Month: December 2024

Backstrap Weaving – Dovetailing

Let’s start this post with the bit that is actually about weaving on a backstrap loom.

I’ve been studying with two Guaraní ladies and learning all about the style of loom that they use. It’s not a backstrap loom but rather a free-standing vertical frame.

A mini version of a typical Guaraní loom.

After weaving my second project on this loom, I decided to use the cloth I’d produced to cover a notebook in which I could record all I was learning with my Guaraní as well as Ayoreo teachers.

That’s where the backstrap loom came in. I wanted to weave bands with the titles of the book. One half would be for all the notes on the Guaraní loom. The book could then be flipped over so that other half could be used for the Ayoreo notes. I used Clea cotton (2-ply approx 35wpi) and embroidery floss for the supplementary weft.

For the book cover fabric I used a generic cotton from a large cone that my Guaraní teachers typically use and dyed some of it two shades of blue.

And then I had to refer to my drawings again to get back into the swing of dovetail warping.

Dovetail warping….LEFT: Warping the Guaraní loom. RIGHT: Warping the fixed vertical loom in coastal Ecuador. I was creating a warp for a miniature hammock under my teacher’s watchful eye just so that I could learn the technique. We used her handspun cotton.

I had encountered this dovetail style of warping in several places in Ecuador and had had the chance to observe it being done in both wool (Otavalo) and cotton and acrylic (Salasaca) but I only had the opportunity to try it myself when I studied with weavers in coastal Ecuador.

My teacher Felipe demonstrating the way he sets up a dovetail warp for his backstrap loom in Salasaca, Ecuador. The post nearest his left thumb is the dovetail post. He uses an additional post for separating colors. He’s just winding a mini warp to teach me and provide me with a sample to take home.

It can be a little confusing but when working with only one color, you soon get the hang of following this kind of warping path.

W= Warping stake. C=Cross posts. D=Dovetail stick

It creates what I call a discontinuous circle. The warp threads travel in one direction until they reach D and then turn and proceed in the opposite direction until they again reach D. The drawing above resembles the set-up that we used in coastal Ecuador and the one that better represents the Guaraní set-up is below.

When weaving has been completed, element D (which was a stick in Ecuador and a string on the Guaraní loom) is removed and the cloth can be opened out to its full length leaving the loops at the ends of the unwoven warp intact. These loops are then used by the weavers in coastal Ecuador as part of the construction of their hammocks. In a normal circular warp, the warp has to be cut in order to open out the cloth to its full length.

When you start trying to use two colors at once on slightly different paths things get a little mind bending. Two colors are used when the Guarani weavers are going to create patterns in pick-up or just horizontal bars. The first time I did this with my Guaraní teachers, I have to admit that I hadn’t quite wrapped my head around it and was just blindly following the path that they patiently pointed out to me. Only later, when I sat down at my notebook and made my drawings, did I get it all straightened out in my head. But even so, I’ll be needing to refer to my notes for a while until I’ve had more practice.

Here I am passing the thread around the dovetail string. The two upper strings hold the warp cross.

With this learning warp I wove a piece that was wide enough to make a coin purse. However, once the piece was off the loom, I decided to sew two pieces together side by side and make a wider purse that’s more suitable for tools.

Winding the two colors together produced the horizontal bars. A weaving class often starts with winding yarn into balls. That’s Clara above. She and her daughter Eldina are the teachers.
The style of string heddles that the Guaraní weavers use is very unique. They are chained together and not held on a stick.
You can get a better view of them here. This is my teacher Angela who used to allow me to visit and watch her at work many years ago.

Clara was not keen on allowing me to make the heddles and I had to insist on being allowed to make at least the last three on my own. It wasn’t enough and I definitely need more practice. I hope to make our next class all about heddle making. So, when I created the much wider warp for the book cover, I went with the heddles that I am more used to making and tied them off in small bunches. I find it a lot easier to work with these bunches of heddles rather than with heddles suspended on a stick when working on a fixed tension loom such as this, and especially when the piece is wider than band-width.

Several two-color sections in my second warp gave me a lot of practice in sticking to the correct warping path.
This shows the wedges of wood that are the warp-tensioning system. So simple! The lower piece is removed after warping and the upper one, which is shaped, is positioned in order to maintain just the right amount of tension. It gets gradually moved along to its tapered end as weaving progresses and take-up tightens the warp.
The finished cloth….enough for the book cover and a zippered purse. I didn’t need the loops at the ends of the warp around the dovetail string and cut them off.
The cover is on the book and there’s the zippered purse. You can also see the purse I made from the first warp that I’d wound with my teachers.
The two faces of the finished book.
Imagine winding the warp on one of these looms for a hammock! And then making all the heddles. This is the first time I met Angela way back in 2002.

As`for my studies with the Ayoreo looping technique, I made use of the small amounts of the remaining garabatá thread by dyeing it and creating another cuff. Because I only had quite short pieces left and I haven’t got the hang of the clever knotless way of joining two lengths of thread together, I created this cuff in a slightly different way. Instead of working a wide and short piece, I made a narrow and long piece. That way I never ran out of thread in the middle of a row.

