Month: November 2023

Backstrap Weaving – Putting it All Together.

This post is about the second expandable folder that I’ve been working on….the weaving, the stitching, the ironing and the gluing. I’m posting all this as much for my own future reference as for the folks who have asked me for an explanation. I have written my notes in my weaving book but there aren’t accompanying photos as there are here. If the process doesn’t interest you, I hope that you will at least enjoy scrolling through and seeing the photos in this post.

The folder is only 99% finished because my box of random buttons that I’ve picked up here and there over the years is now living in Australia. Silly me hadn’t thought far enough ahead to select one or two to bring back to Bolivia with me for this project. I’ve never actually been button hunting here in Santa Cruz. Who knows what I might discover.

The button-and-loop closure that I used for the first folder. I’d like to use two such closures on the new folder, one on each of the plain weave side panels, as this second folder is going to be quite stuffed full of charts.

What did I learn from this project?…..that the cotton fabric I bought for the stitched shibori project that I planned to combine with my woven cloth shrinks a heck of a lot in the hot dye bath. I had to adjust my overall folder design to accommodate that. I’ll keep that in mind for future projects.

In my last post I showed you how different the two faces of this cloth turned out…both attractive in their own way. I eventually decided on using this bolder face for the folder project.
First things first…finish the main pattern fabric. At this point I was celebrating passing halfway.

Next came the weaving of the plain-weave side panels. I chose to weave these separately as the wool singles are particularly grabby in plain weave and I need to operate the loom in a certain way to minimize the amount of abrasion. The sheds are much easier to open when I work with warp floats in the pattern area and so I find that it’s an overall smoother and more efficient operation to just weave the plain and patterned areas separately.

I prefer to weave the two strips separately rather than as one long band which I then cut in two. That saves me having to set up to accommodate the longer warp in my limited weaving space. It does result in a bit more waste, though.

The woven pieces were then ready to assemble into one wide piece for the folder.

Just as I had done for the first folder, I joined the three panels using the cross-knit-loop stitch that my Vietnamese backstrap loom teachers use to join panels for skirts and blankets.

I hemmed the completed piece and lined it with my stitched shibori fabric. I also inserted two pieces of stiff card between the woven fabric and the lining….one for each half…..and added a line of sewing across the center of the piece as well, thus keeping the two cardboard pieces separate. I stitch by hand and I love doing this kind of straightforward stitching. At this point I discovered that the amount of stitched shibori fabric that remained was not going to be enough for my original construction plan. Well, we just have to adjust and make it work, don’t we?

These will be the fan-folded pieces that make the expandable sides of the folder. I use two for each side…one for each half… and join the two halves together as the very last step of the process.

The sides of my first folder extend all the way from bottom to top…

You can see the line in the middle of the fan-folds where the two halves are eventually glued together.

In order to fit the full height of the folder I needed 11″ of length for each piece of shibori fabric. I only had enough fabric for 9 1/2″. It’s more than enough to contain the sheets of charting paper that will be housed within the folder so it’s not a big deal…still, I think the side panels look much nicer if they can extend all the way to the top of the folder. It’s hard to believe that the cotton cloth shrank so much in the dye bath. I’m wondering if I perhaps failed to take into account seam allowance when I originally measured out the cloth. I didn’t take notes!

I ironed fusible interfacing onto the reverse of the four stitched shibori pieces and then created the fan folds. This cotton cloth is quite a bit heavier than the fabric that I used on the first folder and I had to coax it into holding nice crisp folds. It really didn’t want to.

And now, this is where it all starts to get a bit fiddly and I’m afraid that my photos aren’t great. I hope that my descriptions don’t sound as clumsy to you as they do to me!

The four fan-folded pieces are then sewn to the inside of the folder. The first folded section in each is sewn down flat along the the edges of the folder. That piece of cardboard is only there for the photo to help distinguish the folded pieces from the background lining cloth.

And now, out comes the iron and things get even fiddlier! I have a burn on the inside of my wrist to prove it. The next step is about inserting the cardboard dividers. Here’s a photo of the sides and dividers in position in the finished folder….

