Category: backstrap looms

Backstrap Weaving – Winter Colors

I wonder what colors spring to mind when you think of winter…blues, greys, winter white? As I sit here in shorts and a tank top, I have to remind myself that it’s actually winter here in the tropical lowland part of Bolivia in which I live. It’s the same in the fall when flowers are still blooming and the city is alive with the bright colors and fragrances that are usually associated with spring. It’s easy to forget that the leaves in the fall season in other places are turning all sorts of stunning colors.

I was lucky to have been visiting my friend Lausanne in Vermont one year around the Columbus Day weekend.
One sign for me that the seasons have changed is when the rays from the low winter sun find their way through my bedroom window to fall softly across my work at my backstrap loom. At other times of year, my windows ae blacked out to keep out the heat.

I guess all this has been on my mind lately because I am in the midst of a long move back to Australia to a place that has four very distinct seasons. It will be a little too cold in winter for my liking but hey, I lived at the southern-most tip of the South American mainland for five years and spent eleven seasons living in ski resorts. I’m no stranger to cold…just getting fussy in my old age! I do look forward to the more classic fall colors but I’ve heard that the winters can be grey and foggy. The locals like to call that mountain mist “the champagne air”.

So, what are winter colors here in Santa Cruz?…all the bright colors of tropical fruits and flowers.

I love going out for a late afternoon stroll and coming home with these little tastes of sunshine. Pineapple and papaya vendors selling slices are scattered about the street markets ready to skin, de-seed and chop just the right amount for you.

And in keeping with that, I’ve had some quite bright colors on my loom lately. As you know, I am only working with yarn that I have stashed away here…no new purchases. I decided to pull out the tub of Omega Sinfonia cotton thread that I often use to prepare workshop samples. It’s a riot of tiny balls left over from years of workshop prep. I almost took one look at the mess and turned around to put it straight back into the closet. The worst part was that what looked like the bigger balls of thread were actually made up of dozens of tiny quantities all rolled into one ball.

From the days when my living room would look like a yarn jungle with piles and piles of Omega Sinfonia workshop warps.

In my last post, I talked about weaving a grocery tote using the Mayan Hands naturally-dyed cotton but I just couldn’t get inspired. I turned to the Omega Sinfonia instead and decided for a start to scrape together enough to dye navy blue for outer pockets for the tote bag. If I wove the pockets in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave, I could show both faces of the cloth…one pocket on each side of the bag displaying each of the two faces.

As for the rest of the bag, well you know my style….I’ll figure that out later. I grabbed some other colors from the tub and set out to plan a pattern…something very colorful and jolly. I was going to say spring-like but it would actually be all-year-round-like here where I live. It would certainly be something lively to brighten the days of “champagne air” when I end up living in Katoomba.

Then it occurred to me that I had never actually woven anything substantial with this thread and that I would have to, therefore, sample….eye roll…..I wasn’t in the mood for sampling! But no, fortunately, I remembered that I had put together a warp for the cover of my video class, Operating a Backstrap Loom, in good ol’ Omega Sinfonia.

My video class that is available to stream on Taproot Video. There might even be some copies of the DVD left.

Having done its job as the DVD cover, the warp had sat unloved in a drawer for quite some time until I had the idea to unweave that small woven section and turn it into a backstrap with a bit of pick-up patterning. I took it traveling.

Weaving outdoors in beautiful Maine.
The finished backstrap which happens to be the one that I am currently using (almost all the others are now living in Australia)

Speaking of weaving one’s own backstrap, let me show the one that Natalie wove using the instructions in my free tutorial here on my blog that includes video clips. I love how the yarn she used has created its own pattern.

Backstrap woven on a backstrap loom by Natalie Marie Robinson.

So, I had all I needed to be able to make my width calculations, I dyed the scraps navy blue and drew up an idea.

Not my usual color palette and way out of my safe color comfort zone, to be honest, but it looked okay on paper, so why not?
Off paper and onto yarn, the warp kind of freaked me out…argh, I didn’t know if I could live with those colors.

I remembered a colorful warp that I had taken traveling with me years ago…hastily put together the night before I had left. I had hated it so much that it never left my bag. But I did eventually weave it when I got home and made it into a sewing kit pouch. It had grown on me, and I still like it.

