Author: Laverne Waddington

I am an Australian who has recently returned to Australia after having lived for 32 years in South America where I was teaching English, weaving, writing, and studying indigenous weaving techniques. I have been learning and documenting traditional textile techniques of various Latin American countries with indigenous weavers since 1996. Although I have studied using several types of simple looms, my loom of choice is the backstrap loom. After many years of largely replicating, adapting and embellishing patterns that had been shared with me by my weaving teachers and friends, I now design my own unique pieces while continuing to employ the woven structures used by my mentors in South and Central America. In 2009 I decided to leave my English teaching job to focus on weaving and, since then, have self-published eight PDFs on technique and patterns which were sold on various websites over the years. I now plan to sell them here on this blog...coming soon. Please subscribe to this blog for updates.

Backstrap Weaving – Therapy

Long time no see. A lot has been happening but at the same time not a lot has been happening.

In the “a lot has been happening” category I’ve undergone a dramatic change of scene:

It’s certainly dramatic for someone who has been living in a landlocked country for the last twenty-seven years. The following might give you a clue as to my whereabouts….

I pass this mural on my way to the shops.

Yes, I’m back in Australia for good after having talked about making this move for years. But I’m still in transition mode as I will be staying with my brother and sister-in-law in this beachy area on the mid north coast of NSW until mid November when I will then move to my own place in the Blue Mountains.

It’s a lovely area for strolling in bushland and by the shore. I walk around the block to a large open field where kangaroos come to graze in the late afternoon. They’re far too shy to allow me to photograph them. We stop still and stare at each other for a good five minutes after which they nervously return to their grazing. However, I only have to take one very cautious and almost imperceptible step closer and they’re off.

I have these guys waiting to greet me when I step out in the late afternoon to bring in the laundry.

Kookaburras create quite a racket when I take a stroll around the neighborhood but will instantly pipe down the moment I turn on my camera to record them.

I had long planned to fly out of Bolivia on April 28. I had my accident with the four-legged black torpedo that I described in my last post one month prior and it almost messed up everything. Needless to say it was tough leaving after thirty-two years in South America and all the fuss after the accident didn’t make it any easier. I was in need of both mental and physical therapy by the time I reached my brother’s place on May 4.

I’m alone now house-sitting for my brother and his wife who are away traveling for two months. I watched the bag I wove and sewed for my sister-in-law back in 2006 head out the door for yet another world adventure…

Here they are in Alaska on this current trip where Deb’s using it to hold her binoculars….

It’s always so nice to know that a gift has turned out to be so useful.

The best mental therapy during this newest transition period has come in the form of sitting on the beach in the sunshine, inhaling the sea air while listening to and watching the waves roll in. It reminds of this weaving I did some years ago….

I always like to see the white string heddles in this picture as foaming waves rolling onto a yellow sand beach. And there’s a big ol’ sun there in the foreground.

Now it’s humpback whale migration season and on the next clear day I’ll head to the lighthouse to see if I can spot them.

Other forms of therapy…..smelling eucalyptus leaves burning as folks rake the fallen ones up to burn in the cool evening air (such nostalgia!), walking along accompanied by all the magical birdsong that I recognize from my younger days in Australia, making new friends which has turned out to be super easy in this wonderfully friendly community.

Scenes from strolling around the neighborhood.

One such friend that I met at the weekly craft group happened to mention in conversation that she had lived in Papua New Guinea. I immediately asked her if she had seen the bilum bags that artisans there make from plant fiber. The stitch they use is exactly the same as that used by the Ayoreo people in Bolivia although the plant material used is different. I remember my Ayoreo teacher being fascinated by the fact that these people on the other side of the world are making bags using the same technique.

The main difference is that the bilum bags are stitched much more loosely. The looping is very much more open, even more open than the work by the Wichi artisans in Argentina. The bilums are also worked as a continuous round and are, therefore, seamless whereas the Ayoreo artisans work a row from left to right and then flip the work and return, once again working from left to right. Jey brought a bag to show me that she had collected fifty years ago. I’m guessing the colors are from natural sources and it’s amazing how vibrant they are after all these years.

The Ayoreo work is so much tighter that, when set next to the bilum, it’s very difficult to see that the looping technique used in both is indeed the same. It was very exciting for me to be able to see this work and I can’t wait to send a photo to my teacher in Bolivia. Jey tells me that she even used to have a small hammock made in this technique for one of her babies.

What do I do when I go along to these weekly craft group meet-ups with my rehabilitating hand? Well, I’m just about able to put enough twist into my takli spindle to spin some of my brown cotton. There’s progress because when I first arrived here I couldn’t do it at all…couldn’t even grip the spindle. It’s not the most comfortable thing in the world and I can’t do it forever and a day as I used to.

There are issues with my wrist and I’m not recovering the range of movement that I had hoped. It’s taken me this long to get an appointment with an orthopedist here and I’ll see him on Wednesday to find out what’s going on and if there’s any reason for concern.

My occupational therapist dresses up my hand in the most interesting ways! The tape pattern was designed by a Polynesian tatoo artist. While wearing this on my skin I’m thinking that maybe something like this will seep into my weaving one of these days…..a fun souvenir of this slow rehab.

