November 2021 – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Between Science and Magic Part 2

“Between Science and Magic”…this is the second time that I am using this title for a post. I saw it being used as the title of a review of a new book about hummingbirds and loved it. It is such a fitting description of these amazing little creatures. You sit and watch as they magically hover by a flower in a buzz and blur of wings. Then you watch some brilliant BBC slow motion footage that reveals the science behind their ability to do so. And yet the science doesn’t in any way diminish the feeling I get that I am witnessing magic.

As I sat sketching, crunching numbers and planning the next book cover that I wanted to weave, it dawned on me that the phrase is also a fitting one for how I feel about weaving. I decided that it would be fun to include the phrase on the cover of a book that I will call A Weaver’s Journal.

My planning notes look kind of scientific with all those numbers, diagrams and other scribblings. I don’t trust gut feeling or instinct when it comes to planning a project. I can’t eyeball width by winding warp threads and just stopping when it looks right. It all has to be figured out beforehand.

Colors don’t just magically come together in my head either. I don’t have a natural talent for that and envy it in others. I look at what I have in my stash and then go online for help hoping that I can somehow put together something similar.

**I started with teal and then looked online for ideas**.

I only have natural white and a color called “rye” in 30/2 silk and so needed to dye some of the white to teal. I have a jar of teal dye which didn’t work for me the last time I used it. The yarn simply refused to take up the blue component of the dye and ended up a very odd green. I am horrifyingly unscientific about dyeing. I don’t weigh the yarn. I make my best guess as to the amount of dye to use. I don’t measure the temperature of the water. If I get the intended color, it’s pure magic. And I don’t take notes! I mixed two blues that I have, one that is green-ish and another that is more like a standard dark blue and hoped for the best.

The balls of teal are the ones I dyed. They’re 30/2 silk. I wanted to get a color that was close to the tube of 60/2 teal. The fact that I did indeed get something close is magic to me! I would weave the hummingbirds using multiple strands of the 60/2 teal on 30/2 rye just like in the sample band pictured above. They would be surrounded by 30/2 teal, which would have other supplementary-weft patterns in gold. I didn’t manage to work the pale blue into the plan.

Warping…I am very methodical. Nothing is left to chance, wizardry or magic!

**The strings at the top are to create sections and make counting easier when laying in the pattern.**

I don’t wing patterns. The hummingbirds had already been designed, tested and adjusted. I had yet to design the words. I was made aware of just how clumsy I had become with cursive writing! I think that in Australia I was taught a Victorian style of cursive. The lower-case ‘r’ we were taught is not as attractive as those I see in other styles, and designing it so that it connected smoothly and, more importantly, without taking up too much space, was beyond me. So, you will see that my ‘r’s are socially distanced from one of their neighboring letters.

**At this point, I was regretting the gold stripes. I dealt with those later. My phone’s camera sees the teal as more turquoise-y**.

**I am done with the ‘r’s at this stage. Good. My ipod camera is more teal-friendly.**

I am using DMC #12 2-ply mercerized cotton for the heddles on this 30/2 silk warp. They play very nicely with the silk.

It’s a short warp and I wanted to see what my heddles looked like at the end. People often ask me if I re-use my heddle string. I don’t. But I just might pick the fluff off these while listening to a good podcast or two one of these days. The fluff forms a bracelet around the heddle thread and so it’s not just a matter of giving the heddles a good shake or beating. Each little bracelet ring needs to be broken.

The amount of fluff that collects depends on the kind of materials being used in warp and heddle string as well as on how you are handling the heddles as you use them to raise threads. It’s perfectly normal for small amounts of fluff to accumulate as the heddles naturally inch their way along the warp as the weaving advances. I am never aware of shifting them myself. They just seem to magically move along. When I was at the end of this warp and with far less space in which to work, I had to slide the heddles back out of the way so that I could insert a sword and my pick-up stick. Then I had to slide them forward again in order to continue operating the loom. I suspect that most of this fluff accumulated due to all that sliding back and forth at the very end.