I made it mostly about stripes and added a small Chiqueno pattern in the middle.

The thread takes up the dye beautifully!

Dyed garabatá thread and an idea for an arrangement of stripes.

And because my edges, which got hidden within the hems in my other cuffs, would be exposed on this one….and weren’t pretty!….I added a cotton tubular edging to conceal them. And that tubular band is another backstrap loom project to add to this post.

I have a handy piece of furniture that allowed me to improvise a warping board for the tubular band warp.

When I next meet with my teacher Rocío, I’ll have her show me the neat way she has of carrying colors along the edge. And then we’ll get into spinning the big wad of fiber that she got for me! (I showed it in my last post if you missed it and are curious).

The tubular edging makes the cuff hold its shape very nicely, conceals messy edges and adds a really nice finish. I used a button-and-loop closure.

In the meantime, I’ve been visiting a lovely outdoor artisan market that’s just a few blocks from my place. Señora Carmen has a very small stall there where she sells handwork of the indigenous peoples of this lowland part of Bolivia. There I discovered that there is another group here that works with the same fiber as the Ayoreo people. They’re called Weenhayek and they call the fiber caraguata. They work the looped stitch much more loosely but the finishing stitch that they use along the mouths of the bags is different (and I think nicer than the one used by the Ayoreo). I had to buy one of their bags so that I could figure it out (I managed to) and I’m wondering if Rocío knows how to do it.

You can see the difference in tightness in the two Ayoreo examples on the left and the Weenhayek on the right.

And there I’ll leave it for this post. I’ll be getting back to my classes once we’re into the new year. In the meantime there’s plenty to keep me busy with Guaraní, Ayoreo and backstrap loom projects.

Hopefully next time I’ll be able to show a bit about how the garabatá fiber is spun. Until then, sporting a cooling summer cut (the hottest days are yet to come!), I’ll wish you all from my “transition home” here in Santa Cruz, Bolivia a Happy New Year.

Backstrap Weaving – Tales from the Lowlands

It’s been a long time since I last sat down to write a post. There’s been a lot going on and it’s been a bit overwhelming!

First of all, I sold my little one-bedroom apartment. I’d spent a large part of this year doing repairs and painting it, then slowly either selling or giving away my belongings. One of the last things to go was my backstrap weaving station, that is, the bed base to which I would attach my backstrap loom. It was quite sad cutting the straps off the base and dismantling the bed at which I’d sat and happily woven all these years and a little distressing not knowing when next I’d be able to sit at my loom again.

Many years have been spent in my bedroom-floor “studio”.

But that didn’t last long. I was soon occupied with other creative pursuits. In my last post I wrote about the short workshop I’d taken with an Ayoreo artisan learning about the looped stitch worked in plant fiber called garabatá that she uses to create the shoulder bags that both the men and women in this indigenous group carry about with them on a daily basis. The bags are almost a part of their clothing. They never seem to be without one.

My experience in the workshop hadn’t been as productive as I had hoped and while I’d finished it with a much greater amount of admiration for the work, I was also left quite disappointed in the limited amount we had been able to cover in that short time. I had been searching for an Ayoreo teacher for years and had actually given up on ever finding anyone who would be willing to take me on as a student. It seemed that I would have to content myself with buying examples of the bags to study while trying to replicate the stitch in cotton.

Well….I got lucky….so lucky! I was introduced to another teacher, Rocío, and she’s amazing! She’s not only been teaching me the basic stitch and the various patterning techniques but also has been very generous in telling me about the various clans and the origin of the patterns.

But we still had to work in cotton as Rocío explained that the recent fires (which, thank goodness, have now been finally extinguished) and drought either destroyed or weakened the plants meaning that the artisans haven’t been able to produce good quality thread from the extracted fiber.

Working the looped stitch with needle and cotton.

I did manage to scavenge a bit of garabatá fiber here and there so that I could start practicing with the real thing. Cotton really doesn’t do the trick. It behaves in a completely different way from the garabatá and in many ways is more difficult to work with. One nice thing about garabatá fiber is that you can join two strands together without having to tie a knot…a method which I have yet to perfect.

My initial projects will be wrist bands. I’d seen an Ayoreo lady at the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe, NM many years ago wearing several and decided that these would make good learner projects that wouldn’t require huge amounts of thread. It’s always nice to have some kind of finished product rather than just endless samples and the thread was too precious to use only for sampling.

My first finished cuff with a pattern from the Chiqueno clan.

I then started a more complicated pattern from the Dosapay clan which has been stalled until I can find more fiber in these colors.

Sorry about the bare leg shot. As you can see, the project gets tied to the upper leg while the artisan sits crossed legged on the ground.

Rocío tells me that when the piece gets longer, the work is often tied to a bar instead, allowing the artisan to continue to work with the bulk of the piece in their lap. I am nowhere near that point yet!

This next cuff that I made is a two-color example of the Dosapay pattern. It’s hard to appreciate the form of the pattern because I could only fit half of it on the cuff.

