June 2020 – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Creative outlets

It’s interesting to see what my online friends and acquaintances are doing with the time they have on their hands during these periods of lock-down and self isolation. I won’t call it “killing time” as who would want to kill a commodity that is so precious? Most are using the time, their hands and yarn from their stashes to weave, crochet, braid and knit. A couple of friends have been drawing. My friend Yonat just finished a spectacular tapestry piece and I have seen some amazing quilts developing.

It’s no secret what I have been doing with my time and it’s not really anything different to what I would be doing in a “normal” world. The only difference is that I am not organizing my time around the fact that I have a trip away coming up. The last few years gave me the opportunity to travel to Australia in the down-under winter months. We are still in strict lock-down here and for me the biggest difference is having to pick through my stash to plan my future projects rather than plan something and only then buy yarn specifically for those projects on a trip away. There’s something rather nice about that. So, it’s all about weaving for me and soon it will be about planning my next book.

Oh, and I have been juggling. That’s a new one. My nephew taught me to juggle many years ago when I was on a visit to Australia. You never forget but you do get rusty….in my case, very rusty. It’s a great way to warm up my arms and shoulders before I do other exercises, not to mention all the other parts of the body that are involved in retrieving dropped balls. Now I am thinking about how to make my own juggling balls. I don’t need another set but some custom-made ones would be fun. I have a “good” set and then a set of crocheted rice-filled ones that I bought from Guatemala. It’s amusing watching the grains of rice escape and fly about the room as I toss the balls in the air. Maybe I’ll learn something other than the basic three-ball toss.

I hand-sewed my face masks. They came out pretty well. I picked apart a disposable pleated surgical mask to use as the model, made it a bit wider to reach to my ears, and added a little tuck under the chin. I had some wire to use for the nose and used the elastic from some eye masks that I had. One mask is only a single layer of fabric and the other is doubled. I wear them both at the same time. They’ve been through the wash several times and survived. I guess my hand-sewing isn’t that bad after all. Wearing a mask is mandatory in all stores and businesses here. I have not heard a single peep of complaint from anyone here about that.

My sister-in-law, Debbie, is one of the people that I mentioned who took up drawing during some of her stay-safe-at-home time. She had never done any drawing at all in her life and she whipped up this sketch of me wearing a mask and surprised me with it. I love it….

I don’t sew and don’t have a stash of fabric. The masks were made from fabric that my friend Claudia had given me so that I could sew an edging on my ikat cowl. I guess I favor these autumn colors. They happen to be the kinds of colors that I have been using in my recent ikat experiments.

After having finished experiment #8, above, I calculated the amount of 60/2 un-dyed silk that I had left to play with and saw that I had enough to make a sash that could hang on the wall with the other two pieces. That would leave me with a tiny bit to make a wrist cuff. I always like to be able to wear cuffs when I teach. They serve as nice portable examples of the various techniques that I use in my work. After all this time spent on ikat, I felt I needed to add an ikat cuff to the collection. However, I wanted it also be an experiment and planned to make it a test of some of the dye colors that I would use in the larger sash project….autumn colors.

Here it is on my arm along with other cuffs and bracelets that I have woven in autumn colors. It is fresh off the loom here and so it looks dull and fluffy and you can still see the charcoal markings where I drew the pattern on the warp before tying the tape. Its look would change after a wash and press.

One of the tape ties came partly undone in the dye bath which spoiled the pattern a little. I guess I got distracted and didn’t complete the knot for that particular tie. This piece went through three dye baths. That’s a lot of fuss for such a small piece but I learn something every time. Figuring out the most efficient way to stage the steps for dyeing the three colors colors is something that I am learning. On this occasion, I dyed with the burnt orange first. Then I unwrapped the parts that would be yellow and dyed those. Then I unwrapped the border threads and covered the entire pattern section with tape and dyed brown. Other possible sequences come to mind and I guess it depends on the ratio of pattern area to negative space, the colors that are being used, and just how much wrapping, unwrapping and re-wrapping you want to do. I had been hoping that the border and the rest of the negative space would be significantly different tones of brown….a solid dark brown on the borders and a reddish-brown in the other negative spaces. They are different but not so much as to be really noticeable.