Fortunately this latest warp also grew on me. I think the pockets will look very jolly against a dark solid-color bag.

I haven’t woven using thread this size in ages. It wove up so quickly!

All these patterns are in my Complementary-warp Pattern Book. If you have followed my instructions for either complementary-warp pick-up or Andean Pebble Weave, you’ll be able to weave these.

I wove 20″ on this 26″-warp, enough for the two pockets and some extra just in case. You’ll need to put on your sunglasses to look at the other face!

I love the fact that my backstrap loom allows me to create lovely neat third selvedges…

A third selvedge means one fewer hem to sew and saves a little warp waste at the start.

I have what you might call an unconventional way of setting up to create my third selvedge in that I don’t do it the way my teachers here in South America showed me. But then who is to say what is “conventional” when it comes to this kind of thing? You can see the way my indigenous teachers do it here. I talk about how I do it here. That link takes you one of my FAQ pages….a resource that is often overlooked by my readers or perhaps forgotten. In my latest project I used an umbrella rib as the header to create my third selvedge.

To create the neatest third selvedge, you do need to dedicate some time to making sure the warp threads are all well settled in their correct positions before you start weaving. Then you open a shed and beat really well against the beam. When doing the four-stake warping that I show in Method 2 in my free warping video, paying attention to how the doubled threads pass around the two end stakes will make all the difference to the amount of time you need to spend tidying up before you start weaving. Try to have them pass consistently with one of the two colors always sitting above the other on the stakes. Of course, if you plan to start with a fringe, none of this matters.

In the meantime, another pouch got lined with a stitched shibori learning piece. This time there was an attempt to create a bird. I will do better next time. You probably know where this is heading and perhaps hummingbirds will make their appearance soon.

You could turn the bird figure upside down and call it a stem and flower.

I scoured the fabric on which the shibori pieces sits in the hope that I can do some stitched resist on it. I am intrigued by the idea of using the technique on printed fabric. I know that I’ll have to place the figures carefully or the original dark blues of the cloth and the dark dye color will just merge. If that happens, the figures won’t have clearly defined outlines.

I threw a strip of this scoured fabric into the dye pot when I was dyeing the Sinfonia thread blue. The scouring did the trick and the fabric took up the dye nicely. You can only faintly make out the pattern and I think this will be a nice effect.

A much better dye result than my experiment with the fabric that had simply been washed with regular laundry detergent.

I’ll finish with a quick reminder of the pages on this blog that list and provide links to my free tutorials and video clips. These may not be immediately obvious to those viewing the blog on certain devices. Check them out 🙂 See you next time.

Backstrap Weaving – Where is it?

The slooooow move back to Australia is presenting some problems. One of them could have been easily solved by simply making a list of things that I have taken over there so far. That would save me from having the annoying ”Where is it?” question occupying so much of my time.

For example, I can’t find the silk that I dyed with cochineal last year. I have a certain photography spot beneath the bedroom window and I remember removing from it the little zippered bag that holds all those silk cochineal-dyed balls of thread so that I could place an item to be photographed. Now where the heck did I put that zippered bag? If I can’t find it here, surely that means that I must have taken it to Australia. But that doesn’t make sense. I wanted all of my yarn stash to be here so that I have things to work on between trips to Australia.

Anyway, something good comes from combing through plastic bags and cupboards….you find other stuff. You get to say….”Ooooh, I’d forgotten all about you” and feel all warm and fuzzy with the memories that the unexpected item triggers.

The first example of this was the band woven from my own handspun llama fiber that I uncovered in the closet. That brought back memories of a trip to Bolivia’s amazing Uyuni salt lake way back in 2002. It was on that trip that I met a farmer who sold me bags of llama fiber. I was grateful to be able to take the fiber back with me to spin in the fiber-less tropical lowlands in which I live.

I wove a long band from the mill-spun wool singles yarn that you see in the photo, cut it in two and used it to flank the llama band. I joined the three pieces with the tiniest of seams and it has become the slip case for my pin loom. What can I say?…. I love to weave and anything that is not nailed down around here will eventually get its own woven pouch.