BUT I have been able to weave! In my last post I showed how I had trained my left hand to operate the loom and do pick-up. In this way, the hatband I’d started before the accident slowly got finished and my friend did a fabulous job of attaching it to his hat after I had already left Bolivia.

Well, now I can do all that using my injured right hand. I’m able to wind a decent warp, make string heddles and weave narrow bands with pick-up using medium weight cotton thread. I’ve never before thought about what role each of my two hands plays in my weaving process. When I’m using two sets of heddles, it turns out that it’s my left hand that does the twisting and rolling action on one set while my right only needs to pull the other set straight up. It can manage that and do the pick-up!

So, I’ve been making some key fob thank-you gifts:

First one for Jey for lending me her bilum to play with.

This band got folded in half with its ends clamped between the jaws of the key fob hardware. Then I made another for one of my physiotherapists who I felt had gone above and beyond. I found out that she has two much-adored golden retrievers that have their own Instagram page and so I wove a fob with their names.

I used the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave which produces a quirky kind of lettering.

I think it’s fun that the lettering matches the rather unsteady and quirky writing on my hand-written thank-you note! Fortunately, my former bank in Bolivia has been the only place so far that has insisted on my producing a perfect signature.

The other side of the band just has paw prints and is shown here sitting on top of a very rustic woolen backstrap that I got in Peru.

Alison Irwin created a chart of letters in this structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave which was published in the Winter ’22 edition of Little Looms magazine. I sometimes need to make adjustments to the letters in order to create the ideal spacing in the particular words I’m weaving. The chart for the paw prints can be found in my Complementary-warp Pattern Book along with two other versions.

There’s a long list of people to thank. I’ll be busy at the loom making gifts and that’s yet another form of therapy. Luckily the guest-room bed has a wooden base and I’ve been able to anchor my loom to it in much the same way as I did in Bolivia.

It might be a while before I can get into this though….

This just a part of the big box of luscious silk that weaving friend Laura sent me from her stash in Canada. Such generosity. She shipped it quite some time ago and I could hardly believe it when I got to Australia and finally got to see it.

Some of it is insanely fine but I do enjoy weaving with fine thread and…..silk! I can’t even imagine untying those skeins and winding the thread into balls. Actually, my hand could probably manage that but right now I can’t trust it to wind a good well-tensioned warp with such fine stuff. I wouldn’t be able to maintain a steady grip on the thread. That’s something to aspire to. I think I’ll have to take on working with increasingly fine material in slow steps as I slowly recover function in my right hand.

At craft group I also got to meet up with the lady who two years ago had given me a skein of gorgeous variegated silk. I’d sent her photos of what I’d made with it but now I could take the finished piece and show it to her in person. You might remember this project…..

Now she’s teaching me how to crochet winter slippers. Remember that it’s winter down here. I’m so slow though that I’m not sure I’ll have these finished in time! There’s wrist rotation involved in working the hook and I can’t do that yet. So, I hold the hook steady and move the work around instead. It seems to be working! We’re just using scrap wool for this initial sample while I get the hang of it.

I love that things that I’ve been weaving over the years are now coming out and being used on a daily basis. I never used this bag in Bolivia and now it goes with me everywhere!

When I tell people that I weave, at least I have something I can show as an example.

I was having a bit of a down day at the radiologist having my wrist x-rayed when the receptionist admired this bag that I happened to be using that day. She was quite bewildered when I explained that I’d made it myself…..from scratch. No, I hadn’t bought the fabric. I took yarn, tied a pattern onto it, put it into two different colored dye baths with more tying in between, removed all the ties, wove it into fabric on a simple loom of sticks, then sewed the cloth into a bag, wove a strap and edged the flap. Sometimes I forget what this must sound like to a non-fiber, non-weaver person! And then the inevitable question…how long did it take? After all that, she may have regretted having complimented my bag but that simple compliment had made my day ❤️.

So, while I’m excited about the fact that my hand can tolerate my making a couple of key fobs, the thing that has made me happiest is that there is a new backstrap weaver in the making here in Lake Cathie. Courtney, who comes along to every second session of our craft group meet-ups, showed up today with this….

She had just finished crocheting a stunning mochila bag when I first met her and was, as a never-ever weaver, busily researching how to weave a strap. Well, you know that I can’t help myself and I took one of my key fob warps along to show her. She was immediately hooked and went off with links to my Backstrap Basics article and my Basic Warping for Backstrap Looms video class which are both free and available here on my blog. What a great job she’s done rounding up the bits and pieces and getting herself set up. She made my day when she brought this this morning to show me. How I miss in-person teaching!

Do I miss Bolivia and the folks that I have left behind?…of course I do! Oh my aching heart. I had a teary moment on my way back here when I visited a mega supermarket in the States. I noted the rows and rows of neatly and attractively arranged goods, the lack of raucous cumbia music, the wide open spaces, the comfortable controlled temperature and immediately missed the chaos of the Santa Cruz street markets with their dirt, heat, crowds, odours and noise! (And prices, I might add. Phew, that has been an adjustment!) But, sigh, choices have to be made.

So, that’s all for this post. My hand is saying “enough!” (and unfortunately I had quite a painful and restless night as both hand and shoulder protested against my having typed all this at my laptop). They’re much happier weaving.

I’ll leave you with something I spotted at the beach the other day. Nope, I’m definitely not in Bolivia any more.

