Month: August 2023

Backstrap Weaving – In the Bag

Another birthday comes and goes. I was given some lovely mini cheesecakes by a friend and we went out for a stroll around the street market that starts a block and half from my place before having a birthday lunch. Every now and then I go to this market looking for cochineal. The ladies that sell the home remedies are the ones that have it but it seemed that the source had dried up as I hadn’t been able to find any this year.

The market is big and, being in good company, we chatted and ventured further into the market than I normally find it necessary to do on my own. It paid off. I actually found the cochineal mother lode. I just bought a little and then snapped photos all around to make sure that I’ll be able to find this particular vendor again.

I often forget how different these markets must seem to my weaving friends who live outside South America. I generally don’t feel secure taking my phone out when I am at the market. This comes from experience! In fact, I don’t usually take it with me at all. But, because I had an extra pair of eyes with me on this day, I brought it along and took a few photos along the way.

I love the two white cats under the table waiting patiently for tidbits.
Crunchy snacks anyone?
One of the many “healers” who will read your fortune and find solutions for your troubles.

And then I came across another surprise. It seemed that they were stacking up for my birthday. I have never seen anyone selling hand-spun wool down here in the tropical lowlands in all the years that I have been here. In fact, there isn’t any industrially-spun wool to be found either. On this day there were three balls of handspun wool hanging in amongst the home remedies in this little store owned by a lady from Potosi.

We talked spinning and weaving and she searched about to find her spindle to show me. It wasn’t particularly fine yarn but it was such a novelty to find it here and so nice to chat with this lady that I simply had to buy a ball of it. I’ll dye it with the cochineal that I just bought.

And with this I broke my vow to only work from stash but what the heck, it was my birthday.

It has the most wonderful smell that is characteristic of those home remedy stalls.

One more stop was made at the many aisles of the indoor part of the market where the sewing supplies are sold. I needed a long zip in a certain color for the loom carry bag that I was making.

There are multiple vendors along this aisle and it’s amazing how much stuff they cram into their small allotted spaces. What’s more amazing is that they know exactly where everything is. I got my zip in the perfect color.

So, this is what has been on my loom. I showed you the warp of Mayan Hands cotton from Guatemala in my last post. I dyed the black and there are two shades of cochineal red that were dyed in Guatemala.

Each of the red sections is flanked by twelve ends of a slightly darker red. It doesn’t really show up in this photo. I goofed while warping and put more red ends on the right hand side than on the left but decided to just let it be.

The black and white section would enable me to weave several kinds of patterning styles and I decided to weave this in rep weave….alternating thick and thin weft. That would make a sturdy bag and a cushy backstrap. You might remember my plan to make a carry bag for my loom that could double as a backstrap.

I chose a pattern that I had used on a silk wrist cuff some years ago. I had woven it using the complementary-warp intermesh structure with a pattern from Joanne Hall’s book on Mexican Tapestry weaving.

I chose the pattern on the far left in these two images.

I first had to weave a sample to see how many strands I needed to make up the thick weft. Then I could get underway. Because I hadn’t used this Mayan Hands cotton in a large plain-weave project before and had only woven a tiny sample with it, I was a bit unsure about being able to set the width of the large project correctly right from the start. It’s quite common to start off too narrow. Threads that are sitting side by side along two cross sticks sit one above the other along the cloth beam and this can trick you into misjudging the width of the cloth. So, I did what I do if I am weaving with new-to-me yarn and placed four narrow strips of cardboard within the first four sheds so that I could see how the threads sit side by side.

By doing this I can move the threads around until I get the ideal coverage of the cardboard strips within the sheds. I take measurements, carefully remove the strips, disturbing the threads as little as possible while doing so, and then start weaving. This enables me to start at just the right width and maintain it for the entire project.
There’s nothing delicate or subtle about this pattern!