Here’s a look at just some of the black-and-white bags, pouches and slip cases that house all manner of things around my home. They showcase a variety of techniques. Top left is a two-color ikat with a little supplementary weft patterning at the bottom. Top right is a shoulder bag patterned in the intermesh structure with a little weft substitution at the bottom. Bottom left is a three-color ikat using my own handspun cotton. Bottom right is a laptop slip case patterned in a single-faced two-color warp-float structure.

I like that I can keep learning and practicing stitched shibori techniques and use the learning pieces to line my latest creations.

I never seem to decide on the lining until I have finished sewing the bag which means that I get a lot of practice installing drop-in linings. This third stitched shibori project taught me about the effect of different spacing in the stitches and now lines the llama-band bag.

Find Number Two: This was some cotton fabric that I had picked up from a give-away box at a guild meeting I had attended years ago. I had no plans to sew it into anything. I took it because I like to use fabric as backdrops for some of my photos and no one else seemed to to want it. This find gave me the idea of trying the stitched resist technique on print fabric rather than plain white. I gave the fabric a quick wash in hot water which was obviously not enough to truly scour it and make it ready-to-dye. This was just a sample and I wasn’t willing to go to too much trouble. It was okay for a quick experiment and I think this idea is worth pursuing. Ideally, I would have the surrounding print almost totally covered by the dark dye. I don’t know if that’s even possible but I will do some research and put more effort into the scouring next time.

Flower pattern idea for stitched shibori from the website of Townhill Studio where you’ll find lots of tips and tutorials.

Find Number Three: This was a ball of indigo-dyed reeled silk that a former English teaching colleague had brought back for me from Japan. Dear Sayuri (r.i.p) had totally surprised me with this thoughtful gift. She was about the only one among my many teaching colleagues here who showed any interest in what I do but even so, I had never expected her to bring back such a treasure for me. I remember that I had been initially disappointed because my fingers had been stained blue as I was winding the thread off the skein into a ball. I wasn’t sure how that would affect my weaving with it and that might be why I set it aside all those years ago.

I decided that it was time I did something with this gift. I wound some off into skeins and washed them over and over until all the blue had been released. The difference in color as it appears in the photo is subtle but is actually quite significant. I prefer the post-wash color. This silk and some pictures that I had seen of indigo-dyed clothing worn by Chinese minority groups gave me the idea to weave something using a motif that had a kind of eastern flavor. I set about designing one to be woven with supplementary weft.

I used several strands of two colors of silk on a base of 20/2 cotton for my sampling. I love how a backstrap loom allows me to whip up these small samples without wasting too much thread. It took a couple of attempts to get something I liked. That first one was wrong! I was happy with this and was just getting down to the number-crunching part of the preparation process (I like this part because I get to write in my weaving journal with its handwoven cover) when I got distracted by Find Number Four.

Many years ago, I had bought these two ply-split straps. They were made in Colombia by Wayuu artisans who generally use them as straps for their crocheted mochila bags. In this case, they were being sold online as guitar straps but did not come with any hardware. I had become fascinated with the mochila bags and the band weaving of the Wayuu people after buying Dutch weaver Mirja Wark’s book on the subjects back in 2011. My Dutch friend, Anna, (if you are long-time follower of my blog, you might remember “bicycle Anna”) had arranged to get this book from the Netherlands to me here in Bolivia. The following year, 2012, I actually had the opportunity to travel to the Netherlands and spend a day with Mirja Wark. You can see that my recent unearthing of these these two straps has also unearthed a whole string of lovely memories.

My friend Dorothy owns this Wayuu mochila bag with its ply-split strap.

I am usually pretty good at focusing on one weaving project at a time. I may take time out to spin some cotton, weave a pin-loom square or stitch some shibori cloth but once I have chosen a weaving project, I usually stick with it from start to finish. Not so this time. The “eastern” project has been set aside so that I can plan a bag around the darker of the two ply-split straps. I had the idea of using the strap as the sides and base of a plain black bag and weaving an ikat patterned outer pocket to complement the strap pattern.

Wrapping warp threads with tape to resist the first of the three dye colors.

And away we go. I planned a very simple ikat pattern to mimic the “M” shapes in the ply-split strap. I used 20/2 cotton. I have woven two ikat projects with this weight of cotton in the past. The first was the two-color drawstring bag that appeared in the photo near the start of this post. The second was this one in three colors….