Backstrap Weaving – Accidents

There’s been weaving happening at my backstrap loom but this has been a bit different from a standard band-weaving project. A recent incident turned this into an interesting challenge.

Regular readers of my blog may recall mentions now and then of the fact that I literally fell into weaving after taking a fall while out mountain biking in Colorado. That incident back in 1995, which left me on crutches for six weeks in a Colorado youth hostel, started a chain of events that created the backstrap weaver that I am today. If you’d like to know more, I can tell you that during the pandemic British weaver Stacey Harvey-Brown invited a few dozen weavers to tell the story of how they got into weaving for her Loom Room blog. It’s fascinating reading about the different paths the various invitees have taken to arrive at their looms. Here’s the link to mine.

The reason I’ve taken this little trip back in time to think about an accident thirty years ago that became a life-changing event is because a couple of weeks ago I once again found myself down on the ground thinking “Ouch!”

While in 1995 my first thoughts were about how all my plans to hike and camp in the Utah canyons had been ruined (hiking was my passion at that time), this time my first thoughts were about weaving and all the other fiber-related activities I do that require an intact dominant hand. Darn it, I had broken my right wrist and it required surgery. Was this also going to be a life-changing event?

This screen shot from security camera footage shows white-headed me walking away in the distance while a happy-go-lucky dog bears down on me. It kept going and ran right into the back of my legs taking me out like bowling ball hitting a pin!

Anyway, I’m determined not to let this slow me down too much while remaining sensible and giving myself time to heal. First up was a visit with my Ayoreo teacher, Rocío. She’s been teaching me about the traditional process of stitching bags using garabatá thread as well as about the patterns that identify the various Ayoreo clans.

Rocío showing me how she connects two lengths of thread without using a knot.

The last time I’d seen Rocío I had still been practicing the basic stitch using crochet cotton. Since then, and without Rocío’s knowledge, I’ve been scavenging bits of garabatá thread from various sources and working entirely with that material.

The most recent piece was this bag that I stitched during the Carnival break…

My indigenous weaving teachers have never been in the habit of expressing much enthusiasm when I show them my creations. Sometimes it’s a little crushing but I know it’s just their way. My current Guaraní teachers are particularly cool! So, of course I was glowing with pride when Rocío reacted so joyfully to the things I showed her. I think she was shocked. She particularly liked the red, black and white bag with the woven backing I used. I showed that in my last blog post.

She immediately called her husband to come and take photos.

The idea of my visit was to have her show me how to spin and ply the garabatá fiber that she had brought me. While I won’t be able to use my hand to do it myself for some time, at least I can turn it over in my mind in the meantime. A friend came with me and took video. The most valuable thing was seeing how Rocío joins lengths of spun and plied thread during the stitching process without having to use a knot. I hadn’t been successful doing it and had been resorting to using a dab of glue as backup. Rocío was not impressed when I confessed that! We really focused on it this time and I’ve learned a thing or two that had previously escaped me because I simply hadn’t been ready for it yet.

Showing Rocío some woven rather than stitched garabatá.
The fiber is spun and plied by rolling it along the upper leg. Both hands need to be involved so I’ll just have to be patient.

As for that hatband project, I decided that it was time to smarten up my left hand. I really needed to at least try.

It was a little discouraging at first because this is the distance I was able to weave after three consecutive days of spending one to two hours at the loom.

The gift project had a deadline and I didn’t see myself being able to complete it. But my left hand got smarter and faster and I found that once the cast had been switched to a brace, I could at least insert the pinky of my right hand into the shed to hold it open while I inserted the sword.

One-handed pick-up. I’m just holding the sword here for the photo. I couldn’t rotate my wrist to be able to insert it in the shed.
In progress on the loom and finished. I wish I could complete the gift by attaching it to my friend’s hat but I don’t think either hand is up for that kind of sewing right now.

And then came a visit with my Guaraní teacher, Eldina.

Eldina working on a warp just wide enough to be able to demonstrate for me the technique the Guaraní weavers call Moisi.
I forgot to bring my swords so we used scissors to separate the threads that needed to be heddled. Three sets of heddles are used for this structure. Eldina’s 5-month-old baby girl is never far away when she’s weaving and teaching.

Eldina had to call her mother to be reminded of how threads are selected to go into each set of heddles. Grandma Clara is the Moisi expert while Eldina tends to focus on Karakarapepo. According to Eldina, pick-up for the Moisi style is much more complicated than it is for Karakarapepo. If you’ve read my posts from long ago when I was studying with my very first Guaraní teacher, Angela, you might remember that I soon realized that the structure that I call Intermesh and which I first learned from an Ayacucho weaver in Peru in 1995, is the same as Moisi. This allowed me to easily replicate some of the lovely patterns that Angela had been weaving to make cell phone pouches. Replication is always one of my first steps in learning.

A cell phone pouch that I wove using the intermesh structure back in the days when phones were small and cute.

Hopefully, Eldina will eventually take on all of Clara’s skills and knowledge and maybe pass them on to her baby daughter some day.

Mother and baby busy at the loom!

Clara has been working on samples of jaguar skin print using the Moisi technique for a project that a wildlife photography guide is planning. While this sample is not exactly what the guide has in mind, I’m so in love with this Moisi piece. I think it’s stunning. Hopefully the guide will be able to communicate more precisely his vision for this project but he is, of course, paying for materials and compensating Clara for the time she has spent so far. Commissioned work is hard!