I cut and hemmed the ends. The 60/2 silk is fine enough to allow me to hem without creating too much bulk. I’ll add some small snaps, two at each end. I usually add ribbon crimps to cuffs that are too bulky to hem. Jump rings and lobster-claw clasps finish them off nicely. As with any kind of bracelet, attaching the clasp with one hand can be tricky. I have done it often enough now to have a method that works well. That’s something that you might want to consider if you are planning a cuff of your own.

I hemmed and used snaps for these bands in 60/2 silk. There are some very low profile plastic snaps out there but I actually find them quite hard to do up and am sticking with metal ones for the time being.

I also like using a button along with a braided loop. The metal ribbon crimp has a built-in loop through which the braided cord can be passed and knotted to make a loop. The crimp covers and protects the cut raw edge of the band. The other ends of my bands are usually selvedges. Weaving bands like these on my backstrap loom allows me to start with a selvedge and so I can sew a button directly to that end. I don’t have to worry about a raw edge unraveling.

If a band has two raw edges and you want to use a button and loop, I think that adding a ribbon crimp to protect both ends would work well. The button could still be sewn to the band to overlap the crimp (and therefore hide the loop in the crimp.). I have since found out via a Facebook friend that you can buy ribbon crimps that don’t have the loop. One of these days, I’ll get some of those via an Etsy store called TwilightsFancy.

One of my favorite ways to finish a cuff is with a woven tubular band that is woven and sewn to the fabric at the same time. The weft becomes the sewing thread. The tube encloses and protects the edge of the band and really becomes part of the piece rather than just perching as an addition along the very edge. These kinds of tubular bands need to be used on fabric that is quite sturdy. In these two examples I used an eye-pattern tubular band.

I used the tubular band to cover and protect the raw edge of these wool bands. The band on the left is 20/2 worsted spun Mora yarn and the one on the right is my hand spun yarn made from from some particularly nasty llama fiber that I bought in the highlands way back in 2002 when I didn’t know any better. The center color comes from cochineal. The button is made from tagua nut from Ecuador.

The use of magnets as closures for these kinds of cuffs has been discussed but I can’t say that I trust them unless they are lockable. I would hate to lose my hand spun cuff and the tagua nut button which is a souvenir of my travels in 2005. One Facebook friend laughed about the fact that she has walked away and left bracelets with magnet closures attached dangling to metal cabinets.. Maybe a magnet closure with a safety chain would work although I do remember one weaver whose safety chain was attracted to the magnet and was therefore always stuck to it in a crumpled mess!

I have set up what could be the last 60/2 ikat experiment for a while (I say “could be” because I do have colored 60/2 silk a-plenty and as long as I have dark colored dye, I can continue to create ikat patterns. In fact, I already have some ideas!). This latest project is for the sash wall hanging…a long-ish narrow warp which I am doubling so that I can wrap two layers at once and create a pattern repeat.

First some scratchings on paper….

That’s the basic pattern that will be repeated as a mirror reflection of itself length-wise. Other bits of pattern will be added later if all goes well. And here’s the warp extended on its frame and the start of the wrappings….so far, so good.

My plan to use autumn colors has changed. I would like to try two tones of blue. I love some of the Indonesian textiles I have seen where the ikat artisans tie a pattern and then dip the warp in indigo to create a pale shade of blue. Then they tie more patterns into the pale blue and dye the warp a much darker blue. The challenge is to see if I can adjust the blue dye I have with maybe some bits of black or grey to get the kind of blue I have in mind and then create a light and dark shade. Considering the fact that none of the colors I have used so far have turned out as I had envisioned, I am thinking that this plan is quite unlikely to succeed. I will have black dye on standby to cover up any mess! I haven’t had to resort to this Plan B yet. Fingers crossed.