These were the pieces that would help me make my calculations. In my latest project I would use four colors. I wrapped bundles of thread that were twice the size of those that I had used in the first two projects. That fact, together with the small spacing between the wrappings, meant that the dense bundles of threads emerging from the wrappings did not have much room in which to spread and evenly take up the dye all the way up to the very edges of the wraps. I spotted the problem after the first dye bath using the tan color but it was too late to fix. I didn’t want to throw it into a second tan bath because I figured it would darken the color too much. In the subsequent brown and black dye baths I worked on moving the threads (as much as I could with rubber-gloved fingers) so that the dye would penetrate all the way to the edge of the wrappings. Every project carries a lesson. I just have to make sure that I add that to my notes….don’t make the bundles too thick if the wrappings are going to be placed close together.

The completed pocket fabric. The tan areas have little fringes of white due to the problem mentioned above.

Sides and base of bag….done. Outer pocket…mostly done. I am deciding on whether it needs a zip. I am going to scrape together thread to dye black for the body of the bag (remember that I’m trying to work solely from stash and so that will mean over-dyeing some colors black). I know from past experience that I’ll most likely end up with various intensities of black color as a result but that could be interesting. As for the shape of the bag…that’s yet to be decided. I wonder if I can actually figure out the lining this time before I sew the bag.

I still haven’t found the cochineal-dyed silk. But I am sufficiently distracted now. It will no doubt turn up when and where I least expect it to. Looking for it has resulted in some beautiful memory trips, though!

Backstrap Weaving – A Way with Words

With most of the messiness of the strikes and the disruptions of festive season holidays behind us, I finally managed to get an appointment with my Brazilian dentist which means that I can now offer you a toothy smile to welcome the New Year!

One of my favorite things about being at the dentist is reclining in front of her very large picture window watching the hummingbirds feed on the flowers in her garden. Hummingbirds have made their way back into my weaving as I decided on a garden theme for this fabric. I am hoping to be able to sew this into a cylindrical bag for my cotton spinning tools…hence the plant-like subject matter.

The warp is seventeen inches wide and quite short….just enough to make a draw-string cylindrical bag. I had a choice of making it long and narrow or wide and short. Long and narrow would have been much faster to weave….the horizontal strips of complementary-weft patterning that you see (the light blue and teal strips) are painfully slow to weave across seventeen inches! The complementary-warp sections (the darkest blue parts) zoom by in comparison.

Warp of 1192 ends of cotton with two sets of heddles for the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. I later added a third set of heddles to hold groups of warp threads for the weft-faced sections.

I was at first cursing my decision to go wide, but now that the project is underway, I am pleased with the way it looks, and have found that the small sample I had woven actually has given me enough information (I’d had my doubts), I have forgotten about the slowness and am thoroughly enjoying the process.

The warp is much longer than needed but it’s more comfortable to weave with this extra length and besides, I am hoping that I can squeeze in enough to perhaps produce an additional piece of fabric large enough to be the base of the bag.

I fiddled about for quite some time before getting this on the loom because I had to dye various shades of blue for the complementary-weft sections. I haven’t been very adventurous with that. I could use any color I want but am playing it safe in this project with shades of blue. Maybe I will get a little crazier in the next one.

My recent house and cat-sitting experience may have influenced my color choices. The band on the right is one that I was using as a sample during that time. I liked the colors in the bedding and then there’s kitty’s blue eyes. The gold would have been a nice “pop” color but I decided against it in the end. I can see something in that green, gold, and blue some day, though.

So, this is pretty much where it stands right now. I am weaving the figures upside down because the selvedge that I created at the start is going to be at the mouth of the bag.

This is my view while seated at the loom…

The colors are not showing up very well here. The last strip of complementary weft (mountains and forest!) actually has bands of three different shades of blue. You can see the third set of heddles that I installed for the weft-faced sections.

And now I have decided to weave some words into the last strip of complementary-weft….”spinning cotton” and “hilando algodon”. Lettering is not something that I have been interested in doing in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. Warp-faced double weave gives me much more freedom to design interesting letters. The supplementary-warp structure that my Montagnard weaving teachers showed me (tutorial here) allows very bold lettering (with the disadvantage of sometimes resulting in quite long floats on the back of the piece). That style has its place but sometimes can be a little bit too “loud” for my liking. The intermesh structure allows me to use most of the tablet-weaving charts that Linda Hendrickson created.

