Category: backstrap looms

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 – What’s My Style?

Many years ago an online acquaintance told me that she could instantly tell which of the images of woven pieces that had been posted to one of the online groups were mine. I thought that was fun…wow, it seems that I’ve developed a “style”. However, as I think back to some of the things I have woven over the years I’m sure that’s not true at all.

I’m thinking that perhaps my work was so easily identifiable back then because it stood out as being warp-faced in a group where the vast majority of work wasn’t. Also, in those days I did seem to weave a lot of patterns that could be described as big-and-bold and decidedly “ethnic-looking” at a time when replication was a big part of my learning process. The products were hardy belts, straps and shoulder bags. The thread I used was locally-sourced 8/2 cotton which was almost all I had access to here for this kind of work.

Now, I’m not quite sure that I want my work to be so easily recognized. It feels like that would mean I was not branching out and trying new things or heading in new directions. And that might very well have been the case if I hadn’t been given so much yarn by weaving friends over the years….yarn that I probably never would have chosen on my own…like the cones of 140/2 silk I was given by two friends, eeeek! Who would ever contemplate weaving with that? It was offered to me, gratefully accepted, and eventually I used it (and loved it!). I can only hope that I wove something worthy of the lovely gift.

One of the projects using the 140/2 silk as warp was the last two panels in my Within These Walls series.

I suppose that if there had to be something that somehow categorised what I do, or my “style” of weaving, I would like it to be the fact that I use a backstrap loom. For me, the process in most cases is more notable than the product. I’m rambling on about this a bit because of a couple of things that I have seen in my online groups recently. One was a comment on a photo of my latest warp…

The commenter asked me to make sure to eventually post the finished project because she is fascinated by “backstrap weaving”. The thing is, once the fabric is off the loom, there’ll be nothing to indicate that it was woven on a backstrap loom. It could have been woven on any kind of loom that allows one to create 18- 1/2″-wide warp-faced cloth. For me, the product isn’t “backstrap weaving”….the act of creating it is.

What I’m trying to say is that I think that the term “backstrap weaving” is suitable for describing the act of weaving on a backstrap loom…. I’m out in my back yard today backstrap weaving, for example. I don’t think it works as a word to describe the cloth that comes off the loom and I have a feeling that this is the way many people use the term. I suspect that the person who asked the question is interested in seeing the cloth (and of course that’s fine) thinking that somehow it’s exclusive to the backstrap loom. If she had been interested in “backstrap weaving”, the activity, I think she would have asked to know more about the loom, my set-up, how it all works etc..

It makes me wonder, as I have often done in the past, what people think “backstrap weaving” is. And it makes me regret not having made it clear when I decided to name this blog Backstrap Weaving almost fifteen years ago. Maybe I was unclear about how the term should be used myself back then or at least unaware of how it might cause misunderstandings. I know that in the past I have been guilty on my many occasions of referring to my cloth as “my backstrap weaving” as a quick way of saying “pieces I have woven on my backstrap loom”.

One clear indication of misunderstanding was when someone posted that they were doing backstrap weaving on their inkle loom (simply because they were using a pick-up patterning technique that is often used by weavers who use backstrap looms in the South American highlands).

So, here I am “backstrap weaving”. The cloth that I’m weaving is in a balanced doubleweave pick-up technique known as Finnweave which can be and is woven on other kinds of looms. I don’t think anyone is going to pick up my finished cloth and identify it as “backstrap weaving”.

The fact is that, with will and skill, so many different kinds of fabric can be woven on a backstrap loom (with obvious width limitations, of course). The fabrics don’t have any particular characteristic that make the backstrap loom the only possible piece of equipment. The product could be weft-faced, balanced, warp-faced. It could be cloth where all structural and pattern elements are created by pick-up, or the loom could have been set up with multiple sets of string heddles and other aids to make those elements completely loom controlled, or a method that lies somewhere between those two could have been used.

