is available in Sydney stores that would be suitable for warp-faced weaving on backstrap looms. I bought what is labeled as “4-ply” thread at Lincraft. I was told that the name 4-ply in Australia actually refers to the size of the thread rather than to the number of plied strands. In the USA any weight of yarn could comprise four plied strands. It’s a little confusing! I also bought 8-ply versions of this cotton thread at Spotlight and I will give report on this and other available thread in future blog posts.
So, here is the “Kyriakos Kangaroo” woven by me using the Lincraft 4-ply…

Father Kyriakos says that he still has some refinements in mind. I played around a bit with the mountains under the kangaroo. They made me think of the southern highlands…the “Australian Alps”…where I had lived and worked for many years.Kangaroos could be spotted now and then on the drive up to the ski fields.

The Lincraft thread is not mercerized but is fairly tightly twisted. It will pill if the heddles are wrenched about and needs to be handled with care. I really like the way it feels. Lincraft has a pretty good range of colors on its shelves.

I set this band up in a very “barefoot” manner.I had already packed all my backstrap weaving gear away and did not feel like fishing out my warping stakes and loom bars.

I warped around my index finger and big toe as my Bolivan weaving teacher, Maxima, does. This is probably the widest thing I have warped this way and, as the threads piled up around my finger, I figured that I was bound to have some tension issues. As it turns out, I didn’t!

When it came time to weave, you can see, I only got out my sword and used pencils for cross sticks and loom bars. A piece of string is my backstrap. The front beam is a pen onto which I attached rubber bands so that the “backstrap” would not slip off. It was pretty comfortable!

Normally, I would use heddles spread along a stick for a piece of this width but I chose to just tie them in a bunch rather than to search for more pencils.

Someone else who is getting into barefoot weaving is my student, Emerald. You may remember that I stayed with Emerald in her home in Ultimo a couple of weeks ago and wove with her. One of the things we did was the intermesh technique and, although she has a nice set up for backstrap weaving in her living room, she decided to try to include her entire body in the loom…

There are chopsticks and a pencil in her set-up. She also finished off a short and narrow pebble weave band barefoot. This was an exercise in weaving without a chart.

In the meantime, in other parts of the world, Diane, one of the ladies who wove with me when I visited Yale university, was inspired enough to apply for a grant to go and weave in Guatemala during her summer break. My friend Barbara, who is in contact with her, sent me this picture of something Diane wove with her Guatemalan teachers…

Cheryl, who wove with me last spring, is sampling for a camera strap project…

And now… a wee favor to ask of all of you. You may have noticed that I have sometimes mentioned my nephew here in past blog posts and the fact that he is a triathlete. I am staying with him now in Sydney and get to watch his rigorous training schedule. He is up and out and swimming laps or biking and then getting home before I can even get out of bed.

During the Ravellenic Games that ran alongside the Winter Olympics this year, I wove one of his favorite inspirational sports quotes into a silk bookmark for him..

I guess that I haven’t had much of a chance to be a big part of his life. After seeing him a few times in his very early months and years, I headed off to live in South America. I returned for a visit when he was 3 during which I watched Jurassic Park with him and he offered to sit by me in case I got scared. I didn’t see him again until he was 12. He wrote to me when he was 8 to ask me if I lived in a hut in the jungle. Fortunately, I visited Australia more often when he was in his teens and the internet kept us in good touch. He taught me to juggle and we did a great trip, just the two of us, to Ayers Rock in 2006.

Now he is a traithlete studying to be a teacher (like me!) and will be representing Australia in the ITU World Championships in Weihai, China in September. He took part in ITU World Championships in the USA and Spain winning the silver medal in his age group in both. It was quite a blow when he was injured for the championships in France last year. So…he is going for gold this time…his last amateur event before turning pro.

His trip to China, as with all the other trips to the World Championships, must be self- funded and he is looking for sponsors. What I would ask you to do for me, as a big favor, please…. is simply to go over to Facebook and “like” his page. More “likes” will show potential sponsors that he has the loyalty of a good-sized audience and could make all the difference.

