February 2016 – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Golden Dreams

My friend Dorinda in Cochabamba wrote to tell me that my annual order of woven bands from the weaving co-op has been mailed to me….exciting! I only just managed to get myself a new P.O Box in time for this delivery. The timing is nice for the weavers as well, as money from this order will help mothers with the purchase of items on that long list of school supplies for the new school year that recently started.

Here are some of the colorful bands I have bought from the weavers via Dorinda in past years…

I had asked the weavers to include cochineal red in many of the bands and Dorinda posted pictures in one of her latest reports on her PAZA Bolivia website of the most recent dye day. I see lots of cochineal dyed yarn, some lovely greens and yellow….(oops, someone got caught with his pants down!)

Picture courtesy of Dorinda Dutcher PAZA Bolivia — Pictures courtesy of Dorinda Dutcher PAZA Bolivia.

Here are Maxima and other weavers in the cooperative thinking about color order and preparing to wind a warp for one of the bands. Maxima’s warping partner sits at the opposite end of the frame. The balls of yarn will be rolled back and forth between these two ladies. After installing the shed rod and heddles, the warp will be transferred to the traditional leaning vertical loom.

Some of the teenagers, under Maxima’s guidance, are weaving narrow bands which are sewn into yoga mat straps. Here is a basket of straps with their lovely pebble weave patterns which was ordered by a visitor to be taken to the USA…

Dorinda’s posts are always fascinating. Please, head to her site for more stories about her weaver friends and the work they do.

I took the opportunity when I caught Dorinda online to ask her about the decorative sewing that Maxima uses to join the panels for her carrying cloths, or awayos.

I was wondering if weavers in Cochabamba use the same name for the joins as that used in northern Potosi…siray. Maxima gave Dorinda the Spanish word costura which simply means seam. After I expressed my surprise at the fact that Maxima wasn’t using a word in her mother tongue of Quechua, Dorinda asked again and was told siray. Maxima had simply translated it to Spanish knowing that Dorinda wouldn’t understand the Quechua word. However, Maxima doesn’t have different names for the different kinds of stitches, unlike the weavers in northern Potosi.

Here are a couple of decorative siray on two new awayos that Maxima wove. This first piece shows patterning in warp-faced double weave.

The patterning in this next piece is in the pebble weave structure…

Having warp stripes at the edge of the cloth is a wonderful way to help guide the placement of the stitches and I plan to include stripes like this in my next wool piece. Just eye-balling the spacing is really hard! However, it doesn’t seem like Maxima places that much importance on having all the shapes in alignment. I like the sort of free spirit the work shows. She changes thread color when she runs out and is not concerned about only doing so at the start of a new shape or about having an equal number of triangles in each color. I am sure that there is little or no embroidery thread wasted that way.

I am about to wind the warp for my next set of wool panels and must remember to include those stripes. I wrote a couple of weeks ago that I was planning on winding that warp very soon. I had mapped out the colors and chosen my patterns. Luckily I didn’t go ahead with it as that was Version 1. I have since moved on to Version 4 and am still not quite sure that I have it right.

I have all the time in the world to ponder that as my yellow scarf is now off the loom and I am not weaving. However, my sticks are calling out for a new project.

Here’s the scarf still on the loom with various tools that I used to create it….two shuttles: one for the main yellow weft and one for the cream supplemental weft, one of the two long swords that I used, a pick-up stick for the flower patterns and a small sword for extra beating in certain spots. Because I wove this in plain weave, I also used a coil rod.

It was an 86” warp but I stopped at 65” of fabric. Rather than squeezing in some additional inches I decided to stop. I did not want to be trying to create those final bands of supplementary-weft patterning while being very close to the end of the warp. There is a tendency to apply too much tension when there is little space left in which to work. That can cause elongated motifs and I really wanted the motifs at both ends to have the same proportions. That was a little hard to monitor with the other end of the fabric being rolled up and out of view.

In recent posts I mentioned that this scarf fabric was a bit on the stiff side on the loom. I was really looking forward to washing and pressing it and watching and feeling the silk transform. Here is a bit of the fabric before washing…

I love how, after washing and pressing, the supplementary-weft motifs sort of melt into the cloth. They lose the appearance of having been created with individual strands of silk and look more like they have been painted on the fabric.

