March 2015 – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Where are you?

I’ve been getting emails and messages these last few days with a common question….WHERE ARE YOU???? Yes, I have missed a few blog posts, as I often do when I am away from home, and so here I am attepting to squeeze in a quick update.

I must warn you that there is not a whole lot of weaving related content in this post. I am, after all, simply attempting to answer the ”’Where are you?” question and I will save all the stories about new friends and fun people I have met along the way and the inevitable fibery tales for another post, if you don’t mind.

Right now, I am in the vicinity of this….

This is the view from my window on my way to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After having spent six days in Florida, which had been downright refreshing after the brutal heat and humidity of the Santa Cruz summer, I had almost forgotten that yes, the USA was exiting a hard winter and snow was to be expected.

I had been looking at the small, odd and widely scattered patches of white from the plane window as we left Newark thinking that they might be salt lakes (!) and then remembered as we drew closer to Boston, where the white patches grew and started to merge one into the other, that Massachusetts had experienced record-breaking snowfalls this winter….duh!

I spent a weekend in New York city. Ah, ”if I can make it there”…..! :-)I was excited to be staying on the 15th floor of an apartment building in Manhattan with glimpses from my bedroom window of the Manhattan Bridge and the river. It was cold outside. I felt quite the silly tourist as I headed out to meet weavers wrapped in a scarf and clad in my friend’s long, well-padded winter coat but with my bare toes exposed to the elements in sandals.

Picture by Sally Ogren at the guild meeting…indoors… warm, toasty and welcoming.

And just a week before this I was here, in an area that my friend, Berna, nostalgically calls ”old Florida”….a place where old oak trees dripping with Spanish moss line beautiful Lake Yale…

This was the venue for the annual Florida Tropical Weavers Guild Conference.

Strolling the lake shore in the cool, soft, early hours of the morning was my favorite way to start the days that were, in typical conference style, crammed with activity. It gave me time to think and get my head together before approaching a day of weaving.

And whenever I got the feeling that I wasn’t quite alone out there, I was usually right…

And then the sun would make its glorious appearance, I would feel its heat and it would be time to head to breakfast and get charged with the energy and excitement of all my fellow weavers heading off to refine tapestry weaving skills, learn about the Quigley structure, study boundweave, dye skeins in multiple colors and play with cashmere…just to name a few of the workshop options that were on offer.

Well, okay, I will show you one textile thing before I go. I made some cuffs and have been wearing these while weaving. When attention is focused on what my hands are doing in amongst the warp threads, it is nice to have some prettiness on my wrists. I am really pleased with these. They are all fastened with snaps. You might remember that the brown one was a four-selvedge experiment and so it does not have any raw edges to deal with. The others are woven with fine thread with three selevedges and I was able to turn the one raw edge over and hem it without creating excessive bulk.

I definitely want to make more of these and have been inspired to make some very colorful ones by something that one of my weaving friends showed me. You will have to wait until the next post to see that.

So now you know where I am. As to what exactly I have been doing and what I have seen, there is too much to tell right now! It’s time to get ready for a fun day of weaving tomorrow. See you soon.

Backstrap Weaving – Tying Up Loose Ends

It will be just a short post this week as I tie up loose ends on projects and get ready to travel.

There are buttons to be sewn on cuffs, warp-ends to be braided on key fobs, books to be glued and weaving to be finished. I need to break down the two extra weaving stations that sprouted and grew during this latest homestay of mine…the ones in the living room and kitchen… which were needed for keeping up with a weave-along while I worked on my usual large projects in the bedroom. I must clear away the various project piles with their balls of yarn, books with colored fingers of protruding Post-it notes, sketches and pattern charts so that all can be covered and kept dust-free in my absence.

The first thing I attacked was the journal-cover project. Once the weaving was done, the scary part, which involved gluing the cloth to the book covers, had to be faced. Fortunately, I had one rejected book cover piece which served as test fabric for the glue. You can see the rejected piece in the upper corner of the picture above. Would the glue soak through the cloth and appear as an ugly stain on the upper face? It didn’t! Now I can add a zipper to that test piece and turn it into a little pouch.

You can see how I turned the end of the weaving over to the inside of the covers. The piece of cloth in the picture is still on the metal rod which I used to create a selvedge. I glued the fabric there and then used colored paper to completely cover the inside. Precisely positioning that colored paper while using a contact glue was probably the hardest part of the whole process. I also used a line of glue along the point where the book cover bends to open.

I bought another journal and made a fourth cover. You can see the recipients’ initials on the spines. It is fun discovering that you can make recognizable letters with so few threads in such little space.

Here’s the fourth one set up and ready to go. I love seeing a fresh warp like this stretched out in front of me.

I used a motif inspired by Guaraní textiles with snakes and a star…

Then I settled into finishing the third panel in the Bird series with its ikat bird shapes filled in with three-color pebble weave. That was followed by a rather tedious session of sewing black on black as I lined the irregular edges of the ikat shapes with cross-knit looping…

These panels really fall into the category of ”samples” as I used them to learn much about tying warps for ikat. In the first panel, the dye leaked a lot under the ties, staining the threads within, which gave a surprisingly attractive softened look to the motif, especially around the edges, once the pick-up patterning had been finished. In the third panel, my tying skills had improved and the ikat shape had crisp, sharp outlines with the white threads within the ties completely untouched by dye. The bird shape in the third panel is brilliantly white as a result and leaves me wondering in the end which ”look” I actually prefer.