Lettering in intermesh. Feathering on the edges of some of the diagonals can be distracting when heavier thread is used.

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Lettering in weft twining (using two of Linda Hendrickson’s charts). The fact that there aren’t any floats gave me a lot of freedom when I moved on to designing my own letters in this structure.
The style of lettering using supplementary warp threads that my Montagnard weaving teachers use. Some of the white floats on the back can be long, for example, between the longer vertical of the G and the first vertical of the following N.
Warp-faced double weave gives me a lot of freedom for both simple and complex letter design….no floats!
I designed cursive lettering in supplementary weft. There are some very minor limitations because you have to consider the length of the weft floats.

But lettering can also be done in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave in what I consider a fun and quite quirky style. Many years ago, my friend Ruth in Melbourne showed me lettering that she had been designing in this structure. She had woven a really cool name tag for herself. Alison Irwin in Canada has also done so and published a project with Andean Pebble Weave lettering in one of the recent issues of Little Looms (Winter 2022). I will be using those letters to weave the words along the bottom of my bag. These letters have personality! They aren’t large and blocky and overpowering. They sort of dance their way along the warp. I had liked them but hadn’t been drawn to using them when Ruth had first showed me her creations. After all, I had so many other ways at my disposal for designing letters. But now they seem just right for this project. I like that weaving them in complementary weft rather than complementary warp means that the words run across the width of the warp rather than along the length.

You’ll have to wait for my next post to see these fun letters, that is, if I stay with this idea about adding words. The fact that this is not a repetitive or symmetric pattern will make progress very slow. I am, however, very curious to see how the letters look in complementary-weft and will most likely stick it out. (If you’d like a sneak preview of this style of lettering, go take a look at the Winter 2022 issue of Little Looms. You’ll see Alison’s project on the cover).

See you next time (maybe from Australia!…first time back in four years).

Backstrap Weaving – Breathing in, Breathing out.

Some place last week, I have completely forgotten where, I heard (or read) someone say that reading is like breathing in and writing is breathing out. That really appealed to me.

Because I have been house-sitting for the last couple of weeks and don’t have all my stuff around me, on top of the fact that the whole city was on strike for 36 days (the strike ended last Saturday), I had been feeling a little as if I were standing still and unable to be as productive as I would normally like to be. However, since hearing that thought on breathing, I’ve been thinking of these weeks as a period of breathing in…time to sit back in my enforced stillness and cruise the internet, soak up inspiration, make sketches and notes in my weaving book while figuring out if the projects I have in mind are actually technically doable, and deciding if my stash will stretch far enough to make them possible…. readying myself to eventually breathe out and create.

Just a handful of the sample bands in the bucket.

But of course I haven’t been completely idle. One thing I did during the strike was go back to my home on one of the permitted shopping mornings and bring back the bucket-load of woven samples that I have accumulated over the years. Most of the pieces are bands of motifs that I wove to photograph for my pattern books and double weave book. Some were width samples as I tested a new-to me yarn for a larger project while others were just fun experiments…those funny little “what-if” things that I get a sudden urge to explore now and then. Some have stories attached to them. I have felt an urgent need to downsize lately and I’ve been procrastinating about attacking the pile of woven samples. Taking those pieces out of my home to this unfamiliar place has somehow made the task of sorting and tossing things away easier.

I managed to whittle the bucket-load down to a more acceptable amount of bands. This is one of the samples that I decided to keep. Maybe it’s the horrendously hot and dry weather we have been having lately that has made me feel a particular attachment to this watery scene with its cooling blues.

Rivers and Ocean-themed band woven for my Complementary-warp Pattern Book.

I expect that I will make something out of this band one of these days. It might end up being the strap for a bag. It wouldn’t be the first time that a strap has inspired a bag project.

The bag project that grew from a simple strap. Every part is handwoven…even the lining.

During the strike I hadn’t been able to get the distilled water that I need to continue with my cochineal dyeing experiments on silk. I finish house-sitting on Thursday and I will get that organized on my return home. In the meantime, someone on Facebook suggested using bottled water…not as a substitute for distilled, but just to see if it made any difference. I thought, why not?

Cochineal dye experiments on scoured 30/2 silk using hard tap water for some and bottled water for others.