I pressed it while damp and, as the moisture slowly lifted from the cloth, I could feel the fabric softening, relaxing and loosening up…magic! I am really pleased with this project. The scarf feels wonderful.

It’s funny thinking back to the start of this project. I kept trying to come up with ways to hide the yellow because I felt the color was too strong. I wanted to cover the scarf with cream supplementary weft and just let the yellow peak through in places. I am glad I didn’t go ahead with that plan.

When I finished winding the warp, I was close to abandoning this project. I had come up with a weird improvised windy warping path so that I could get the 86” of length. It was not a path to which I was accustomed and I wandered off it at various times. So, there were lots of things to be fixed and adjusted once I had taken the warp off the stakes and that always spells trouble for me. I rolled the warp in paper and left it over night. I didn’t want to look at it anymore. I even considered undoing the whole thing…all 860 ends… and starting again but knew it would end up a mess. Somehow, things looked different in the morning. I made the adjustments, set up the warp and just started weaving.

An online weaving friend commented that it is surely not cold enough in Santa Cruz Bolivia for me to need such a scarf and that I should send it to her in Canada. Well, she is right about that. It very rarely gets cold enough for scarves here. However, I have a dream of ending up back in Australia one of these years and living in a place called the Blue Mountains where I used to hike and climb a lot in my younger days. It is certainly cold enough there. I like to think of these things I am creating as items for a ”hope chest” for that dream to come true. Maybe I should start knitting socks too. I have always been envious of those.

In the meantime, I travel a lot and this scarf will certainly be worn even if it is just draped over my shoulders for decoration.

Now I can give my full attention to the wool warp. Let’s see how many more versions occur to me before I actually start warping and if I can have it set up and underway before the next blog post. Until then…..

Backstrap Weaving – Length!

LENGTH!

Finally, I am doing something with the third of my three current weaving goals: 1. go wider, 2. use finer materials and 3. go longer. I have been working this week on the long warp… the yellow 60/2 silk scarf.

After finishing the bands of supplementary-weft patterns at the start which had me sitting in the same spot for days, I am now on to the faster mostly plain-weave part. I slow down every now and then to add a little flower motif with silk supplemental weft.

Sometimes, it is a solid flower, like the single flower you can see above, and sometimes an outlined one. This does not have me sitting still for long. There is a regular need to sometimes move forward as I roll up the woven cloth and then move back as I unroll the unwoven warp from the far end. The cushion on which I sit is glued to a polished piece of wood which allows me to dig my heels into the floor and slide myself forward and back as needed. It’s a lot easier than having to get up and push that cushion across the rug or wiggle it forward or back. It also allows me to make finer adjustments while seated.

I used sheets of paper to roll the unwoven warp to keep everything neat and even. It’s a lot of fun unrolling the warp from the far end and having one of the sheets of paper drop out…progress! I then use that same sheet of paper between the layers of rolled woven cloth. I don’t know if you ever played ”pass the parcel” as a kid at birthday parties. It reminds me of that. Each time I unroll, it’s like removing one layer of the wrapping on the parcel only to find that there are still more layers underneath.

If I had a nice grassy backyard in which a sturdy stake could be implanted, I would enjoy sitting outside in some shade and having my warp stretched out to its full length…

However, I do find there are certain advantages to having the unwoven warp rolled up. I think that it is easier for me to maintain a consistent tension on the warp if I am always seated at more or less the same distance from the end of the loom.

Backstrap weavers who use circular warps are able to do that. They weave around the circle of warp without having to change in any major way their seated position. My teacher, below, can always be seated the same distance from the wall and brace her feet against a wooden block. You can see how her finished woven piece is circular.

I can’t resist unrolling my work all the way every now and then to see how it is going and to make sure that the scattered effect of the flower motifs is working.

There will be a small celebration when the final piece of paper drops off the end beam and I can see the end of the warp. But, I know that event will mean that soon I will be slowing down to a crawl to duplicate the bands of patterning that I wove at the beginning of the piece. I have managed to be disciplined, not measure, and keep the motifs truly scattered.

The cloth is a little on the stiff side now but I know, having worked with this 60/2 silk before in the teal bandana at left, that it will soften beautifully after wet-finishing and pressing. The sheen of the silk will be more obvious then too.