It’s really interesting for me to discover that the thread arrangement while warping and the thread selection for heddles is really different from the way I was taught in Peru. Once my hand is back in actIon, I’d like to set up a warp for my backstrap loom in the way Eldina and Clara set up on their vertical loom. I’d like to see if there’s perhaps some slight difference in the structure that I’m missing. The woven results certainly appear to be identical.

So, my backstrap loom is just a bunch of sticks now. I might give left-handed warping a go eventually to see if I can manage the Guaraní style of set-up for Moisi. But for the next two weeks at least I’ll be giving my wrist a chance to quietly heal. Maybe I’ll dig out the files in which I’ve started writing new books and get my thoughts reorganized on those. I’m in a transition period right now having sold my old apartment and not in a position to set up for photo shoots but at least I could work on the overall plan, chapter headings etc. A good introduction always gets the ball rolling. Let’s see….

And, speaking of my books….the hatband pattern, or at least something very similar, is in my More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns book. There are so many versions of the snake pattern which is basically an embellished zig-zag and I’m often adapting them to suit the number of threads with which I’m working.

If you’re a regular visitor to my blog and have at some point thought about perhaps buying one of my books, maybe you’d like to take the step to buying one now at taprootvideo.com. The accident and resulting surgery have been a significant financial blow and every little bit helps! I’d really appreciate it!

Backstrap Weaving – Garabatá!

Heads-up: Much of this post is dedicated to the Ayoreo looped stitching that I’ve been studying with my teacher here but yes, there’s also a bit of backstrap loom weaving thrown in here and there.

I’ve been back in Santa Cruz for a while now after my trip to see my highland teachers. I got straight back to studying the textile crafts of the lowlands. While I still haven’t managed to get together with my Ayoreo teacher to learn how to spin the lovely bundle of garabatá fiber that she got for me, I’ve still been busily scavenging all the spun garabatá thread that I can find so that I can continue to practice, practice, practice.

There’s probably a few years of spinning in that bundle….for me, anyway, as a beginner.

You may remember that I’d taken a few lengths of spun garabatá thread with me to the highlands to throw into the indigo pot. It was such a small amount. I had to think carefully about how to best use it.

The bundles in the top left corner are the indigo-dyed ones.

I decided to try to copy the pattern on an Ayoreo bag that I’d bought which had been made with what looks to me to be a combination of Dosapey and Chiqueno pattern. The Chiqueno pattern is the fine-lined diamond shape. For all I know, this combination of figures has another name altogether and identifies another clan. I’ll have to ask Rocío next time I see her. So far, I only know the two patterns that identify the Dosapey and Chequeno clans. Rocío tells me that the techniques used to produce those two can be used in various combinations to create all the other patterns. Right now I have my eye on a pattern on a bag stitched by a Wichi artisan of Argentina which doesn’t seem to be one used by the Ayoreo here in Bolivia.

While it was interesting figuring out how to combine the two patterns, in the end I didn’t think it was the best way to showcase the indigo thread.
The finished pouch is on the right. I used the Dosapey pattern, or part thereof, in all these pieces.

Because of my limited supply of garabatá thread, I’ve been only stitching one face of the larger finished items and turning to my backstrap loom to weave the other face in cotton.

There’s something so nice about weaving just simple white cloth like this. I’m using the non-mercerized cotton that my Guaraní teachers call “crudo” and which does indeed have a very raw feel to it. The woven and stitched panels are quite easy to combine and I really like the result.

I still had indigo thread left over from that project and decided to try another project in which the color might play a larger role.

I love going to this little store that’s just a few blocks from my place here in the center of town. It’s on one of my regular evening walking routes. Carmen sells Guaraní and Ayoreo crafts and, as far as I can see, is the only one selling Ayoreo products in that entire handcraft market.

I drop by now and then to look at the products and be inspired. Occasionally, I can’t help but buy a little something.

This is one of the products that Carmen sells. It’s made from palm leaves by Guaraní artisans. It’s very firm and holds that lovely egg-like shape. It’s one of those things that just feels so good to cradle in the palm of your hand.

I bought a conveniently small Ayoreo bag from Carmen (convenient because it was one of the lowest priced bags due to its size) which had four rows of the Chiqueno pattern on a surprisingly bright turquoise background. This would inspire my next project…..multiple rows of half the Chiqueno pattern.

With this I added one more cuff to the collection. These are perfect projects for learning and practicing new patterns. I like the way the indigo is a bigger player in this piece.

What remained to be done was to continue that pattern to complete the full Chiqueno diamond. This was my hide-away-inside-during-the-Carnival-madness project.

I’m still working on the technique that allows the Ayoreo artisans to join two lengths of thread without using a knot. I’m not usually confident about my own attempts and end up adding a tiny drop of glue for extra security. Keep practicing!
This latest bag also got a woven back. This time I used the intermesh structure as I wanted to weave something that resembles the pattern on the front. The intermesh structure as I know it only allows me to use two colors, though.
At the backstrap loom once more. The structure that I’m calling intermesh uses two sets of string heddles alternated with rows of pick-up.

The diamond shapes are very easy to weave although I couldn’t match the scale of the pattern on the garabata piece.