I hadn’t wet finished the cloth for the first hummingbird book cover. I felt that the fine, non-mercerized, grabby, tightly-woven cotton that I used for that one really didn’t need that kind of finishing for its role as a sturdy book cover.

**30/2 non-mercerized cotton that I brought back from Guatemala in 2008**.

I had to face the fact that the silk piece did, and that wet-finishing was going to alter the carefully planned dimensions of the cloth…carefully planned to perfectly fit my book. Silk weft and silk warp did not give me the tight secure warp-faced weave that the grabby cotton had. Wet-finishing also made the cloth floppy and drape-y, lovely characteristics for a wearable piece, not so much for a book cover. It was very fiddly applying the floppy cloth to the book….but I got there.

**The finished book and the good ol’ contact cement that makes it all possible**.

You may have noticed that the gold stripes are gone. I wove a vey narrow length of tape in the 60/2 teal silk and used it to compensate for the lost width from the wet-finishing process as well as cover the gold stripes that had been annoying me. The tapes also covered some of the more irregular turns of supplementary weft…a bonus! I love the way it turned out.

There might be one more book coming if I can scrape together yarn from my stash that fits the idea that is developing.

In the meantime, I have had a little distraction, although it is still hummingbird-related. A Facebook page about archaeology recently shared some pictures from the textile collection of the museum of the University of Princeton. The description reads: Cross-Loop Stitched Border Fragment Featuring 54 Hummingbirds, 100 B.C -A.D. 200. Camelid Fiber and Cotton. Peru, South Coast.

This is magic….the fact that this shows up in my news feed on Facebook at a time when I am into all things hummingbird-ish. And how astoundingly gorgeous is this piece of work! I love that we have this evidence that people were just as in love with the magical hummingbird two thousand years ago as we are today and felt the desire to depict them in their art. The depth of color in this two-thousand-year old piece is incredible.

I know this technique as cross-knit looping and was taught it as a decorative and protective edging by my weaving teachers in Bolivia. I have also seen it referred to as needle knitting, the needle in this case being a sewing needle that carries the thread though loops rather than a knitting one. I have not come across anyone here in my travels who is using this technique to create these three-dimensional figures although I know that the Center for Traditional Textiles in Cusco (CTTC), Peru is currently working on recovering the technique and creating reproductions. Back in 2012 when I was in the U.K, Sue Prior showed me a piece of three-dimensional needle knitting that she had created as part of the work of the Peruvian Textiles Study Group in her Guild. It was a wonderful little sample. My email contact for Sue is out-of-date and I wonder if she still reads my blog. Contact me, please, Sue!

I thought I would try a little project of my own in chunky cotton to see if I could get a result that looked something like those three little tail feathers.

This is a first attempt and there is plenty that I will do differently if a second attempt ever happens. This just might be a good exercise to keep me busy while I ponder my next woven project.

I’ll finish by showing you the work of Fenny in the Netherlands. She is doing a spectacular job of weaving a pattern that was designed by my online weaving friend Eladio Salas in Mexico. That was many years ago after I had published my very first book. Eladio took very quickly to designing and weaving wide and complex patterns on his backstrap loom. He allowed me to use a portion of his amazing original design in my pattern books. Fenny’s work is beautiful. She has a nice loom which allows her to comfortably weave these wider patterns.

This pattern is charted along with 131 others in my book More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns which is available as a PDF or as a spiral-bound book at Taproot Video.

I am still staying in most of the time and staying safe. Hopefully we will get our booster shots soon. I wonder which one it will be. I went out to visit a friend yesterday. Strolling the thirteen blocks home on a Saturday afternoon is very pleasant because the downtown area is quite deserted. But then I got bitten on the leg by a dog! The bite area is black and blue from the force of the bite but fortunately only one tooth broke the skin. Maybe the universe is telling me not to get cocky and to just stay home!