I haven’t told him I am doing this and would love to surprise him with a small boost to his fan page tomorrow. I hope that you can take a moment to help out.

And now to see if I can make it on a flight out soon….wish me luck!

Backstrap Weaving – Vivid!

VIVID is the name of an annual festival of lights, music and entertainment that took place in Sydney at the end of May just in time for my visit. Colorful images are projected onto buildings and landmarks around Sydney harbour and the city center. My brother captured some of them with his camera when we went together to the festival one night….

The white sails of the famous Sydney Opera House were transformed to an amazing piece of crystal glowing in the dark…

And then adorned with butterflies…

I don’t know how to describe this next one!

Other buildings along the waterfront were also used as giant screens onto which fantastic slithering images were projected…

I have been enjoying a variety of landscapes and weather here in Sydney from the city to the country. I had a day out in the pretty rolling hills just west of Sydney…

And a hike in the bush. It was tshirt weather in the middle of winter…

I got rugged up on a cooler day for a trip to the city, the waterfront and Chinatown with my weaving friend, Emerald…

Emerald and her family are from Burma and they invited me to come and stay with them in Sydney’s inner city for a couple of days of weaving. I had forgotten how exciting it is being there right in the heart of all that inner city action. Emerald has distant memories of having taken some weaving lessons in her younger days in Burma. Now she wants to learn more about the backstrap loom and the weaving culture of her homeland.

She showed me her beautiful collection of longyi, the long pieces of fabric that are worn by both men and women in Myanmar. They are wrapped about the lower half of the body. Some of these pieces were woven on floor looms but there are still backstrap weavers to be found in certain parts of the country.

The Wikipedia page on the longyi includes this saying…

Men who cannot read are like the blind; women who cannot weave are like the cripple

—an old Burmese saying at a time when every household had a handloom and the womenfolk wove all the longyis for the family.

VIVID colors against black….

We warped and set up her backstrap loom for an Andean Pebble Weave project. Emerald has placed hooks into the wall of her home and has created a very nice backstrap weaving space.

I feel as happy as she looks here when I am seated in front of a fresh warp! Now it is time to get down to work and pick up the pebble sheds and create the string heddles….

A lovely green warp for a lady named Emerald. I showed her how to operate the two sets of heddles on this wide warp and now she is all set up to weave a cell phone pouch and whatever else she may be able to squeeze out of this warp. Emerald first contacted me via this blog. You may have read her enthusiastic comments here. Then we became friends on Facebook. I wasn’t able to meet with her when I visited Australia last year but it worked out this time and we had two fun days together.

Emerald showed me the book that she recently bought on Sazigyo ,by Ralph Isaacs. Sazigyo are very fine tablet-woven bands from Burma which were used to wrap palm leaf manuscripts. The book comes with its own silk tablet-woven book mark.

Images and lines of text are woven into the tapes themselves. This Facebook page contains many images of these woven tapes.

Emerald is very excited about learning about these and now wants to study tablet weaving so that she can also create bands of woven text in her native language.

It was a very educational experience being with Emerald! She also told me about Inle Lake in Burma where yarn is spun from lotus stems and woven into cloth.

Julie Hall has written a very interesting and image-packed blog post about her visit to Inle Lake and I appreciate her having given me permission to use some of her images here…

Textile weavings made from lotus and silk, a specialty of Inle Lake, by Koh Than Laing — Lotus flower on Inle Lake…image by Julie Hall used with her permission.

xxxxx — Pulling apart a group of cut lotus stems to extract fiber for spinning…image by Juile Hall used with her permission.

The following video from this page shows a small part of the process…

My weaving friend, Wendy Garrity, has also written about a visit to Inle Lake and includes images and video on her blog.

Meanwhile, back at my brother’s place, vivid colors are all around with evening visits by flocks of lorikeets to the backyard accompanied by the screeches of the sulphur crested cockatoos and laughter of the kookaburras at dusk…

I met with weavers up in Springwood in the Blue Mountains in a lovely bushland setting for a weekend of backstrap weaving in the home of Helen Halpin, editor of the Weavers Forum newsletter. Last weekend I wove with folks in a pretty homestead on the suburban outskirts in front of fields of grazing sheep.