The dusty pink upper right is the result of alum mordant on silk in bottled water with added cream of tartar. I really like it!

This is what the tap water and cream of tartar dye bath had looked like….so promising, right? However, a tap-water rinse sent it right back to purple again. Oh well. It was worth a try.

While on the topic of dye experiments, I can tell you that I just happened to come across the Long Thread Media podcasts again a couple of days ago. I have listened to these chats with fiber artists in the past but because I haven’t subscribed, I keep having to remind myself to go and check out the new episodes. I listened to the fairly recent one with natural dye expert Catherine Ellis the other day and was so happy to hear her speak about the time she had been teaching someplace in the north east and was unable to coax any red out of cochineal bugs. This was due to the hard water that they were using. She also mentioned that using distilled water had provided the solution to this problem. Hooray. It’s so nice to have this confirmed by such an authority. It squashes the thoughts I have every now and then that I am simply doing something very wrong and that it isn’t the fault of the water that I can’t produce red. And so, while I don’t have any nice dyed red silk to show you this time, hopefully in my next post there’ll be some lovely red tones to add to my collection of samples.

The other thing that I have been working on here is the case for my friend’s quena (flute). I showed you in my last post how I was weaving two bands at once in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave on my backstrap loom so that I could have two pieces each with a third selvedge.

The idea was to use the third selvedges at the mouth of the case and at the edge of the closure flap as you can see below….

That gave me two raw edges to take care of at the other end of the case. I joined the fringed endings of the two bands together with weft twining which sealed the raw edges. You can see that in the photo below. I’ll leave it up to my friend to decide how short he would like to cut the fringe. He does tend to like things on the wild and woolly side. All that’s left to do is add a large snap closure or a magnet closure, or even velcro tabs if that’s what he prefers. I have a tutorial on this kind of handy weft twining here on my blog.

I am so happy with the way the pattern on the flap lines up with that on the body of the case. The pattern is a modified version of one that I include in my More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns book.

I then got the idea of replacing the decorative bands on the flute itself with woven ones. The bands that are currently in place are made from colored nylon fishing line. There were three bands and I have managed to remove one of them so far. I think that woven bands in red and black would look much nicer.

So, if it’s fun to weave two bands at once on my backstrap loom….how much more fun would it be to weave three? That way I get three pieces each with its third selvedge to place around the flute. The selvedge will slightly overlap and cover the raw edge at the other end of each band. I am weaving these in much finer cotton than the thread I used for the case. This is the good ol’ Clea thread that I used to use for almost everything long before I started traveling a lot to the States to make my yarn purchases. It’s made in Brazil and I have a bin of its odds and ends from all those years ago. It’s a 2-ply crochet cotton which isn’t as highly mercerized as the crochet cottons I have come across in the States. When I eventually move back to Australia, I am sure that I will long for it. I prefer the flatness of 2-ply thread over the round-ness of 3-ply and the less polished feel of the Clea thread.

Three bands to encircle and decorate the quena in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. This is just one of the hundred patterns in my Complementary-warp Pattern Book.

And when the evening comes and its time for cat-sitting cuddle duty, I brush this little old lady and spin her fur for fun.

I have two takli spindles here with me. One is occupied with the natural brown cotton labeled as “cinnamon”. By the way, I did some boil tests with the cinnamon thread to see if the darkening of the brown color intensified the longer it was boiled. I started with the two extremes, boiling one lot for 40 minutes and the other lot for only 5. The difference is disappointingly barely noticeable and so that’s the end of that experiment! It was actually the label on the brown color called “coyote” that stated that a range of tones could be obtained by boiling the thread for different lengths of time. I haven’t started spinning the coyote yet and so I will perhaps try this experiment again when I have spun a decent amount of thread.

I’ll be back home by the time I write my next post. I’ll be breathing out some kind of mixture of everything I have been breathing in these last couple of weeks. See you then.

Backstrap Weaving – An Artist’s Residency

I joined a team for this year’s Tour de Fleece event. This is a spinning event that always runs at the same time as the Tour de France. It’s a chance to set yourself a goal and spin along with others, watching their progress, celebrating the completion of their goals, proudly showing off your own work, and learning a heck of a lot about the spinning of all kinds of fiber along the way. There are prizes but I would say that not all that many people are interested in or motivated by that particular aspect. I have made two attempts to play along in a team in the past and have never lasted more than a week, I am embarrassed to say. I got bored!