The patterns I chose for the bands are loosely based on those I saw on a Mexican rebozo, or shawl. I made quite a few changes to the original to include my own flower motif. My weaving friend, Franco, shared a lovely video of a parade of Mexican rebozos…the variety is astounding and I love the ways the models wear them. There is a white one and a black one there that I am totally in love with!

My erratic internet can handle this video and so I am sure that you will all be able to enjoy it….Thanks, Franco!

One day I will have a warp for a rebozo on my backstrap loom.

While on the topic of length, I guess the longest pieces of warp-faced weaving I have seen are the Central Asian yurt bands. My friend Lisa owns one and hers is 48 feet long….makes my scarf length seem ridiculous!

Here it is wrapped around her yurt…how gorgeous!

They are not woven on backstrap looms. This is the loom set-up in Kyrgyzstan posted on the site of Little Foot Yurts…

The heddle stick is attached to the tripod which keeps it permanently raised. We saw a similar system being used by a Turkish weaver in a video I shared here recently. The shed rod is a flat piece of wood which is most likely turned on its side when needed. At the weaving line you can also see a small stick holding the warp threads that will float to make the pattern.

Here’s another beauty that my friend Yonat and I found in a store in California when we were out and about. We can only imagine how long it is.

I got pretty excited the first time I encountered these pieces via my friend Lisa online. I thought…Wow, the Andean Pebble Weave structure in Central Asia! But, on closer inspection, I could see that it wasn’t the same structure. It is not a complementary-warp structure at all. Complementary-warp weaves have two structurally identical faces. The colors are reversed on the two sides of the cloth as you can see in my piece below.

I call the structure that is used to create the yurt bands, Simple Warp Floats…this my dull structural name for it. ”Simple” because the floats appear on only one face. In Kyrgyzstan it is known as terme.

You can see how different the two faces look in this picture of a piece I wove replicating some yurt band motifs. The face on the left is the ‘good” face. The face on the right has spaces where the black weft is exposed. You can also see this difference in the first picture of Lisa’s rolled up band above.The same motifs can be easily woven as double-faced ones but they are not woven that way traditionally.

I made this piece into a case for my small laptop…

This became a favorite structure of mine for a while. Yurt band motifs adorn my favorite belt…

I went a bit wider too and made a zippered pouch…

…but I’ll never go as long as those yurt bands!

It was even more exciting to find that the structure is used here in South America, in the tropical lowlands of Peru, for example. I have seen it on pieces from Iran and Mexico as well. These were inspiration for a set of place mats I wove using this Simple Warp Float structure.It’s all based on a basic warp of two colors. One shed holds all the light threads and one shed all the dark. If woven as plain weave, you would produce a band of dark and light horizontal bars. You could then choose to create three-span floats with certain light threads in order to make a pattern. Or, you could do the same with just the dark threads. Or, you can alternate as seen at right….one motif with dark floats followed by another with light floats The horizontal bars act as a sort of background.

Below, you can see a variety of patterns on a belt from Aguacatan, Guatemala. This is a very long piece for a belt…ten feet. The dark and light floats are sometimes used together within one motif. The horizontal bars, again, act as a sort of background to the motifs. The bars really dominate in this belt.
In this next band that I wove a long time ago, dark and light warp-floats working together form the motif on a base of horizontal bars…

You can also choose to float threads in a way that has the horizontal bars appearing to be part of the design itself rather than just being a ”background”. This is a piece I wove after returning from Ecuador where I had stayed with cotton weavers who use this structure in their work. Only the dark threads are forming floats in this piece and, to me, it feels like the horizontal bars are forming their own pattern of large ‘X’s.

And then, you can go all the way and create so many floats with both colors that you completely cover the horizontal bars as in my next example….

This is the terme structure that is used to create the yurt bands I showed. I used it to weave this place mat with a motif from the Peruvian tropical lowlands.

You can see a picture of a weaver in Kyrgyzstan (from the Little Foot Yurts site) saving the dark warp threads on a small sword. These are the threads that will float to form the pattern.

More information on these structures can be found in my tutorials here, here and here. I will be transferring this information to my Structures and Terminology page soon.

I think I was wise to choose a project that included lots of plain weave for my first venture into this kind of length in backstrap weaving. There are times when I am happily zooming along….opening a shed, beating, passing the weft and so on….and only slowing down to weave a little flower, the pattern for which I have by now memorized. I can imagine the time and concentration required to weave those 48-foot long yurt bands with all that pick-up every single step of the way! I wonder how many such bands a weaver in Kyrgyzstan makes in lifetime.