And now I get to show you what my online weaving friends have been doing…

You may remember that last year I spent a weekend with some of my backstrap-loom-enthusiast friends during which we focused on preparing wide projects. Here is Ann last year making heddles after a day of planning and warping….

Aunt Lydia’s size 10 has some bold and beautiful colors and Ann combined them so nicely.

Ann has had time to finish this project during time spent at home. She noted that it took a year to get through the first half and only a week to finish the rest! She’ll be sewing the fabric into a bag. I know that Ann is really skilled at the sewing machine and that this will be something awesome.

Sally Backes has more than one band project on the go. This one is on her Windhaven Fiddle loom and she is creating a pattern from my More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns book. If you have studied either the Andean Pebble Weave method or the complementary-warp pick-up methods that I teach in my books, you will be able to weave the patterns in this pattern book. I love the red and white border arrangement that Sally has chosen.

Karen Rein chose flower and leaf motifs to decorate her first warp-faced double weave band. These motifs form part of the 11/12-thread set which are designed to fit on the first learning band. There are also sets with 15/16 threads and 19/20 threads. This was woven on an inkle loom using the instructions from my Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms book.

In the double weave book I recommend using a loom that gives you, as an absolute minimum, five inches of working space. That is the distance from the weaving line to the heddles. However, where there is a will there’s a way. My weaving friend, Kate, had to run some errands which involved some sitting about and waiting. She took this tiny loom along with her as it is the most portable one she has. Another online weaving friend of mine owns one of these and says it fits in her purse! There isn’t what I would call a comfortable amount of working room for doing pick-up on this loom, particularly not for double weave, but Kate made it work and wove the little llama figure from my book while she was out. This wasn’t Kate’s first double weave band. She wove the first one on a much larger inkle loom that gave her a much more comfortable amount of space in which to work. The little loom is adorable!

I am so pleased to see that Susi Saparautzki has got to the stage where she is comfortable weaving warp-faced double weave and has moved on to designing her own patterns. One of the things I have emphasized in the book is just how easy it is to do this. Susi created a motif with dolphins and I love the splash of background on which she has placed them.

Stacy Holder’s Andean Pebble Weave band is stunning. I often forget when I am planning my projects that one can use something other than white as the lighter of the two pattern colors. I love this combination. This pattern along with several other knot-work motifs is charted in the More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns book.

Wendy has been out backstrap weaving again with her clever self-contained set-up. For this band she has been using beautiful reeled silk from Bhutan as warp and supplementary weft in jewel colors and plans to make a wrist cuff…..

Vonnie Galusha’s first Andean Pebble Weave band was used as inspiration for members of the Sacramento Weavers and Spinners Guild in their recent news letter. Vonnie worked with my Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms book.

And, finally, back to the backstrap loom. Here’s Jennifer Kwong’s set-up and first ever band in complementary-warp pick-up. It’s a beauty. We love her clever use of a crepe spatula as a sword. (Complementary-warp Pick-up book…also available in German).

That’s all for now. Mask up, if you can, and stay safe, please.

Backstrap Weaving – How warp-faced are you?

I have to remind myself now and then that there are varying degrees of “warp-faced-ness’. Goodness knows that I have told my students this many a time when they have asked me to help them figure out the number of warp-ends they need to create a certain width. I can only give a ball-park figure because my warp-faced may be very different to theirs.

I often give the same warp (same material, same number of ends, same length) to a group of weavers and then have them compare their woven bands. All will turn out good warp-faced bands but the differences in width in the bands can sometimes be quite surprising. There isn’t a correct width as far as I am concerned, as long as it is indeed warp-faced. You just want to have a consistent width. If the band gets too wide, the weft will be exposed. If it’s too narrow, the weaver won’t be able to get a good straight beat as the threads will be crammed and may even be trying to climb one on top of the other. I encourage them to compare bands because in the early stages, before habits are formed, they can easily adjust their methods if they happen to prefer the way another weaver’s band looks.