A weaver from Pitumarca that I watched at Tinkuy 2010 creating weft-faced fabric on his backstrap loom.
A weaver from San Ignacio de Loyola in Peru has made the weaving of her warp-faced pattern totally loom controlled by using multiple sets of string heddles.
My weaving friend Sharon Kersten is currently sampling balanced cloth on a backstrap loom using a 15-dpi rigid heddle. Note her cool temple…push pins in a length of balsa wood.

By the way, I seem to have been asleep the last few years as far as rigid heddles go. I had no idea that they’re now available in 15 dpi. Sharon says that unlike other weavers who tend to have shaft envy, I on the other hand have dent envy.

This gorgeous sheer cotton cloth was woven on a backstrap loom by a weaver in Mexico. It’s yet another kind of fabric that I think is more accurately described as having been woven on a backstrap loom rather than with the blanket term “backstrap weaving”. The range of achievable structures and techniques is wide! (Image from the Flickr page of Teyacapan and used with her permission).

The other thing that had me pondering what is meant by “backstrap weaving” was a question in another group: “What is the best book on backstrap weaving for beginners?” It leaves me wondering if they’re referring to the activity or the product. Do they want to know how to make, set-up and use a backstrap loom or do they already have one and just want to learn the patterning structures that are most often associated with this kind of loom? Are they looking at “backstrap weaving” as the process or the product? I haven’t asked but I am curious to see what other people reply as I think it will give a good indication of how others understand the term.

Anyway, let me get on with what’s currently on my loom…..I’ve been working on my latest project with the latest gift of yarn from my friend, Will, in Australia….some lovely variegated 10/2 silk which sits alongside some luscious white 20/2 silk that Susan had given me many years ago. I have admired work done with variegated thread but never thought to branch out and buy any because I really had no idea what to do with it. With the gift of this lovely mother-of-pearl thread, I’ve been given the push that I needed to come up with something.

My piece is all kind of soft and feminine-looking which might shock you if you’ve come to think of my style as big and bold. This is another example where gifts are ensuring that I don’t fall into any particular style box in terms of product. The common factor is the loom. It’s all about the loom.

It’s always lovely when the threads have all been settled into place and I can get started on the pattern.

The colors in the variegated thread have aligned themselves quite differently from the way they did in my much shorter sample. In the sample there was less space between the darker threads across the warp which meant that there was higher contrast between the leaf shapes and the surrounding white supplementary weft. The effect in this longer warp is much softer. I’m doing some white-on-white patterning with supplementary weft on the sides. (This isn’t the “mad” idea I mentioned in my last post. I decided I wasn’t going to take a chance on trying that in this “real”project).

That’s the extent of the foliage pattern. I’ll weave this band of pattern again at the end. I am, however, continuing with the white-on-white along the sides.

I’ve had to keep an eye on the width because I broke one of my rules and didn’t sample the doubled 20/2 silk on the sides to get a width reading. That’s the price I pay. I guessed how those threads would want to settle and now I have to keep an eye on them in case they decide otherwise.

And now a hummingbird and flowers start to make their appearance. This might be the only motif I weave between the upper and lower strips of foliage….keep it clean and simple, perhaps. We’ll see.

I’ve just joined a hummingbird group on Facebook and it’s so much fun seeing the joyful posts as people announce the return of their friends after their winter away.

Before I switch off the bedside lamp at night, I take a quick look over the edge of the bed to see my loom with its limp warp lying on the floor. I love the way this looks in the soft yellow light. I wonder if I can get silk thread in these colors?

I’ll leave you with this photo that Kate sent me after having read my post last time which touched on the subject of width. Kate recently returned from a trip to Mexico in which she was able to visit with backstrap loom weavers and received permission to share this photo. As I sit at my loom quite pleased with my eighteen-and-a-half inch warp, I am in awe of the forty-eight inches (by Kate’s estimate) this weaver is managing…..and that’s wool! The fabric she produces is used for a very unique kind of cloth which is used as a man’s garment about which I’ll tell you more in my next post.