Here are some projects from weaving friends…

Two Andean Pebble Weave projects from two very talented Julias…

Julia T wove the wall hanging at left. It has a mixture of motifs from my books and those of her own. The maze pattern is her own and she has cleverly combined a traditional Andean pattern with her own ideas. The piece recalls time she spent with a team of friends creating a labyrinth in a park surrounded by beautiful bird-laden Australian bush. Julia W’s piece is her adaptation of a Japanese sashiko embroidery sayagata motif to the Andean Pebble Weave structure. The gold twining, hanger and stripes are such lovely touches. She has done several beautiful pieces inspired by Japanese embroidery patterns which she cleverly adapts to Andean Pebble Weave.

Both Julias came up with clever ways to hang their pieces.

Julia W’s wrapped ring and bamboo stick are beautiful in their simplicity. She has created two very different faces by having not only the pebble weave but also the intermesh borders in reversed colors. This way, the piece can be hung on either a dark or light-colored wall. Julia T wove a stick into the last few inches of her weaving so that she can change the face that is being displayed simply by flipping the end and fringe. That’s the thing with these double-faced structures. You want to be able to enjoy both beautiful faces.

And then, there are some bands. Marieke has been working with the double weave technique from this tutorial. I learned it as a two-shed technique which means that it can be easily adapted to the inkle loom on which Marieke prefers to work. Kathy and I got to weave together a couple of years ago and she continues to enjoy Andean Pebble Weave on a backstrap loom using patterns from my books. I love her jolly ”saver cord” but mostly, I love the fact that she is using one. Not everyone falls in love with it as I have.

I could see from my stats that there were an enormous amount of hits on my link to the site with the triangle purse tutorial last week. I hope that many of you go ahead and make one and show me the results. The link to the tutorial along with other goodies can be found on my RESOURCES page.

So, it’s back to my long project. I think there are only two more pieces of paper left on my rolled-up warp. I can’t wait to wash and press the piece and feel its liquid slinkiness slide through my hands.

Backstrap Weaving – A Potpourri of Structures

Phew! I didn’t think I would get this post out today. The internet was out for most of the day… on again but really painfully slow, then off again. I have started lifting weights while I wait for pages to load. How many bicep curls can I do while waiting? I finally gave up and wove.

It has come back to life again this evening but I have my heart in my mouth as I type. Last weekend, along with Monday and Tuesday, were Carnival days and I believe a good many people packed up and left town. That left me with high-speed internet for those four glorious days. Perhaps there is something good to be said about Carnival after all. You may have guessed that I am not a fan of this celebration. Anyway, I knew there would be a price to pay for enjoying all that high speed! Everyone came back and the system collapsed

I had a few things going on this week. I simply cannot weave on my yellow scarf project at night. I can even manage black thread at night with the aid of a head lamp…but not this yellow. Light from a head lamp makes things even worse. It’s like looking into the sun. So, it was good to have a couple of other things to play with in what happens to be my favorite time for weaving. I turn on the air conditioner and enjoy an evening of fresh coolness at my loom.

There was the sewing on my brown wool panels to complete. This was not an easy job even though I had chosen the simplest of the decorative stitches to use. All the things that I had envisioned going wrong when I joined my two cotton panels last month, and which never actually happened, went wrong on this wool piece. The softer, slinkier wool fabric moved around and the edges got misaligned. I can’t tell you how many times I had to pull out the stitches.

I finally got it under control. This was definitely something I wanted to do at night in the cooled air. Having that wool thing on my lap while I sewed during the heat of the summer day was horribly uncomfortable. Now, I would love to weave an edging but this project used up all my brown wool. I simply can’t see it done in any other color and so I will just have to wait.

In the meantime, I have been planning the next wool project. I am going to use more jewel-like colors on the next one and weave patterns using the supplementary-warp structure. This, along with Andean Pebble Weave, were the first structures I learned in Peru back in 1996.

I was not a big fan of the supplementary-weft structure at that time. My teachers in 1996, and another with whom I had studied in 1997, had taught me to weave tiny animal motifs and some of them were a little awkward and had really long warp floats. That had put me off.