Only after sewing the two pieces together and declaring it finished, did I have the idea of trying to copy the horizontal stripes on the edge of the garabatá piece. I could have woven them as vertical stripes and then turned the fabric sideways to sew. It would have looked pretty cool having the stripes continue from the edge of the garabatá piece across the back of the bag. Too late! But that idea no doubt is going to stick with me until I have a chance to try it out in another project.

Carmen told me that she often travels out to the communities to bring back new products and that she would look for garabatá thread for me on these visits. Because this particular conversation had taken place in December last year, I had given up hope that this would ever happen. However…. I was out on my evening stroll last week and bumped into Carmen in the street. She’d just closed up shop and told me that she had thread for me. The excitement!

An apple for scale. This will go a long way! I may have to save it to take back to Australia. I love just holding it in my hand and it has the most wonderful smell!

There’s been some activity with my Guaraní teachers too.

Now that I’ve learned the basics behind dressing and operating the Guaraní loom, I’ve been trying to focus on specific details rather than spending the entire time in class warping for a large project. It’s about process rather than product for me and my desire to do this is not something that my teacher quite understands. In this particular class, I could have happily spent the whole time just making string heddles in the Guaraní style over and over again until I felt less clumsy about it. The Guaraní style of heddle making is not like anything I’ve run across before. I think I have the hang of it now, though.

I think I disappoint Clara a little when I don’t want to put a large warp on the loom. She suggests making a placemat, for example, but no, I’m boring and weird and just want to make heddles…haha.

Below, you can see what the heddles look like at the end of the project when they’re removed from the loom. The warp above is a combination of colored Clea two-ply crochet cotton (roughly 8/2) and the heavier non-mercerized white. My teachers always use the heavier thread for heddles.

I wasn’t all that interested in weaving off that last narrow project. Like I said, I really only wanted to practice making heddles. But I did weave it and it was good practice in heddle operation using a method which also seems to be very unique to Guaraní weavers.

I grabbed this shot from a video I made many years ago with my first Guaraní teacher, Angela. You can see her using the heddles to create a shed.
Piecing together strips of that narrow piece to make another zippered purse. I modeled it on the one above that I wove years ago for a plain-weave weave-along that we ran on Ravelry and have been using ever since.
In the latest class I worked with an even narrower warp, only about 1 cm wide! Sorry, Clara, I still don’t want to weave a placemat.

In this class, I wanted to learn how to warp a checkerboard pattern that Clara and Eldina often use in their work and see the different ways it can be manipulated to create patterns both with and without doing pick-up. I’ve set up a warp with this pattern on my backstrap loom now for further study. I’ll show you the results next time.

After being cooped up for four days straight during Carnival, I decided to take a trip with a friend up to the foothills for a weekend about 2 hours out of Santa Cruz city. It was a nice way to escape the heat, do some walking, treat myself to some meals out and, most importantly, visit the hummingbird refuge!

Hills! Santa Cruz city is soooo flat!
This!

We went to the Refugio de Colibríes (hummingbird refuge) with very low expectations so as not to be disappointed. Maybe we’d see a couple of birds if we sat very still for an hour. Wrong! We saw loads of them. I’m not going to rattle off the various species but if you’re on Facebook you can visit the refugio’s page and see the photos taken by owner, Saúl, with accompanying descriptions.

I managed to get this shot by placing my phone over the eye piece of Saúl’s telescope. I could see the little guy’s chest moving to its heartbeat through the telescope. But the telescope was just an added bonus. The naked eye alone was enough to be able to enjoy the birds and be able to distinguish one species from the next. Owner-guide Saúl was fantastic. Goodness knows how many times he’s explained the same things to visitors but he does so with such enthusiasm.

Maybe there’ll be a hummingbird figure on my next Guaraní warp.

Backstrap Weaving – Highland Holiday

I’ve been up to the highlands and am now back again in the hot tropical lowlands. Yes, I’m still in Bolivia. Australia is there waiting for me and I’ll get there event-u-a-lly…..

I meant to write a blog post yesterday but once I got into sorting and editing the photos, I found myself completely overwhelmed. Lest that happens again today, I’ve decided to make this just an overview. Anything that doesn’t make it into this post will probably show up now and then in future ones as well as in my Facebook and Instagram accounts.

So, on this ten-day visit to Independencia , Cochabamba where my weaving teachers live and where Dorinda was also vacationing, here’s a run down of some of the things I did…..

I took the five-hour minivan route to Independencia from Cochabamba instead of the eight-hour one by coach. I’m guessing that the minivan is capable of traveling on roads that are perhaps unsuitable for the larger bus and that the bus remains in service because it’s required to service many tiny communities that are scattered along its longer path. The minivan route is no less scenic than the one I traveled last time by bus. In fact it may be even more so.

From the town of Quillacollo just outside Cochabamba city we head straight for the mountains and in under an hour we had zig-zagged our way up to around 3700m leaving the city of Cochabamba a mere blur in the distance on the valley floor.

From there it’s a journey along slopes of deep narrow valleys high above lively rivers (it’s wet season). Water cascades down the slopes above, crosses the dirt road ahead of us and continues tumbling its way down to the green valley floor. Then we go up over passes to continue along the next valley, up again and so on. I was sitting in the second last row and it was like riding a bucking bronco back there with every descent from the passes. I gave up trying to take photos and instead just tried to imprint the scene on my brain.