Wth this experience behind me, I shall have a lot of time in my travels to ponder the next ikat project that I want to start on my return. The aim has always been to create flowing curved shapes in ikat rather than the rigid block-like ones in the Bird samples. I want to fill beautiful curved shapes with pick-up patterns. I have two such shapes in mind and I will, no doubt, stumble across something while I am away that will inspire a third.

As you can see, the three panels above are still on their looms. So, I am not completely finished with this project. I have yet to decide how exactly I want to finish them in terms of weft twining, fringe or braids. Should I introduce some red in the first two panels? I will launch myself into that when I return.

Backstrap Weaving – Books and Bands

Last week I had my hands on the gorgeous handspun wool bands from the weavers of Cochabamba. I was enjoying all the beautiful warm tones the weavers had obtained from dyeing with leaves, flowers and cochineal. I admired the different textures in the cloth that the tight twist in the yarn had created.

This week, I moved to the fresh, cool, blue of indigo-dyed fine cotton from Guatemala….

The variation in tone in the thread gives my woven fabric a lovely ‘rustic’ streaked look, almost like faded blue jeans. This is to be the cover for a journal that I bought to give as a gift for a friend. Her initials will sit on the spine of the book. I enjoy doing the pick-up for supplementary-weft inlay especially when using fine thread and I love weaving the warp-faced plain- weave base for the patterning. The back cover will not have patterns and will be very fast to weave. Doing plain weave with such lovely thread and in such a gorgeous color is a joy. I am using a coil rod as part of my set-up to prevent corrugation. You can see the thin coil rod in the picture beyond the cross sticks.

Getting the width exactly right was the challenge and I was happy to have used the Guatemalan cotton in the Key Fob Weave-Along that we ran in the Backstrap Weaving Group on Ravelry recently. The blue and wheat-colored fobs gave me samples from which to make my width calculations. I normally wouldn’t completely trust information from such tiny samples but I was lucky this time and the book covers turned out to be the perfect width.

I may even turn the key fob samples into matching book marks for these small journals. The covers are simply sitting on the books for the time being. The ends of the cloth have been turned to the inside and I will glue them there and then cover the inside with some pretty paper or card. I may have to also apply a line of glue next to the spine where the book cover bends to open. Tomorrow I shall go shopping for paper and more books because I am having a lot of fun making these.

The center red motif below the flower head is an adaptation of a pattern that an online friend in Greece wove and showed me. It is fun charting the tiny initials to fit on the small space on the spine.

Here is a third one on the loom….

Apart from that, I got caught up a little in the recent interest in woven cuffs that emerged from the Key Fob WAL. It seems like a good natural progression…projects of similar length and just a little wider an lots of room for creativity with different kinds of finishes and closures.

I made the silk Andean Pebble Weave band that I wove recently into a cuff. Some people like to make the closure of the cuff a prominent feature using a pretty button or other kind of clasp. I didn’t as my cuff is heavily patterned. I just overlapped the ends and secured them with press studs. The press studs, which are kind of ugly, get hidden under the overlapped ends. I used 60/2 silk which made a very fine band. This meant that turning and hemming the end did not create much bulk. One end has a selvedge and didn’t need hemming.

Then I wove a cuff experiment in wool. I wanted to make a piece with four selvedges and see how much length would be lost to take up.

I would like to make a fairly plain wool cuff with four selvedges so that I won’t have a raw edge with unwoven warp-ends to have to deal with….just a fairly plain band with a large button and maybe a tubular edging for decoration. I warped a band of 7 1/2 inches and only lost 1/2 inch in take up. I couldn’t resist throwing in a little motif along the way just for fun. So, this finished band gives me the information about take-up that I will need for planning the next one.

I will most likely make the celtic knot band, on the left, which has just been sitting around here for ages, into a wristlet too.

Now we are into March and the Key Fob Weave-Along is coming to its end. People are moving on to other projects and other looms or picking up backstrap things that they had put aside when the WAL began.

Gwen learned a lot about using stripes, spots and bars in her patterns in the Key Fob WAL and used that knowledge to go on to weave a striking guitar strap on her backstrap loom…

If you are wondering about the leather ends and buckles that she used, check out the ad for ASpinnerWeaver on the side bar of my blog or on the RESOURCES page. My friend Annie’s husband makes them in black and brown.

Half-basket weave ground weave with patterns created with black supplemental warp threads...by Julia — Half basket-weave ground weave with patterns created with black supplemental- warp threads…by Julia

Another exciting thing that came out of the WAL is fresh interest in the supplemental-warp structure which has had us looking, thanks to Catharina, at patterns of Estonia and northern Europe.

We have also been comparing the techniques of the supplemental-warp patterning that I was taught in Peru and Bolivia with those that I learned in highland Ecuador.

The timing couldn’t be more perfect as I have just begun corresponding with a lady in Canada who contacted me via Facebook. She went to Colombia a year ago and has been sharing information about the suppementary-warp structure and how it is used there.

I will try to gather everything and write about all that next week.