It wasn’t until I saw the more geometric Mapuche motifs woven in this structure when I visited a sheep estancia in southern Argentina, that I started appreciating the structure and all its possibilities. Nevertheless, I haven’t used it very much. While weaving with my teacher Maxima in Cochabamaba, I saw some of the supplementary-warp figures woven by ladies in her co-operative and those have given me ideas for this next project. First, I needed to weave a sample in the wool that I plan to use so that I could figure width. That kept me busy in the evening when the yellow warp had to be put aside.

There it is above. Weaving this gave me the chance to see that there was a glitch in my pattern chart. I had woven four repeats before I even realized. I am glad I caught it now and not in the middle of the larger project.

When I got back to Chile after my first weaving classes in Peru in 1996, I was very excited and wanted to weave everything I had learned at once. I wove a narrow band with some of the pebble weave figures I had been taught and then I got very brave and wove a wider piece using both the supplementary-warp and Andean Pebble Weave structures together. Back then, I didn’t for a moment question whether it would possible to successfully combine a complementary-warp and supplementary-warp structure. I didn’t know any better. I had no idea about such things as ”take-up” and there was no one to tell me that I shouldn’t do it or that there might be problems. I just did it. And, I guess I was just lucky that it worked out fine. I am thinking I will do the same on my next wool piece…combine the two structures. This is not uncommon in the highlands.

You can see the green and white supplementary-warp figures on the edges of the piece I wove in Chile back in 1996. I had figured out a way to chart those little figures but I hadn’t come up with anything for the pebble weave. I just followed my scribbled notes with all their references to numbers and color.

Everything was upside down and back-to-front on this warp! The warp was very crooked as my stakes had leaned. I ended up with my warp upside down. The supplementary-warp figures show their ”right” side. I consider the right side the one where the supplementary-warp threads (in this case the white ones), are forming the figures. However, the pebble weave figures are showing their ”wrong” side in the picture above.

Complementary-warp structures do not have a structurally right or wrong side but I had wanted my cloth to have white figures on a red and green background and didn’t have the experience at that time to know how to adjust the way I was doing the pick-up to fix that. I had come back from Peru not having a deep understanding of what this was all about. I was just blindly following my scribbled notes. Having a thorough understanding came much later after lots and lots of weaving and more trips to Peru and Bolivia.

You can see the finished cloth above adorning the cover of one of my photo albums….now showing the ”right” side of the pebble weave but the wrong side of the supplementary-warp sections. Even the narrow strips of pebble weave came out wrong. That is not the pattern I had intended at all! My pebble sheds were out of order and I ended up creating an entirely new motif….a happy mishap. I am so happy that I still have this piece of weaving. It holds a lot of stories.

While digging around for that old photo album, I unearthed the only picture I have of myself weaving in my home in southern Chile. It is totally out of focus, but what a happy memory from 20 years ago! I am working on the piece I just described.

You can see the very large pattern charts I had created for the supplementary-warp figures. My backstrap loom is attached to the bottom beam of my Navajo-style loom. I am sitting on my legs…can’t do that anymore! You can see a pile of Peruvian hats that I had brought back on the chair at left. What really makes me smile is the small pillow on the sofa. It is covered in one of my very first weavings… a tapestry piece in acrylic that I made on a frame I had knocked together a couple of years earlier into which I had hammered nails. I knew nothing about winding a warping and had simply tied a piece of sewing thread to a nail at the top of the loom, cut it and then tied it to a nail at the bottom of the loom. And so on… I so wish I had kept those little things I had woven.

As for the yellow scarf, I have just finished the intensive supplementary-weft patterning at the beginning and am moving on to a nice relatively free run of plain weave. I will repeat the bands of supplementary-weft patterning at the other end. I had started with the idea of covering the piece with cream-colored silk supplementary weft so that only small bits of yellow would be revealed but I found that the supplementary weft thickened the cloth too much for my liking. I didn’t want to lose all the light liquid flow of the silk.

Here is the first band of figures. I adapted the pattern from a cotton rebozo of Mexico.

I changed the pattern for the second band so that the flower motifs show in the yellow negative space.

And then, the plain weave starts. It will be decorated with scattered flowers. And, this time, when I say ”scattered”, I really mean it! I have planned pieces with so-called scattered motifs before only to find myself measuring and looking for symmetry. I can’t seem to help myself! No. This time they really will be scattered. I have woven more since I took this picture and added a couple more flowers. I am enjoying this whole ”scattered” business now. I don’t have to count any of the 700 ends to see how to place the motif and create balance and symmetry. I just pick a thread, any thread, and start weaving the motif…love it!