And then we stopped so that the driver could negotiate the carrying of some freight for a couple who had flagged us down and it was one of those perfect moments for getting a nice shot. We happened to be on a relatively flat and open area with the setting sun casting a golden glow on the hillsides and I was able to hold my phone steady for a change and get a photo of the peaceful scene. I thought that if I just get one nice photo from the five-hour trip, I’ll be happy.

So much for this just being an “overview”. I’ve already spent too much time just on the van trip! Back into overview mode….

On the surface, the town didn’t seem to have changed much since my last visit….

How such a wickedly steep street can look so mild in this photo is beyond me!
These rocky streets in town become slippery with mud after rain but dry up miraculously quickly.

However, some things had changed….Maxima was now living in a house of her own with a lovely view and even had wifi.

Charqui (jerky) on the washing line in the patio in front of a nice view across the valley.

With Dorinda, my teacher Maxima, (long time followers of my blog will know them), her daughter, Vilma and the grandbabes, we dyed a bunch of skeins of handspun yarn with indigo in a banana-based vat.

I mashed overripe bananas with Maxima and little Mayra for the indigo dye bath.

I think this was only the third time that Maxima was attempting to dye with indigo. The second time had apparently failed and so I spent a lot of time wondering…are we doing this right? Will it work this time? Well, it did and I got to keep one of the skeins. I can’t wait to use it in a project on my backstrap loom. The skeins are made up of the ladies’ doubled handspun wool singles. Once dyed, the doubled threads are then tightly plied. I’ll get to ply my own skein which pleases me because I’m not fond of weaving with the high amount of twist that these weavers typically put into their yarn.

Maxima and daughter, Vilma, showing off the aguayo (carrying cloth) Maxima wove for a custom order from the USA. Indigo-dyed yarn from the first attempt can be seen in the stripes. This cloth is gorgeous! The colors are so rich and Maxima has included a stunning variety of figures. It’s all Maxima’s work except for the tubular edging.
A close-up view of a small section of the center of the aguayo where you can see some of the indigo-dyed yarn in the decorative joining stitch.
We made skeins. I’d never made skeins just on my hands before and was happy not to have mine end up in a tangled mess. The singles yarn immediately kinks back on itself when not under tension and can make things difficult to control.
Immersing skeins in the indigo dye pot with Dorinda, granddaughter Emily and little Mayra always there in the mix. We wore gloves but still managed to get the dye on places where it didn’t belong.
First results once again against that lovely backdrop. One of those skeins became mine 🙂
On the following days, Maxima continued experimenting on her own and tried over-dyeing some naturally-dyed yellow to produce that pretty green.
And yet more on another day. This time over-dyeing a cochineal-dyed skein.

So, I came home with this (below). The mug is for scale more than anything else because those balls of yarn I bought are huge! I bought those two balls from one of the weavers from the outlying community of Huancarani that I visited on my last trip up here. The ladies from Huancarani come into town on the weekend to sell their produce in the market. We attempted a trip to Huancarani on the preceding Thursday for a weaving get together much as I had done on my last visit but it had rained heavily all through the night and a landslide had shut the road.

Plying all this yarn will keep me busy for a while. As if I need even more stuff to lug back to Australia but who in their right mind could resist?

Here’s a flashback to that Huancarani trip and the fun day we’d had all weaving together…

When not dyeing, I would visit with Max and weave with her as she had asked me to teach her some new patterns in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave.

When I was walking in the market street on the Saturday, I was stopped by one of the Huancarani ladies who asked “Where’s Berna?” That’s the name they know me by. No one calls me Laverne in Bolivia. Bs and Vs are pronounced virtually the same and they don’t recognise that the La is part of my name as La is often placed before any woman’s name when referring to her as a third person. So, here in the lowlands I’m Verny and up there I’ll always be Berna/Verna. The Huancarani ladies had been expecting my visit on the Thursday and so now that they were in town, they were looking for me. Of course they didn’t recognise me as the lady with long dark hair that had been to their community to teach patterns seven years ago!

Back in 2017 I went to Huancarani and can be seen here with that long dark hair guiding Maxima’s sister Narciza through the steps to weaving a pattern from my More Adventures with warp-faced Pick-up Patterns book. It’s a motif from a Central Asian textile that I had adapted to the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. It had caught Narciza’s eye and she was keen to learn it and not let me go until she had conquered one repeat.
We just managed to get through one repeat before it was time to leave and I left wondering if she would ever use the pattern. I did leave behind a woven sample just in case.

You can see the unique way weavers in these communities in this part of Bolivia manage their warps. They don’t attach them to their bodies with a string or backstrap. Instead, they have the warp suspended between an index finger and a toe. Together with the middle finger they form a picking cross of the two “pebble” sheds and then do all the pick-up and loom operation with just the one free hand. It’s amazing to see! I did this with Maxima back in 2011 when I visited her in Cochabamba. Even though the structure is the same as the one with which I am thoroughly familiar, this method of weaving it was completely foreign to me and it took me some time to get used to it.