The motif is a complementary-warp pick-up pattern made up of two-span floats and very occasionally a three-span. Any section of white in a row that doesn’t have any white directly above or below it in the preceding or following row will be made up of three-span floats. Being complementary-warp, the piece is double-faced. It’s very straightforward. You just have to remember that vertical lines of white need to be broken up by picking up black threads in the thin-weft rows.

And here it is off the loom. I wove the start and finish only with thin weft so that they would be easier to hem. I also split them into two halves because they would become sleeves into which I would thread the cords for the backstrap. This will be clearer later when you see images of the cords in place.

I’m really happy with it! I ran out of black thick weft and switched to reddish brown which I think looked even better. In the end the color didn’t matter because I covered the bumpy selvedges in order to sew in the zip.
There’s no point to this photo. I just like the way my book looks on top of the rep weave piece. 🙂
I wove a band using the lightest of the three cochineal colours that I have in this cotton and used it to enclose the typical bumpy rep weave selvedges.

I still have to test the ideal length of the white cords so that I can cut and bind them off. I also need to decide on the best way to affix a carry strap. I’m going to let it sit for a bit while I think about that.

Here it is holding sticks, swords, shuttle and tool bag. I still have to sew to isolate the sleeves that hold the cords.

What’s next? Maybe some dyeing with cochineal and perhaps a longer version of the little box-like purse that I recently made. I have a lot of fine Guatemalan cotton for that in a color the vendor called champagne. I need to come up with a pattern for it in supplementary weft.

Keep busy lest you be accused of sloth! I was amused to see this depiction of the seven deadly/mortal sins in an episode of QI. A spinner was used to represent Sloth. How dare they! I couldn’t get a close enough view of the spinner during the program to be able to understand what that was all about. But I did find an image online and was able to see that her spindle, laden with yarn, was lying idle on the ground….the horror.

See you next time!

Backstrap Weaving – In and out of the Box

I just wanted to quickly show what I made with the fabric I was weaving in my last post.

Supplementary-weft motifs in red silk on cotton.

Bear in mind that I am not much of a sewer and that my thrills from sewing successes, therefore, come cheaply. I do love stitching by hand, though.

I really liked a box-like purse that Handymum had shown in a video tutorial. She doesn’t speak at all in these videos and explains everything with hand gestures and occasional text in English. When I can also mute the music, it becomes my favorite way to watch these kinds of videos. They play at high speed and so I need to watch them several times to be able to catch everything. I save only the very simplest ones while I improve my skills. I’m not going to risk my handwoven cloth on something that is beyond my skill level.

YET, if I’d really respected my lack of experience and sewn a sample with fabric I have floating around, I would have avoided a silly mistake I made.

The unusual layout of the pattern is due to the nature of the box-like purse I planned to sew. The plain blue that flanks the pattern would be the sides of the “box”.
I managed to get a second product, a slim zippered tool case, from the extra bit of warp I had put on the loom. I switched to a different pattern for that based on warp-float snake designs that are woven here in the lowlands of Bolivia.
Guaraní weavers here create snake patterns in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. (They call it kara kara pepo) There are so many versions of it, both simple and complex. This is my modified version of one of them. I love how it looks in supplementary-weft in my latest project.

The sides and front of the box shape collapse inward so that when closed, the purse lies quite flat. I thought this design was really cute. What I love is that you can unclip the flap, open it up and clearly see everything laid out inside instead of having to dig around inside a zippered pouch. I occasionally have to tip out all the contents of some of my larger tool pouches in order to find something.

I dyed a piece of the fabric on which the pieces sit here light blue to use as the lining. I’ve put basic sewing supplies in there…a tin of pins, a wooden needle case, snips, a stitch ripper and some dark thread.

This was the first time I had sewn in the lining before sewing up the piece and the first time I sewed everything before flipping the whole thing right-side-out. I told you about my cheap thrills, right? I was so pleased with myself! As for the mistake, I sewed too close to the thick interfacing. In her video, Handymum sews on the lines she has drawn onto the lining and you can’t see how close she is to the interfacing on the other side. Rather than draw lines, I flipped my piece over and sewed around the interfacing instead, but much too close considering the thickness of the interfacing (I used two layers). I’m all for ripping things out and doing them over but it was too late. I’d already snipped the curve of the top, cut the points off the outer corners and cut into the inner ones. And so, the seams are really strained and stretched over the interfacing and some of my (black!) stitching shows as a result.