Everyone eventually settles into their own version of warp-faced-ness. Mine tends to be on the more open side with perhaps a hair’s breadth space between the threads. I see these differences even among my indigenous weaving friends here in Bolivia. These ladies have been weaving most of their lives. I buy bands from the weaving co-op that my teacher Maxima runs in the central Bolivian highlands. Several of the bands woven by women in the same community will have the same motif but look different, even if ever so slightly. I can see each weaver’s version of warp-faced. Is the motif long and narrow or wider and more squat?

For me, the important task is knowing exactly how wide my project is going to be on the loom so that I can make sure that I get started on the right foot. While planning, I will use measurements from previous projects to figure this out. As my projects get wider and the thread I use gets finer, I find that there is another important task that sometimes gets overlooked. That is, making sure that the threads are equally spaced across the width of the warp. That’s a big task when you are working with 1600+ ends. I can measure my warp before starting to weave and see that the width is spot-on. However, I also need to check that the threads are evenly distributed across that width. They may be more spread in one part and much less so in another but still give me that perfect width. Believe me, when you have a bunch of brown or black threads spread before you, it is not that easy to tell!

Having stripes in the warp makes the task so much easier. My warping notes tell me the number of threads in each stripe. I can calculate how wide each stripe should be and move threads around until they are all sitting as they should. I can take an entire morning to do this! I sit there pushing threads around, measuring, pushing them around again until I finally feel ready to throw the first shot of weft. I’ll keep measuring and checking until I have at least an inch woven.

When there aren’t any stripes, you don’t have any kind of visual aid. Just eye-ball it? That’s not recommended in my case. I have no talent whatsoever for eye-balling things.

The first give-away of uneven spacing when using a warp with no stripes can come when you weave supplementary weft motifs that span the warp. The little leaves that run across the bottom of this solid red piece varied in girth and showed me clearly that the threads were pushed slightly closer together in some places than in others. I consoled myself with the fact that identical leaves are probably pretty hard to come by in nature! Another sign that would suggest a more serious difference in warp spacing would be if you were unable to achieve a straight weaving line. If one part of the cloth is advancing more rapidly than others, one possible reason is that the threads in that area are sitting closer together than they are in the rest of the warp. I have had that happen and I know just beating harder on that one spot doesn’t help!

Of course, there is a way to check in the absence of stripes. It’s just a little more fiddly. Tie off the warp threads as you wind the warp in even sections. Figure out how wide those sections should be and then measure each section as you spread the threads out ready to weave. Easy!

The last ikat project I did had stripes. This had not been intentional but ended up coming in handy.

Once the plastic ties had been removed from the warp, I could use the thread-count in the stripes to help spread the warp out evenly across the beams of the loom. As a result, the repeated patterns in that project were evenly distributed across the width of the warp.In my excitement to get my very latest ikat experiment underway, I neglected to consider the way the threads had been distributed along the beam. Firstly, I had to recalculate the target width because you may remember my mentioning a certain mishap with scissors in which a chunk of ends got cut when the warp was on the ikat wrapping frame. I caught that error just in time because I had been busily spreading the threads out to the original width calculation. I guess I was too distracted with congratulating myself on picking that up to remember to check the distribution of the threads! It’s not disastrous. But you know how it is… you, the weaver, can see it when most likely no one else can. In any case, this gives me a chance to point out to you this idea of varying degrees of warp-faced-ness which might help you in your own projects.

Here’s what the warp looked like after it was dyed…

It’s back on the wrapping frame so that I can unwrap. You will see that there are more ties on the horizontal bar on the right than on the left. The left bar is at the starting end of the warp. I wrapped two layers together to create that bar. For the other bar, I wrapped the two layers separately so that I could open out the warp to its full width and leave those wraps in place while I wove.