Let’s finish with something pleasant…. 🙂

Backstrap Weaving – I Made a Thing

First of all, I have to tell you just how wonderful it was to hear from so many people behind the scenes about the bonus video clips I talked about in my last post. Those who had bought my tubular band book on Patternfish needed to contact me to gain access to the video gifts. And contact me you did! I have to apologize for not having sent each and every one of you a personal reply…it got a bit overwhelming! But it served as a reminder that there are many many eyes out there reading my posts….yes, actually reading all my ramblings and not just scrolling down through the pictures (although, there’s nothing wrong with that!). I do try to provide a lot of eye candy for those who stop by and don’t have the time to read everything.. All this is to say, thank you. It made me feel good.

You’ll see that the title of this post is I Made a Thing. I did… but this thing I made is not THE thing that I am planning for my hummingbird motifs. That idea is still developing in my head, But, yes, I made A thing. However, there was still some sampling to do as I had come up with another idea for my little birds.

Two posts ago I showed you a new version woven with supplementary weft rather than in double weave in which I used the idea of embellishing the hummers with curls and swirls. The sample above is in 30/2 silk with silk supplementary weft. I used this idea one more time in some green cotton thread that I had brought back from Guatemala in 2008. I think the cotton might be something like 30/2 in size and I am pretty sure that it isn’t mercerized.

In the example on the left, I created the outline and the swirls within the hummingbird shapes with teal supplementary weft. On the right, I filled in the negative space around the swirls with white supplementary weft. That means that the swirls are revealed in the exposed green ground cloth. It’s a different look. I love both versions! I may have to combine both in that distant “real” project”.

An advantage of the using the supplementary-weft technique is the simplicity of the loom set-up. I like to use four sets of string heddles when I weave with fine warp material in warp-faced double weave. I need only use the most basic set-up of all when I use this supplementary-weft technique.

I am using five strands of very fine silk as the supplementary weft and played around with the idea of using strands of different colors. I abandoned the first attempt at the bottom…too pale…and liked the darker version at the top. Dwindling stash has me using color combinations that I might not have normally considered. I do like the green and orange-y red tones together. A weaver friend told me that green goes with everything because, after all, Nature has combined it with every imaginable color of flower. True!

I love how my backstrap loom allows me to set-up a short sample warp like the one above. I could probably squeeze a couple more inches out of that warp if I remove the coil rod and replace the pencils with finer sticks. I can even drop back to just one stick or even to no stick at all…using a shed loop instead to contain the threads in that half of the warp.

So, while I ponder that “real” project to which I keep referring, I decided to use all that I had learned so far and weave a cover for a book. This is the Thing that I made. I found a book in a size I like in a local store. It has blank, thick lovely pages that have lots of texture. It was a chance to use the cotton thread from Guatemala that has been sitting here since 2008. I had brought it back with plans to use it as supplementary weft rather than as warp. I didn’t have enough green and so I decided to get even more comfortable with orange and use orange as both warp and weft. What I am calling orange in the warp is more of a coral color really.

I love the look of all those crisp white heddles against the green. I normally weave my book covers with the selvedges running along the horizontal edges of the book. Because I wanted my hummingbirds to be be the right way up rather than sideways, I planned this piece to have the selvedges aligned with the vertical sides of the book. I crossed my fingers in the hope that my one short and narrow sample in this thread would give me reliable information in terms of ends per inch. I wanted the cloth to sit right at the vertical edges. I didn’t want to turn it over all four edges and create all that bulk at the corners.

I also decided that I wouldn’t wet-finish the cloth. I know....Shocking! I figured that it’s a nice tight warp-faced weave that doesn’t require further tightening in the water. I simply was not going to deal with accounting for shrinkage. The cotton has a rough rustic feel that I like. Wet finishing would have softened it I am sure, but I am happy with the rustic feel.

Completely removing the cover from the book was easy and made the process so much simpler. This way, I didn’t have to cut the cloth and tuck a tab into the spine. Contact cement has become my friend since I learned to work with it. This isn’t the first book I have ever completely covered with my woven cloth…number 11, in fact, and I have learned some do’s and don’t’s along the way.