I have some of the same Guatemalan cotton in a color called champagne and I might have another go at this sewing pattern but in a longer version using fabric woven from that thread.

Like the indigo cotton, the champagne-colored cotton from Guatemala is slightly finer than 20/2. I love weaving with this stuff.

I’m sad to see my supply of that indigo-dyed Guatemalan cotton getting low although stash-busting is my goal after all. I just know that I’ll probably never get to replace it. It’s special because of the way it has faded after all these years. I love the way it weaves up with all its variations of shades of blue. I still have loads of the champagne color, though. I’m assuming that it was also dyed with natural substances but it doesn’t seem to have faded. I’ll know for sure when I compare the thread on the inside of the cakes to the outside layers of thread.

As for the next project, it will be yet another bag, hopefully. Not another, you say?! But I like to think that I’m thinking a bit out of the box with this one. I have this crazy idea of making a long bag in which to carry my backstrap loom that doubles as a backstrap.

When I was house-sitting last year, I took my loom with work-in-progress to my new digs in a large cotton tote bag……
…..only to find that I had forgotten to bring a backstrap. It turned out that the tote bag in which I had carried it made a fairly decent emergency backstrap. From this came the idea.

I’m using Guatemalan cotton again except this is somewhat heavier stuff, also from Mayan Hands, that my friend Kate gave me. I dyed the black and it accompanies cochineal-dyed purplish-red (dyed in Guatemala) and natural white. I’m back to one of my old faithful color combinations.

I’ve tossed around various ideas for the structure and pattern and I think that I’ve finally (almost!) settled on rep weave to give me good sturdy fabric with complementary-warp pick-up patterns. I do try to learn something new with each project. I have in fact woven rep once before and so its not entirely new, hence the “almost” in parentheses. I keep thinking that I need to add a twist to this somehow. If not, creating the strange backstrap/tote bag may have to be the new part of this project.

The only rep weave piece I’ve woven so far.
It makes a nice placemat for my tray table so that things don’t slide around.

In the two new projects that I’ve shown in this post, the thread has come from Guatemala. The finer stuff was bought from Mayan Hands at a conference many years ago in Bellingham. The heavier thread, also from Mayan Hands, was given to me Kate.

Kate working with her Guatemalan loom and warp when I visited in California.

I wove this scarf using fine cotton thread from Guatemala that was given to me by Betty. She had bought it in the 1980s!

I used patterning techniques that I’d learned in Guatemala to decorate it.
I went to Guatemala myself in 2008, met my teacher Lidia and also brought back some cotton of the kind that you see here on the swift. Lidia took me shopping to get the best prices!

I haven’t done a whole lot with it because the quantities were quite small. I’d bought it with the idea of using it as supplementary weft rather than as warp. But here’s one thing I ‘ve used it for….

Fabric for a book cover. There wasn’t enough of any one color and so I had to step outside my color box and combine two.

So, that’s another stash that I’d like to get into. And, on that same trip I bought a ball of handspun cotton singles from a spinner. The ball sat in the closet for close to ten years and then I got to use pretty much all of it for this sheer scarf project….

I love this white-on-white supplementary weft technique.

I haven’t been to Guatemala since 2008 but every now and then someone puts a Guatemalan warp in my hands and I get to take a trip down Guatemalan-weaving Memory Lane….(and it seems that this post is also turning into one!)

I hope to make another trip to Australia in October and I’m thinking that maybe I could make a little side-trip to Guatemala from Miami on the way back when I’ll be virtually empty-handed. Who knows?

As for now, I need to go and figure out what to use for the thick weft in my rep piece, if in fact rep is my final decision for this project. See you next time.