Think of the side pieces as being folded into a series of valleys and mountains. The dividers extend across the folder from mountain peak to mountain peak. There are two mountain peaks on each half of each side.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you come up with a much better way to do this which will have me slapping my forehead, but this worked well for my first folder and I haven’t since been able to come up with another option.

I cut five pieces of stiff card (8″ tall) and twenty 8 x 1 1/2″ strips of heavy fusible interfacing. I ironed about two thirds of the width of each interfacing strip to the two edges of each card, one to the upper face and one to the lower.

I hope this photo gives you the idea. This isn’t the tricky part, by the way!

My cardboard divider pieces now look like they are edged with an “open jaw” of interfacing ready to clamp down on and enclose something. They need to be ironed onto the fan folds so that they grip the mountain peaks. Yep, that’s the fiddly bit. For the most part it works really well, especially if you manage to keep your body parts out of the way of the iron. I used Wellbond glue for any parts that weren’t quite within reach of the iron. It’s good stuff and works really well. However, I prefer risking the iron to the mess of the glue. Plus the glue requires a much longer “cure” time than the ironed interfacing.

This process will utilize four of the five pieces of card. The fifth gets inserted at the end when you join the two halves of the side panels together. I used the Wellbond glue for this and could then sit back and give it the required amount of time to cure before placing my pile of pattern charts into their new home.

You can see the center join which forms another mountain. The interfacing tabs on the last cardboard divider are glued in and sandwiched between the two sections.
All I need to do now is braid some loops and find two nice silver buttons.

That just about finished off my supply of Petaluma wool. I have some left to use in my next venture into dyeing with cochineal which could well be my next project. I’ll be able to weave a (very) little something with it. If not that, I’ll weave cotton ikat cloth, using my handspun, and make another stitched shibori project for a wallet.

And here’s a reminder that Dorinda is in the States and will be able to mail orders of beautiful cloth and products created by my weaving teacher, Maxima, and the other ladies in the co-op they operate in the central Bolivian highlands. She can do this until December 6. The pieces ae made from the weavers’ own hand-spun and naturally-dyed wool. Take a look at the gorgeous range of colors they are able to create from local dye plants and cochineal. Finished products are available as well as just the cloth on its own for you to use in your own sewing projects. These are snippets of pieces that I have bought over the years.

You can contact Dorinda directly at dkdutcher@hotmail.com or via the PAZA Bolivia blog. I hope you’ll consider making a purchase for yourself or friends for this holiday season. And many thanks to those who have already done so. Dorinda keeps me updated!

Backstrap Weaving – Hitting the Ground Running

I traveled and now I’m back home trying to get my sleeping patterns back in order. I’ve found after all the trips away that I have done that one of the best ways to ease the effects of jet lag is to hit the ground running on my return. In the days when I was teaching English here at the Centro Boliviano Americano, I would arrive back from a trip to Australia and be back in the classroom the next day. I seemed to shake off the effects of jet lag so easily that way. If I come home and am just faced with cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping and a pile of yarn, it’s way too easy to give into the temptation to lay everything down and go take a nap. That doesn’t help at all with getting back to normal sleep patterns.

So, where did I go?

Arriving in Sydney in the early morning, I had hours to kill before my afternoon train up north. I put my luggage into storage at Central Station and went down to the harbor on what was an absolutely glorious day.

My gosh it was crowded down there. Was this the mass tourism that I had been hearing about? Not quite. I eventually realized that people were coming to witness the 50th birthday celebration day for the Sydney Opera House. Crowds were gathering for the day’s events.

Flying into Sydney at day break reminded me of the colors I had chosen for my woven piece named Sunrise, Sunset.

Now I’m back in Bolivia and have hit the ground running as far as my fiber-y pursuits go….not so much as far as cleaning and laundry go, though. Has it helped with the jet lag…..hmmmm, maybe just a little bit.