Part of theVirginia Farm group getting serious about pebble weave! — Part of the group getting very serious about pebble weave!

The second day was cold, blustery and very wintry. We could hear owners Jenny and Phil’s flock of sheep bleating outside but little did we know that two little black lambs were being born as we wove away warm and cosy indoors..

The ladies who wove with me are part of a group whose name forms the fun acronym “EWES”. It stands for Epping Weavers Embroiderers and Spinners. It really seems like an extremely dynamic group. Sydney folk who read my blog might want to join. Here’s Brenda wearing a handknit sweater and her inkle woven EWES lanyard…

Images of warmth and vivid colors have been arriving in my inbox from the other side of the world. Snuggled up under a blanket with a miniature poodle snoozing on my lap, I look at my friend Janet’s sister’s grandkids learning backstrap weaving in bikinis in summery USA. One of Janet’s own backstrap woven guitar straps, made from her own handspun, lies on the ground between the girls providing plenty of inspiration.

Larisa, who is Russian but now lives in the UK, sent me a picture of a fabulous stole that she wove on a backstrap loom…such vivid colors and wonderful pick-up work!…

The image she sent me is of a low resolution and I hope she sends me a larger one soon so that we can all better appreciate the detailed pick-up in this beautiful piece of work.

Weavers who hung out with me on my recent US visit have been busy weaving in their summer months.

They are happy to be able to enjoy the portability of the backstrap loom which enables them to easily weave outdoors or even in the front seat of the car!

Cheryl has a ”loom with a view” at her lake house. She is weaving pebble weave “hugs and kisses”.

I don’t know where Elizabeth was going but she took her loom on the road anchoring the warp in the glove compartment of the car…

Anne has been working on her Andean Pebble Weave and is making great progress…

Charlotte launched herself into a new band challenging herself to some mental gymnastics handling the color changes in the three columns of motifs. This is the same motif that appears on yurt bands of Central Asia. In Central Asia it is woven using a single-faced structure. Charlotte is using a complementary-warp structure . This means that her band is double-faced.

Julia found a good use for a pebble weave band that she had created over a year ago. She made a bag for her sister’s flute. As is always the way with Julia’s work, it has been woven and put together beautifully.

Janet, who wove with me last year, has become an active member of the Ravelry group and has been sharing her latest experiments with supplementary-weft patterning. Sheila is a new member of the group and bought a Gilmore Wave loom for her studies of Andean Pebble Weave. She is working on adding extra string heddles to this two-shaft loom so that she can weave the structure as a semi loom-controlled one as I was taught to in Peru. It is much easier to operate the two sets of string heddles using a backstrap loom which enables you to freely and easily adjust tension on the warp with spontaneous body movements. Sheila is working with a ”fixed tension” loom which means that she needs to apply other strategies to achieve consistently clean sheds with her string heddles. It looks like she is succeeding!

Above, you can see the two sets of string heddles which Sheila is using along with the loom’s own two shafts. She has unrolled her weaving for the picture. When she is weaving, the two sets of string heddles are positioned further away from the shafts than they are in this picture.

She is weaving one of the knotwork designs that I have charted in my second book. The Andean Pebble Weave structure can be used for motifs not found in the Andes. Basically, any pattern that comprises diagonal lines can be adapted to this technique. A part of my second book is devoted to this idea and I show how motifs from various non-Andean cultures can be adapted to the Andean Pebble Weave structure.

I will leave you for now with some more VIVID colors…images of some very exotic neck pieces that I recently saw on Facebook. These have been created via a collaboration of three Peruvian textile artists, one of whom is tapestry weaver Maximo Laura. VIVID! You will probably recognize his contribution if you are at all familiar with his work. My backstrap weaving friend, Dorothy, is going to study tapestry weaving with him in Peru soon! According to the Facebook post, these artworks will be sold via the Puchka Peru website.

My visit to Australia continues….I have a group of friends coming over to my brother’s place this week to weave and then I will head back to Bolivia shortly thereafter as my brother and wife will be taking off to Ayers Rock on their motorbike. Maybe I will squeeze in one more blog post before I leave….