As I said before, working with the garabatá fiber is in many ways easier than working in cotton. One disadvantage is the varying girth and stiffness of the handspun thread which can be thin and relatively loosely plied in some parts and therefore quite flexible, only to become much thicker and tightly plied in others.

I dyed some of the fiber black for the third example and used a small version of the Chiqueno pattern so that I could fit the whole thing onto the cuff.

So, there’s been a lot of cuff stuff going on. Rocío told me that there was a chance of perhaps being able to buy a whole ball of spun thread. Her family lives five hours away from us here in the city and maybe they could bring some the next time someone travels in or she travels out.

What happened in the meantime is that someone did come in from the communities bringing a big wad of the raw fiber. I got a call from Rocio asking if I was interested in buying it. I was! It hadn’t been my plan to learn how to spin the fiber but it looks like it’s going to happen! She assured me that this fiber is top quality and will be worth the effort.

A photo that Rocío sent me of the purchase. This cost $7. I can’t even imagine the amount of thread this will produce!

I haven’t had a class with Rocío since that purchase. I know from my experiences learning to spin wool and cotton that it’s going to be a long time before I’ll be able to spin anything usable. I will then surely have a greater understanding of how difficult it must be to produce thread of consistent girth and ply. The fiber is rolled along the upper leg to produce thread. I’m envisioning a very sore leg and hand! My upper leg is already riddled with the evidence of having stabbed myself with the needle multiple times while practicing the stitching.

An Ayoreo lady at the Folk Art market in Santa Fe demonstrating the spinning method.
Three garabatá and four cotton wrist cuffs.

As you can see above, I’ve been weaving as well. Yes, I did manage to get back to my backstrap loom fairly quickly. After selling my apartment, I moved into a fully furnished room still here in the center of Santa Cruz city. It’s in a very vibrant part of the city and just a couple of blocks away from an awesome street market. And hooray, the bed has a wooden base which made setting up a new weaving “studio” very easy! I brought a little piece of the old studio with me…a wool rug woven in the foothill communities 2-3 hours from Santa Cruz city.

I’ve been weaving cuffs…just small projects as I really don’t want to unpack everything in my new home. I have four large wheelie bags packed and ready to go for when I make the final move to Australia and I don’t want to touch anything in those if I can avoid it. I’m just in a transition phase now while I take advantage of the fact that I can study with Rocío.

So, when I found that I needed a shuttle for the wrist cuff projects, it was easier just to buy and eat an icecream than dig through those four wheelie bags in search of one.

And who wouldn’t want to stick around during the Santa Cruz summer when those big beautiful mangoes are filling the street markets at a cost of four for $1.50! Those are Guarani-made placemats on the table which are part of the furnishings in this rented room. I’ve settled in so easily here. I can easily live in one room. My little flat in Katoomba in Australia that awaits me will feel huge after this.

The first two cuffs I made from the same warp have button-and-loop closures. The ends have been turned twice and hemmed. The garabatá cuff has a sliding knot closure. This kind of closure is something that I want to play with more as I hope to weave and sell cotton cuffs at local craft markets once I’m back in Australia. I will be needing additional income sources in order to be able to afford to live there and selling at the markets will also be a good way to publicize classes. The sliding knot closure will allow the cuffs to be adjusted to fit different wrists.

I’m back to using the Brazilian-produced Clea cotton that was pretty much all that was available to me before I started traveling to the States and got thoroughly spoiled with all the choices. However, now with the current amigurumi craze here, there are several other options. Clea remains my favorite, though. It’s fine enough to allow hemmed ends that don’t create excessive bulk on the wrist bands.

The second cuff warp. I plan them to get two cuffs out of each warp. That length of warp fits nicely into my available space here without having to do any rolling up. I’m also avoiding opening those wheelie bags to get out what I would need to enable me to wind longer warps!

There are other reasons to stay on here and not jet off back to Australia immediately. One is the opportunity to study with two Guaraní weavers. I spent time with Angela, my first Guaraní teacher many years ago. We never had any formal classes. It was more a case of my visiting her and hanging out watching while she wove. She was always very generous in allowing me to take pictures and video and ask questions. We would come across each other every few years as she made her way back and forth between the city and her Isoseño community sometimes stopping and living here but then suddenly disappearing back to her community. I eventually lost touch with her. My new Guaraní teachers told me that Angela passed away six years ago. Such shocking and sad news.

Angela in the patio of her home here in the city when I used to visit her. She always had several projects on the go.

I will leave that part of my recent activities to another post. I have my very own Guaraní loom now in mini form which I can work on in my room. Of course, I won’t be carting it to Australia and will give it back to my teachers when it comes time to leave. I love its simplicity and particularly like the shaped wedges of wood which are moved within the slot to reduce the increased tension on the warp that results from take-up. It’s such a simple and effective system! Two of the strings hold the cross while warping. The third is the dovetail string which I’ll tell you more about in the next post.

Mini Guarani loom on top of my wheelie bags set up ready to be warped.

I’ll leave you with this picture of it and tell you all about it and the weaving in my next post, hopefully before Christmas. I’m nicely settled here now and should be able to get back into posting more often.