In my happy place: weaving has commenced and I am part-way through the first row of supplementary-weft figures in the first un-dyed section. You can just see the very edge of some of the pink wrapping tape at the far end of the warp. I was over-frugal when I wound this warp because my silk is in short supply. It’s a short warp and I didn’t leave myself much working space at the end.

This is what the supplementary-weft motif looks like….

I particularly like the appearance of “reverse embossing” (my made-up term) that is created on the back of the piece when I use this particular supplementary-weft technique…

Here it is fresh off the loom. There’s lots of fluff to be picked out (this silk is surprisingly fluffy…not all slick and smooth as you might expect silk to be). I also broke two warp threads which I had to replace with a color that doesn’t quite match. Luckily this happened outside the ikat areas. Those ends need to be woven in. You can see them in the lower part of the picture. The cloth has a very matte appearance at this point and is somewhat stiff.

I washed and pressed it….maybe you can see how that brought out the sheen…

Then I decided to add a warp-faced band to one of the ends using the un-woven warp-ends as weft. This is the way that some ikat textiles from Sumba, Indonesia are finished. The bands are applied to both ends of the cloth. I have been told that these textiles were typically finished with striped warp-faced bands in plain weave. In the 1970s some weavers started using ikat-patterned bands on these edges and I have also seen examples of bands with pick-up patterns. In examples that I have seen, the bands sometimes turn out to be slightly shorter and in some cases quite a lot shorter than the width of the cloth and end up pulling in and puckering the cloth. On other examples, the length of the band perfectly matches the width so that the cloth lies flat. I don’t know whether these different ways of applying the band have been intentional.

What I can tell you is that in my experience of having woven only two of these kinds of bands, it is really hard to prevent the puckering!

I have seen a couple of videos of weavers in Indonesia weaving these bands (I embedded one video that had been made by the late Kay Faulkner in one of my recent ikat posts). Here’s another which was filmed by David and Sue Richardson in which the weaver twists the warp ends that have been pulled through the shed.

Her textile was going to be worn and washed and the fringe, therefore, needed to be tamed. In the videos I have watched, I have not seen the weaver using an additional weft thread that moved back and forth through the sheds alongside the bundles of warp-ends. Strictly speaking, I have been using the un-woven warp ends as supplementary-weft because I do use an additional weft thread to hold the band together. In my examples, adding the bundles of warp threads to the shed is what attaches the band to the cloth but is not what is being used to actually weave the band. As my piece will be hanging on a wall and, most likely, won’t be washed again or be subject to wear and tear, I will leave the fringe in its original wild state.

Let me try attaching these bands fifty more times and I just might be able to conquer the puckering!

You will see that the two ikat motifs that are supposed to be identical in proportions are not. After all I told you at the start of this post, you will know why. 😉

I have lots of things to show you from my online weaving friends. I continue to get woven feedback on my latest book Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms and was excited to receive a message from Susi in Germany showing the motifs she has designed in double weave on a band for her niece. Showing people how easy it is to design in this structure and encouraging them to do so was one of my goals in writing this book. I am going to save those pictures for the next post but would like to leave you with something bright and beautiful after all the dull brown I have been posting!

The backstrap loom is so versatile and this following project by Judy Kavanagh shows another exciting way of using these looms. This project is very different to mine in that it is not warp-faced, it is not woven using commercial yarn, it is not in muddy colors and it is practical rather than purely decorative….

Judy is using a rigid heddle and her own handspun wool and silk yarn to create a scarf. She uses a cardboard sleeve around the woven cloth to help her maintain a consistent width.

How gorgeous is that?! She used three strands of a 2/28 merino in dark fuschia as weft. I hope this has you all whipping out your rigid heddles.

And, here it is finished with twisted fringe. Thanks, Judy.

I am staying safe and well here. I sewed my masks and continue to build up my pantry in the hope of being able to spend even less time out of my home should things get worse here.

Take care, please.