Hopefully, I will get the wool warp wound this weekend. That will give me something to work on in the evenings next to the 86 inches of yellow scarf warp.I need a longer bed to which I can lash these various projects side by side!

A friend in Chile sent me a link to a free e-booklet on natural dyes in southern Patagonia. It’s in Spanish but still lovely to look at even if you don’t understand the text.

This would have been so nice to have when I was living down there. There was a time when I played around with dyeing during my 5 years there. I used anything I could find in the back yard and dyed some small samples of wool. I kept notes but never dyed enough yarn to make anything. When I came to Bolivia I wrapped the dyed samples around tubes of newspaper and made a lid for one of my tall storage baskets ( which I had also made of tubes of newspaper.) It’s still in pretty good shape despite having had cat claws in it multiple times. The very dark brown, by the way, is just plain old loose-leaf black tea. I needed a dark color to contrast with the others.

You may remember I posted this next picture a couple of weeks ago. These are the sweet coin purses made with fabric created by the Hmong people of Thailand. I noticed that there were a lot of hits on the link to the Fair Trade store that sells these. My friend, Susan, in Australia, sent me a link to a tutorial on how to make them which solves the mystery of how much fabric they require… not all that much after all. The site provides a pattern template. Beware, you may fall down the rabbit hole of Renaissance Ribbons when you visit the site…I did!

There has been some double weaving going on among online friends. Moniek Deroo in Belgium wove red poppies on a band dedicated to the fields of Flanders where she lives…red poppies on the blackness of war, bordered by the green grass of the battle fields…

Moniek is using her inkle loom for this and has added extra string heddles to speed up the pick-up. It can be woven as a simple two-shaft structure and that is actually how I was taught to do it when I learned it in Potosí, Bolivia.That’s also the way I teach it in my tutorial. Moniek is weaving the embedded version of the double weave structure which I teach in this tutorial.

I add extra heddles when I work with particularly fine or numerous threads like on the 60/2 silk piece below…On narrower pieces, or those with heavier thread, I enjoy not having to deal with the clutter of all those extra heddles and am pretty fast doing the pick-up without them.

Betsy has just started following my online tutorial and is working her way through the exercises. Betsy has woven Andean Pebble Weave with me and says she finds double weave easier. I find patterns easier to read on double weave pieces as there are no warp floats and it is quite easy to read the pattern repeats on the cloth just by looking at the motifs you have already woven rather than at a chart. I find it faster to reach that ability when doing double weave than when weaving structures that involve warp floats.

I have a few more things to show you from my talented online weaving friends but I will end on this last one as my internet is showing signs of giving up again.

Liza has also been dabbling in double weave and is already designing her own patterns. I love this leaf pattern of hers…

And, she made this wonderful rug using a backstrap loom and old jeans…how cool is that…

I asked her for a shot of her work in progress because I wanted to see her loom set up. She sent me a beauty…

I’ll quickly publish this before my internet breaks down to a crawl or to zero again.

If you are a bit bamboozled by the potpourri of structures I have presented in this week’s post… supplementary this and that, double weave, complementary-warp, warp floats, blah blah, I do hope to update the Structures and Terminology page on this blog soon to explain them in a bit more detail for you.

Until next week…

Backstrap Weaving – Making Do

I just love this picture and this weaver’s work space. Place all you tools on the warp, roll everything up and leave it hanging from the post to which it is anchored…the simplicity! Gone are the days when I used to have to roll up everything and put it in the closet every night. A folding bed had to take the place of my work space at night. Apart from that, my cat would have gotten into everything if it had been left out.. The bed is no longer needed and the cat has moved away so, now I have a permanent piece of floor as my work space. Things tend to get out of control when you don’t need to put things away anymore, especially when I have several projects going at once. The photo of the neatly stowed backstrap loom is being offered as a screen saver calendar by this Mexican site.