A backstrap-loom weaver from the Chamula municipality of Chiapas in Mexico.

Backstrap Weaving – Wonderfully Wide

It’s been a while since I’ve had something wide (wide for me, anyway) on my backstrap loom. The last thing was the cotton rep-weave warp from which I made a backstrap/loom carry bag. This one was 15 1/2″ and had 800 ends.

The warp is made up of white and cochineal-dyed cotton from Guatemala. I dyed some of the white black.
The finished backstrap which doubles as a loom and tool tote bag.

As I said, these kinds of warps are wide for me but not necessarily for backstrap loom weavers in other parts of the world. The widest warp that I’ve seen over here was 39″. It was a light cotton ikat warp that was being woven by a weaver from northern Peru. She stood while weaving in order to manage the width. That makes my 15 1/2″ seem quite ridiculous. Backstrap loom weavers in parts of SE Asia routinely weave what look like even wider pieces while seated at their looms. Maybe when I am eventually living back in Australia, I’ll be able to explore that side of the world and maybe sit beside those weavers to see how they skillfully create their warps and manage those widths.

An ikat shawl weaver from Tacabamba, Peru, standing to manage the wide cotton warp on her loom.

I like the fact that, as far as the loom is concerned, going wide simply means getting hold of some longer sticks. I have a piece of painted metal curtain rod that I’m using as the cloth beam of my latest project. A dowel rod acts as the warp beam. The weft thread can be wound around a suitably long stick if I don’t have a long enough shuttle.

My Montagnard (Vietnamese hill tribe) teachers always use the beams and swords that are designed for the widest pieces of skirt and blanket fabric that they weave no matter how narrow the piece they happen to be weaving.

My current project is 18 1/2”…a very humble width in comparison. However, to me it feels wonderfully wide and I love having my beams loaded up like this.

The other thing to which my “Wonderfully Wide” blog title refers is the fact that I feel that I have a wonderfully wide range of techniques and structures that I can draw on when it comes down to planning a new project. I wandered through several ideas when it came down to figuring out what I would do with the silk thread that I had been given by a couple of fiber friends in Australia.

I wasn’t one hundred percent sure about the size of this silk thread but after fishing out silk examples from my stash drawer that range from 30/2 to 140/2, I came to the conclusion that the variegated is most likely 10/2 and the white 20/2.

I thought about doing rep with alternating thick and thin weft and some pick-up. That idea got discarded in favor of ikat…a variegated ikat pattern on a solid-color background. In the end I settled on using supplementary weft to play with positive and negative space.

I felt that I’d already explored the idea of a variegated ikat pattern in this piece (although the thread in this case isn’t actually variegated. It’s just a mix of lots of different colored ends of warp). I had to look back at this to be reminded that I hadn’t particularly liked the effect at the time (although it’s funny how things can grow on you!)
When I do ikat on a multi-colored warp, I prefer having wide stripes of color so that there’s only one color in each pattern segment, as you can see in this silk example I made some years ago.

The warp on which I’m currently working will hopefully be fabric for one face of a pillow/cushion cover. I am using the 10/2 variegated thread alongside doubled 20/2 to give me the width I need. Please bear in mind that I’m not saying that doubled 20/2 equals a single strand of 10/2. I’m just hoping that the two will play well enough together to give me the width that I need.

But first, as always, comes the sampling. The pattern will be foliage and hummingbirds. I wanted to weave the foliage using white supplementary weft (multiple strands of 30/2 silk) to fill the negative spaces. This means that the foliage pattern would be revealed in the underlying variegated ground cloth. Normally it’s the supplementary weft itself that forms the positive part of the pattern.

This covered book that I created is already living in Australia. I dug up photos to see what the various colors of supplementary weft looked like in the upper and lower foliage patterns. Again, it isn’t variegated thread but rather a combination of four strands of three different colors. In this case the supplementary weft is used as the positive part of the pattern on the green background.
In this example, the gold supplementary weft has filled the negative space around the flower pattern which is revealed in the black ground cloth. The red patterning shows the use of supplementary weft in both positive and negative space.