I had taken some cotton fabric away with me so that I could keep busy during any down time stitching for a shibori project. If you’ve read my most recent posts, you’ll know that I have plans to create another expandable folder just like this one that I just finished…

My expandable folder project has a woven wool cover with three-color patterning. It holds my various styles of blank pattern charts.
I used some fabric that I happened to have to line the cover and make the expandable sides.

I’m planning to use my stitched shibori fabric to line the cover and make the sides on this second folder project. I chose a simple leaf pattern to suit my beginner skill level. I’ve only made a few small stitched shibori experiments so far which I’ve used to line some of my woven bags.

At this stage, all the leaf shapes have been stitched and I am pulling and tying off the threads to prepare the cloth for dyeing. The folds of cloth in the tightly gathered areas will mostly resist the dye. I completed this task and took the piece home ready to go into the dye pot.
Sleep was denied me the first couple of nights. That along with the fact that day time temperatures have been outrageously and unseasonably high (and I don’t have air conditioning), had me dyeing the cloth in the wee hours and attempting to remove the stitches. That was the only time that I could bear to use the stove. It was lovely sitting and working on it in the quiet and relative coolness of 3am.

I’d used stronger thread than in my previous projects and removing it was quite a challenge. I was amazed at how different the two faces of the cloth looked. The photo above shows a soft image while the other face, below, has much bolder lines and higher contrast.

I’ll probably use one face for the lining and the other for the sides because I simply can’t decide which face I prefer.

I’d created a new pattern for the three-color weave I was planning to use for the cover of the new folder. I was once again going to use the wool singles that I’d got from the farmer in California. I dyed two blues to use alongside the natural grey. I think the pattern I drew for the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave was born from having spent some time looking at textiles and basketry from Borneo and Sulawesi.

I made all the necessary calculations and wound the warp leaving it ready to be picked up when I returned from my trip.

This was what was waiting for my return so that I could hit the ground running. I’d separated the threads onto two sticks for the two sets of heddles and left the heddle making itself as the task that would get me straight back into the groove on my return.

Weaving with these wool singles is all about gently taming a hairy squiggly beast. I’d barely got into it when I broke a warp thread. This was a convenient reminder of just how careful I needed to be.

I got some smart and wonderfully thin black cable ties while in Australia for my unconventional way of lashing my warp to the beam.
Approaching halfway and rolling up the woven cloth around beams and paper.
Woo hoo!….past halfway and time to reverse the pattern. No more broken threads. I’m really pleased with the new pattern I created.

I’ll construct the folder in the same way I did the other. The cover will be three woven panels that I join with a decorative stitch. I had requests from a few people to explain how I put the folder together. Hopefully, I’ll remember to take pictures of the process this time so that I can write a blog post about it and show you.

Before I leave, I’d like to invite you to visit the PAZA Bolivia blog that my friend Dorinda Dutcher writes about the work of my weaving teacher Maxima and the other ladies in the co-op in the central Bolivian highlands. There are exciting plans to perhaps introduce the ladies to indigo-dyeing techniques and I can’t wait to see how the weavers combine it with their current gorgeous range of natural colors.

My favorite Bolivian weaving teacher, Maxima, stands here on the left with one of her daughters and a granddaughter…..three generations of weavers! Her granddaughter proudly shows her first ever weaving that has been accepted for sale by the co-op of weavers in her community. It was woven on the traditional leaning frame loom using handspun and naturally dyed wool. Dorinda, who works with these ladies to transport and help sell the products made from this beautiful cloth, has just written a blog post showing all that she has available to ship now from the USA (until Dec 6) if you are looking for Christmas gifts.

Another reason to direct you to the PAZA blog, is to make you aware of the woven products that the ladies offer via the co-op especially now that Christmas is approaching. I do hope that you will consider making a purchase to support them. Dorinda’s latest blog post shows what she has available in the US to ship until December 6 (after which she will be traveling and unable to process orders). Dorinda fills the blog with personal stories and photos of the weavers’ rural lives and is well worth a read even if you aren’t in the market for a beautiful piece of handweaving. Here’s the link again.

Until next time when I’ll hopefully have a finished folder to show you…..