Here’s another pleasant work space. This one is more cat-friendly…

This is the work space of one of my Bolivian teachers. She has one room dedicated to her weaving which holds three of her enormously long leaning vertical frames. Look at that lovely clear floor all around. She is weaving a long piece from which she will cut and sew three bags for a museum store. She has all the tools she needs on hand….a nice piece of sheep skin on which to sit, a sword which is leaning against the loom, a metal pick which is within the weaving, a piece of plastic coated wire which holds one half of her picking cross, her beater (the llama bone wichuña) and a tape measure. Cat and hat are optional.

The problem with my work space is that I have so many options…so many books from which to gather inspiration, so many sticks and needles and bits and pieces which somehow seem so essential. And then I need to chart patterns and make notes about things that my weaving teachers carry in their heads and hands. I have an ”out of sight, out of mind” mentality and need to to have every idea on which I am currently working under my nose. I am sure that with fewer things I would just make do with what I have.

Here’s the view from my bed when I wake up in the morning. I need to walk on top of all of that to get out the door.

You can see the two projects on which I am currently working. I have been fiddling about sewing the two wool panels together. First, I tried the triangle joining stitch, the arku siray, but found it too large and bulky and now I am working with the k’iska join which is much more discreet and one which I think better suits the busy pick-up patterns.

I have been taking my time over this. Sitting for long periods sewing with wool cloth on your lap in the summer heat is not comfortable. I think this weight will be really nice for a light poncho.

Maxima in Cochabamba adds extra twist to her handspun yarn before winding a warp for a pebble weave band.

Working on this wool piece has been really interesting. I used wool straight off the skein . I didn’t re-spin it to increase the amount of twist.

My weaving teachers here use tight over-twisted yarn that they spin themselves. They always re-spin the acrylic thread that they buy in the market. This makes the yarn stronger so that it can withstand the abrasion that comes from warp faced weaving. It also helps to smooth the yarn and sort of lock away a lot of the hairs, the things that make neighboring warp threads want to grab and stick to each other.

What I have realized from working on my wool project is that the over-twist also takes out pretty much all the spring and stretch from the yarn. The yarn I used was stretchy and that makes it really difficult to get a nice firm beat. My weaving teachers greatly admire cloth that is firm. With the hard beat and the tightly twisted thread, the resulting cloth is virtually waterproof and incredibly durable. I could beat away forever on my piece with its stretchy yarn and never get the firmness that my weaving teachers desire. And that’s okay because I really wanted something light and soft and flowing. The fabric softened up beautifully after I washed it. But, I know that if I ever took this piece to the highlands to show my teachers, they would either shake their heads sadly at it or tease me for being too weak to beat hard. It just wouldn’t be good cloth in their world of weaving.

You may remember that one of my weaving goals these days is to go wider, finer and longer. I only got a two-out-of-three with the wool project. It wasn’t longer than my usual projects. I haven’t managed yet to get all three going in one project.

The yellow warp you see in my work space gives me another two-out-of-three. It’s 86” long, which is much longer than my typical pieces and, being made of 60/2 silk, sits in the ”fine” category. It’s only wide enough to make a scarf.

Winding the warp was a challenge. I didn’t like my set-up…too many twists and turns for my liking…you know how fussy I am about the whole warping process. The way I chose to warp had my cross sticks placed at the far end of the warp. Just the action of dragging the cross sticks down to the front of the loom (and I did it as gently as I could) fluffed up my nice silk warp…darn. I picked off all the fluff. Next time I wind a long warp, I will definitely figure out a better way to do it.

I could have wound a circular warp, but I chose not to. It’s a single-plane warp and I have rolled up a lot of it around the far loom bar using sheets of paper to keep everything spread and even. That way it can fit into my small weaving space.

A circular warp would allow me to weave the 86” warp without having to roll it up. You can see the difference between a circular warp and a single plane warp in this next picture of two bands. Single plane warps have two ends…you start weaving at one end and finish at the other. On a circular warp you weave around a full circle until you return to the start point and then cut the warp apart.

I am starting a floral pattern on my yellow scarf warp using silk supplementary weft. The motifs are in cream colored silk. I like to think of this as ”mangoes and cream”. After this band of pattern I will weave 6”-8”” of supplementary-weft pattern where the cream weft fills the background revealing the motif in the yellow ground cloth. That’s what I will do at each end of the warp and everything in between will be basically plain with perhaps a few flowers scattered here and there.