And here it is finished. I managed to get the little flower positioned on the spine right where I had wanted it to be .I apologize that I have been lazy lately just snapping all my photos with my tiny ipod, some of them as you can probably tell, late at night . I still haven’t bought myself a new tripod for the “good” camera.

Naturally, questions arise about technique tutorials when I show these projects on social media. I did write a very basic tutorial on this supplementary-weft technique many years ago which you can find right here on my blog. I admit that the tutorial makes me cringe just a little as the base warp that I used in the blue example all those years ago was so terribly corrugated! Nevertheless, the tutorial will give you a good idea of how this works and I know that many people have successfully used it.

A wonderful resource for supplementary-weft techniques that I have come across in the last few months is the website of Guatemalan-based Mari Gray’s Kakaw Designs. Mari writes on her site that Kakaw means cacao and goes on to explain that Kakaw Designs supports “traditions as deep as the root of the cacao tree”. Apart from selling clothing, accessories and even footwear made from Guatemalan textiles that she and her partners have specially designed, she runs tours, offers courses and sells kits for weavers who would like to try their hand at operating a backstrap loom.

One of several pre-warped and pre-heddled loom styles offered by Kakaw Designs.

You can order fully warped and set-up backstrap looms, like the one above, with everything you need to weave brocade (supplementary-weft) patterns using the techniques employed by weavers in San Antonio Aguas Calientes. The kit can be supplemented by classes via Zoom given by Guatemalan weaver Doña Lidia in English. There are classes on basic backstrap loom operation and plain warp-faced weaving as well beginner and intermediate-level brocading classes. For more advanced weavers, they even offer a class in the double-faced supplementary-weft technique. Other offerings include tamale and tortilla-making classes.

A piece that I photographed of a Quetzal bird woven in the double-faced technique while in San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Guatemala in 2008.

This simple bee motif is the first I learned to weave in the double-faced structure with my teacher in Guatemala.

Single and double-faced styles that I studied and wove in the same area in which instructor Doña Lidia is located in Guatemala.

This piece shows the nature of single-faced supplementary-weft patterning.

Instructions are also available via PDF with accompanying video clips for those in time zones that don’t fit well with the scheduled Zoom classes or for those who are not able to attend the live classes for any other reason. Take a look at the Experiences page on the Kakaw Designs website for more details. If any of you have taken any of these classes with Kakaw Designs, please do let me know. Perhaps you would be willing to share pictures.

Doña Lidia being filmed for one of her weaving classes.

From the archives….here’s me practicing all I learned in Guatemala back in 2008. I learned so much that expanded my knowledge of supplementary-weft techniques far beyond what I had learned here in South America. Guatemala is so much about weaving with supplementary weft. and there are so many different styles. Once you learn more about it, you will understand how Guatemalan textiles can be so wonderfully colorful.

In this picture I was weaving the cloth that would become the front and back covers of the journal in which I recorded all the instructions. Even back then I was enjoying creating woven covers for my books. I finished the piece that I had started with my teacher in Guatemala (inset) and used that on the lid of a backstrap loom tool box.

Ah…my weaving space looks so neat and tidy in that picture! I wasn’t living alone back then. Here’s what it looks like now. You can see my book cover cloth on the loom and the rest is all the accompanying creative chaos.

I’ll finish by showing you a picture that Kathy sent me of her warp-faced double weave project. She used some rather soft cotton that she happened to have in her stash and was surprised that it behaved so well. Warp-faced double weave is a dense structure and can be hard on softer yarn so that’s something about which you should be careful when choosing thread for this technique. Crochet cotton with its high twist works very well when you are learning. With experience you could ty branching out to using less hardy materials. Kathy has used motifs from my Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms book but she is a backstrap-loom gal at heart and prefers to weave double weave that way. She is using just two basic sheds as I teach in my inkle loom book.

Warp-faced Double Weave is wonderfully versatile in the range of images that it allows you create…from whimsical birds, butterflies and bunnies to delicate leaf and floral patterns, to the bold angular shapes of Mapuche-style motifs or the more intricate Al Sadu-style patterns of the Bedouin. It’s one of my favorite structures for creating images and lettering.

See you next time!