So….back to the lady in the street market who stopped me. Once I told her that this white-haired person was indeed Berna, she pulled out a couple of bands to show me, one of which is pictured at left. Sadly, Narciza hadn’t been able to come to town that weekend as she has a herd to attend to but it seems that Narciza spread knowledge of the new pattern to other ladies in the community. How happy that made me!

And Maxima had taken advantage of the copy of my book that I’d left behind with her on my last visit.

Maxima and a group of weavers are seen here studying and discussing images in the book shortly after my visit.

Maxima showed me what she had woven from the book….

It’s a belt that she wove for daughter, Vilma, to wear on festival days. It’s woven in the bright tightly twisted acrylic yarn that the weavers here love to use.
The ladies love to be able to show off “new” patterns in items they use for special occasions.

On our first morning weaving together, Maxima chose to use some of the crochet cotton that I’d brought. I think her unfamiliarity with the material left her a little frustrated. These weavers create a very tight weave, squeezing the weft into place with a tremendous amount of pressure. The cotton thread just wasn’t behaving the way her handspun wool or re-spun acrylic thread would. Those materials have a certain amount of stretch which the cotton simply doesn’t. While she was able to weave the little motif she had chosen correctly, it just didn’t look right with that tight, tight beat.

Maxima preparing a cotton warp for our first session together. The end of the warp is temporarily tucked into the waistband of her skirt while she uses two hands to make heddles, Later the end will be suspended on her index finger. Anything that happens to be lying close by such as this comb can be called into use to hold the cross.
Starting with a little plain pebble weave.
Meanwhile Mayra and Ana who seem to see all forms of household chores as play, were happily washing their toys. At one point I saw them playing chop-the-head-off-the-chicken-for-the-pot with the cat!

My second session with Maxima was completely different. She used her re-spun acrylic thread this time and the results were completely different. She confidently chose larger and more complicated patterns from my Complementary-warp Pattern Book (all the patterns therein are in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave) and her joy at watching the figures appear and then reaching the stage where she could predict what was to come next, was apparent.

Starting with a fresh warp of respun acrylic thread for wider, more complicated patterns.
The young ladies on this morning were on chicken duty…..that is, keeping the chickens from wandering from the yard into the kitchen.
One of the four running-horse patterns that creator Deanna Johnson calls Elmy’s Mustangs, is almost complete.

Here’s a video clip of Maxima doing the last row of pick-up for the horse pattern….

She also selected the viscacha pattern from my book. I’d charted that pattern from a fragment of pre-columbian cloth that I’d seen online. I’d been able to track down the owner of the fragment and get him to send me close-ups so that I could decipher it.

The cat figure,also from pre-columbian textiles, that Maxima chose was not completely successful but I know it will be in her next attempt now that she has understood how to weave the eyes of the viscachas.

This is what I was doing in the evenings to entertain myself. I was using Alison Irwin’s idea for weaving letters in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave to make a key fob for the lady who ran the hotel in which I was staying. Inti means sun in the Quechua language and Wasi means house.

I also wove a bunch of patterns to leave behind for Maxima to study and attempt in her own time after I left. When I showed Maxima the hotel key fob, she loved it and so I offered to make one with her name as well as for her daughter. Her husband then laughingly asked why I wasn’t offering to make one for him. I was happy to oblige. Dorinda took this photo of Maxima after I left as I wove the fob on the last night and wasn’t able to deliver it in person.

I think she liked it!

And then it was my turn to learn some new weaving thing. I noticed that the large aguayo that Maxima had woven was edged with a patterned tubular band that is known in some parts as nawi awapa. The weavers here call it chichilla or simply nawi (nawi meaning eye). Maxima handed that task off to another weaver as she has forgotten how to weave these patterned tubular bands. She generally edges her carrying cloths with crochet. The customer in the U.S however, wanted the more traditional patterned tube. What I noticed in this particular tube was that the color arrangement would flip back and forth along its length. The zig-zag would change colors every now and then as would the inner eye color and I was mad keen to meet a weaver who would show me how ro do it. Maxima’s sister Narciza knows how to do it but she hadn’t come into town.

So, on Saturday market day I visited with the Huancarani ladies in the street and asked if any one of them knew how to do it and if they would be willing to teach me. Of course no one just happened to be carrying colored yarn and besides, all except Justina said that they didn’t know how it was done. I invited them to come up to the hotel so that I could show them a nawi awapa band that I had started and also show them some other bits and pieces that I thought they might find interesting.

Squeezed onto the balcony of the hotel, I showed the ladies any woven thing that I happened to have. Here they’re examining my double weave belt with its Bedouin patterns which are completely foreign to them.
I brought out my cotton spinning bag and everyone fell in love with the tiny takli spindle and wanted to take it home. Only Justina was “brave” enough to try spinning cotton with it and she did a great job.

Justina examined my ñawi awapa warp which was set up in the way I had been shown in Chinchero, Peru. It turns out that while the results are exactly the same, the weavers in this part of Bolivia set up their warp for the ñawi awapa in a slightly different way. It’s slightly different but different enough to be confusing to Justina who said that she wouldn’t be able to teach me using this warp. I was a disappointed but interested to know exactly what the difference was. Time didn’t allow further exploration but Justina returned the next day and agreed to teach me if we created a new warp from scratch. I was thrilled!