So, I wound a warp of what I figured would be a suitable width to give me the information I needed for the larger project. With this sample I would find out the number of ends I needed to create X inches of cloth, the number of strands of 30/2 silk that would give good coverage as supplementary weft, the best weight of silk to use as the main weft and the warp span of the longest practical weft float. I took some old foliage patterns that I had created for other projects and altered them to reduce the negative spaces to what I guessed wouldn’t create impractical lengths of floats….the kind that would sag or get hooked on things when the cloth was in use.

The pattern needs to be busy so that there are never any excessively long floats of the white supplementary weft.

I was very happy with the result and made a note not to have the pattern on the real project extend all the way to the selvedges. The first couple of little triangles you see there are where I was testing the ideal number of strands of 30/2 silk to use for the supplementary weft. The 30/2 silk comes from my weaving friend Deanna. We made a swap….a very large cone of 10/2 cotton (which had also been a gift from my friend, Betty) for a cone of 30/2 silk.

Susan’s gift of 20/2 silk is being used as warp alongside the Will’s variegated 10/2s in the real project. Deanna’s 30/2 silk (which in a roundabout way also comes from Betty) is the supplementary weft. I am weaving the generosity of all these fiber friends into this piece!

Off the warping stakes and onto the loom. As usual, when winding wide warps, I wind several small sections removing them one by one from the warping stakes and placing them on the loom beams that are waiting nearby on the floor. I don’t take any risks with having my warping stakes lean, even if ever so slightly, by having too much thread loaded onto them.

The next task was to make 593 heddles.

I placed a couple of cardboard strips in the sheds to help me see if any sections of the warp are set more closely than others…as I’ve said here many times, there are varying degrees of “warp-facedness” which means that some warp threads might be positioned closer together than others. When weaving with supplementary weft I need to weave a little narrower than is my natural tendency so that I make sure that the patterning weft is not exposed at all when it travels between the layers of warp. That can be a bit tricky….fighting against muscle memory.

It’s normally my habit to start with a selvedge in which case I would remove those cardboard strips and start weaving right at the base of the warp. However, I decided to leave them in place this time. Although the two aren’t visible in this photo, I can tell you that the 10/2 silk and doubled 20/2 seem to working together well.

This is the point where I will start weaving the pattern. And here I’ve stopped for the time being while I figure out my design. My sample was on 142 ends. I need to extend it to 1186 ends! I plan to have a strip of pattern the same length as my sample, once again using the supplementary weft to fill the negative space. Then I plan to weave scattered frolicking hummingbirds in white supplementary weft, this time using the variegated thread as the negative space surrounding the figures. I’ll finish by repeating the first strip of pattern. Well, that’s the plan anyway.

I’ll have a choice in the style of hummingbird figures….either using the supplementary weft to “draw” the swirls within their bodies as can be seen on the left, or use the weft to fill in the negative space within their bodies so that the swirls appear the underlying ground cloth, as on the right. I’m leaning towards the latter but maybe a combination of both?

This is what I mean by “wonderfully wide”. Choices, choices, choices. I have another idea, which I won’t go into yet, for including some very quiet pattern in the white sections of warp. I thought of it about two minutes ago! There’s something about writing this blog that helps with the creative process, it seems. The idea is a little mad so I might wait and see how that goes before I reveal it….or not! The madness might be just temporary, lol.

So, thank you so much all my extremely generous fiber friends for these lovely gifts of thread. Here I am weaving in a color palette that is not a common one for me. It does remind me a little, though, of the piece I wove when weaving friend Marilyn let me pick colors from her stash of 10/2 cotton.

Maybe this sunrise I had witnessed with Gwen while in Florida was on my mind at the time……

The lake had alligators in it!

I’ve spent several evenings now just working on the pattern. Let’s see how much progress I’ve made when next we meet…..

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…..