It is so interesting seeing the different ways that weavers set up their looms and wind their warps. I have had a chance to look at new set-ups on backstrap and other simple looms this week by making contact with some weaving friends around the world. It has given me a chance to revisit the topic of the Shed Rod that I wrote about in a previous post.

You may remember that in that post I had noted that of the two basics sheds on backstrap looms- the back shed and the heddle shed- the back shed is often the one that is more difficult one to open. This, of course, depends a lot on the kind of yarn being used. Weavers come up with different ways to deal with that. They can use a shed rod of very large girth, they can strum the warp threads with their hands or with a tool or, as backstrap weavers in Ecuador do, they can distribute the threads over two shed rods and raise only half of them at a time. You can see the two shed rods in place at left. The weavers I saw doing this were using quite heavy wool warp.

Just after I published my post on the technique employed by backstrap weavers in some parts of Ecuador, my friend Kathleen Klumpp posted a video to Youtube that she took last year in Miguel Andrango’s workshop in Ecuador in which you can see the weaver using the two shed rods. I have been waiting for the right opportunity to show it here. Thank you. Kathie.

The weaver has quite an unusual way of doing the pick-up. It is not a method that I have seen used elsewhere and I am wondering if Mr Andrango was taught this way when he visited Cusco or if this is something of his own that he has passed on to the weavers who work with him in his workshop.

He first picks out all the light threads from the light colored shed and saves them. Then he picks the dark ones from the dark shed and combines both the light and dark threads into one shed.

On the other hand, the weavers in Peru with whom I have worked form a picking cross of all the dark and light threads and then select the colors, both light and dark, all at once.

Above, you can see the classic loraypu pattern, which is woven in Chinchero, Peru, on Miguel Andrango’s loom.

Adem, in Turkey has taken up backstrap weaving and has been sending me links to wonderful pictures and videos on Turkish textiles. He learned kilim weaving techniques from his grandmother when he was school aged and, while researching weaving online, came across my blog. Now, he and his wife are both happily backstrap weaving at home. I love how he has made do with all kinds of things that he has at home to set up to warp and weave….

Starting simply…

And then, adding some more tools, like a cardboard roll, that works brilliantly as a shed rod….

Finding more stability in his set-up…

Length is obviously not a problem…

Now Adem and his wife have my book and I am looking forward to seeing what they create with Andean Pebble Weave.

Weaving tools around the world, all serving the same basic purposes, can be so very different in shape and size. Not everyone can wander down to the Sunday market stall, like this one that I visited in Guatemala, and pick up just the right kind of stick or sword.

I love seeing how people make do with what they have.

As for the video links that Adem sent me, I have embedded one below which shows a wonderfully simple loom being used by a 75-year old woman in Turkey. Some of the pieces of equipment are not like anything you would find in a Guatemalan market. A simple stick tripod permanently raises the heddle shed. Her shed rod is a sword-like stick rather than a cylinder which she tips on its side to raise the back shed.

I love the sounds of the weaving in this film as much as I like the visuals. After the first minute, much of the video is devoted to interviewing the weaver. Adem tells me that she is talking about how she prefers living in her village rather than in the cities where her children have gone to live. She and other weavers used to create wide pieces but that is not done anymore.

The band she is weaving in the video is used as the strap for baskets like those in the picture below found here…

(Oops, well it looks like that video has been removed from Youtube. Here’s another one instead which also shows the warping. One lady winds the warps while another sits by and makes the heddles. You can see how the tripod is set up and there is great footage of the the weaver operating the loom as well as braiding the ends.

A flat shed rod just on its own, in my experience, makes raising the heddles difficult on a backstrap loom. However, this is not a problem in this loom as the heddled threads are already raised. The heddle stick is being held up by the tripod.

Another interesting shed rod can be seen in this next video from the Ukraine. The warp threads are coiled around the shed rod. This is a screen shot from the video which is embedded below…

The weaver shows how it is placed in the video. I think I learned the Ukranian words for ”over” and ”under” from watching this process as she coils one thread over the shed rod and then the next one under, again and again. This makes the shed rod very stable. Despite being much longer than the width of the band, the shed rods sits nicely in place and does not flop or roll around. She shows very nicely how she uses her sword behind the heddles to open the heddle shed. With a flat shed rod, that method simply wouldn’t work.

All the videos I have posted here are very light and I had no problem watching them with my erratic internet connection here in Bolivia. I hope you can watch and enjoy them too.