Gathered the next day in Vilma’s sewing workshop with Justina deciding that she had enough time to teach me if I could bring some yarn. So, out came the crochet cotton again to the rescue…not ideal, but good enough for learning.
Creating a fresh ñawi awapa warp while Maxima went out to look for a forked twig to use. It holds the cross….more about that later. On the floor you can see another stick that is used to save one of the picked-up sheds for later use. The weavers here call this stick “el muchacho“.
Justina guiding me. Yes, I learned it! Maxima and Vilma looked on. I wonder if Maxima absorbed enough by watching to be able to do it on her own. Wouldn’t surprise me. I offered to let her sit in my place and try but she declined.
When I got home of course I had to weave one straight away. I still have lengths of fabric that I bought from the ladies back in 2019 and I used some of Verna’s cloth to make a little pouch that I could edge using the Huancarani set-up and color-changing method.

Justina told me that they call the forked stick illawa, which is the same word used for string heddles. Perhaps these weavers use the word for any device that enables them to create sheds. I do love the name for the other stick….el muchacho, which strangely is in Spanish rather than in Quechua.

A closer look. You can see that the color arrangement in the tube along the base of the pouch is different from that along the side. This is a much nicer photo of the beautiful natural dye colors used by the ladies in these textiles. I used commercial wool from my workshop stash for the edging.

I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed this visit. On certain afternoons Dorinda and I would walk up and up and up above the town to get some exercise. I was suddenly very much aware of my calves. I was really pleased with the way I was dealing with the altitude.

One afternoon, Sandra, the hotel manager, took me down to her orchard. So that was a down, down, down walk with the harder part coming at the end of the day. I was happy to see custard apples growing for the first time and to be able to pick quinces which Dorinda later made into jam. We took back apples and Dorinda made a pie. How spoiled was I? The biggest thrill was seeing a hummingbird nest with two eggs in the orchard. The photo needs something for scale. The nest and eggs are tiny!

There was time first thing in the morning to hang out on the balcony with hotel cat, Garfield, and watch some young girls herding their flock of sheep onto the football field. Stray dogs would arrive to romp and freak out the sheep who would bolt out the gate and into town with the little girls running screaming behind them! It would happen pretty much every other day.

Got my nose burned on day one in the high altitude sun and so did not go out hatless ever again after that.

We got stuck in the mud on the way back to Cochabamba. The mud sucked the soles right off my sandals and I never saw them again. Then we got caught up in protest roadblocks as we neared Cochabamba and it was quite a saga getting from there to the airport. It involved walking with soleless sandals through shin deep water and taking the train that was packed to the gills. It was so difficult getting on and even more so getting off! If my flight had not been delayed, I might have just missed it. To be honest, if the road had been closed due to the landslides and I had been stuck in Independencia, I might have chosen to just stay on until Dorinda’s visit ends on the 10th. It was a glorious visit and I really had no need to leave when I did.

We all got filthy. The quiet sleepy group of passengers up to this point turned into a happy chatty group after successfully getting the van out of the mud and back on its way. How was I going to get on a plane with my feet in this filthy state? Never mind, there were flooded streets to walk through further along once we hit the outskirts of town and had to get out and walk due to the roadblocks. Feet were squeaky clean by the time I got to the airport.

And the scenery on the way back….could it get any better? Yes, it could. It was and had been raining a lot and in the red rock sections the waterfalls that had sprung up and started to flow down the other side of one of the valleys, were running bright pink! Mud and rain-streaked windows made decent photography impossible but I burned those images into my brain!

Back in Santa Cruz and once I’d woven and documented the color-changing nawi awapa, I turned to other projects. I’d taken some garabatá fiber to Independencia to toss into the indigo dyepot.

The top left bunch of thread was dyed in the indigo pot. At bottom right you can see a tiny pouch I made using the Dosapey pattern. That tiny bag holds a tiny booklet and mini pencil. Now to decide how to combine colors in a new project. Roció, my Ayoreo teacher, contacted me for a class while I was away. I’ll have to let her know that I’m back.
This is the start of a larger Dosapey pattern that I finished just before traveling to Independencia. I dyed the black for this project.
I just had enough garabatá thread to create one face of a pouch. I wove the other face in cotton and sewed the two together. This pouch held my passport, tickets and money purse and went with me on the trip. I used the edging stitch used by the Weenhayek artisans along the top.

And now I’m working on something a little unusual. An expat gentleman who runs wildlife tours here with a particular focus on the endangered jaguar asked me if it would be possible to weave a jaguar skin pattern. He would like to commission Guaraní weavers to produce small bags with the print to offer to his clients. He is and always has been keen on promoting the handwork of the artisans that live in this lowland part of Bolivia. He showed me a tapestry pattern that he’d found online and I took it as a challenge to try to reproduce it in one of the warp-faced structures that the Guaraní weavers use. With this I can show him how much pattern can fit into the dimensions he has in mind. He can sketch out his ideal pattern and then approach the weavers with a proposal. This way they won’t have to waste time and yarn sampling and experimenting. Besides, you know me….always looking for an excuse to weave.

Using the Moisy technique which is one of the two pick-up patterning structures that the Guaraní weavers use. I set this up all ready to go before I left on the highland holiday.

So, the overview grew somewhat as I settled into writing and felt less overwhelmed! I hope you’ve enjoyed these tales from the Highland Holiday.

Until next time…..

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.