I enjoy the quietness of spinning in this re-purposed wooden mortar compared to on the pretty plate that a friend gave me. The sound of the metal shaft of the takli against the plate got on my nerves after a while! Still, I treasure the lovely plate and am sure I will find another use for it.

This year, I am trying to spin all the Sea Island cotton that I was given by my friend Betty. I spin a little on my takli spindle after breakfast every day. I feel very motivated and I think it’s because I have specific uses in mind for this cotton thread. That, and the fact that I am pretty new to spinning cotton and am constantly learning, make it more interesting. I also don’t have that nagging need to get as much weaving done as I possibly can, as I used to do, when I would have to drop everything to prepare workshop materials and pack to leave for an extended trip away. Don’t get me wrong…I LOVED those trips away.

This is all pre Tour de Fleece product.

Life has slowed down. I pretend that I am one of those lucky people that go away to escape distractions so that they can spend an extended amount of time focusing on their art. They choose a peaceful or exotic place and do an artist’s residency, drawing inspiration from their new natural and cultural surroundings. That’s me, except that I get to do it in the comfort of my own home and draw inspiration from the internet, lol. I followed along during the several weeks that a Facebook acquaintance recently spent painting in the Shetland Islands on such a residency.

The projects that I have in mind for the spun cotton thread are also “firsts” which I think is another motivating factor. While I spin, my mind runs through the steps that I will take to get those projects off the ground. I try to imagine all the things that could possibly go wrong in the hope that I can avoid them. I am pretty sure that all this will have me sticking with the Tour de Fleece for its entire duration this time. I write down the steps for the new projects in my Weaver’s Journal only to erase or amend them the following day when I figure out a better way.

I had come to the conclusion that I cared very little for the process of spinning and that I am one hundred percent motivated by the product. Now I am not so sure. I have a dismantled Ashford Traditional wheel in my closet that would enable me to spin a whole lot faster, yet I ignore it and stick with my takli for cotton and my good ol’ Cusco drop spindle for wool and alpaca. They somehow just seem to be more “me”. I guess that there are some aspects of the process that I really love after all. I am certainly not purely after finished product as I had once thought.

I had the experience of buying raw cotton, de-seeding it, fluffing it by hand, and then beating it on a sack of grain to prepare it for spinning when I stayed with a family of spinners and weavers in coastal Ecuador. I do understand that all of that is really the most essential part of the process. Being given a large coil of beautifully prepared Sea island sliver to spin is not quite the same, is it?

A photo of one of my prints from Ecuador, 2007. De-seeding the cotton was a typical evening activity in which all family members participated.
Beating the natural brown cotton that the locals call “mico” on a sack of grain.
The method for spinning cotton in this part of coastal Ecuador involves a horizontally held spindle and a distaff. In this picture Luz (R.I.P) uses two fingers to draft while the others regulate the movement of the twist into the drafted area.
As a clumsy beginner, I found it very difficult to get a good rate of spin from the horizontally-held spindle and the positioning and action of the drafting fingers was tough too! I have since been spoiled by the takli.

Afternoons and evenings are for weaving and this is what has been keeping me occupied in my “artist’s residency”. The weaving part of the Finnweave piece with its foliage pattern is finished . I have yet to wet-finish it. If this works as something that I can use to keep my neck covered, I will be pleased. As I mentioned in a past post, I don’t really enjoy wearing the scarves that I have woven. The length and ends and fringe annoy me. I just want something that I can button around my neck (I love the pieces that I knitted that I can just stretch and pull over my head but that doesn’t work so well for woven cloth).

This is the view as I peek over the edge of my bed in the morning. As soon as my feet hit the floor, I am in my weaving studio.

My sampling paid off (it always does). It enabled me to maintain the eight-inch width effortlessly the whole way. This is something that I find challenging when doing a balanced structure without a reed. The sett varies, though! The warp threads between the motifs get a bit a crowded sometimes but then open up again as the positions of the motifs change. I learned from a previous project not to weave motifs in columns because of that crowding problem. I am interested to see how things change after wet-finishing.

I find the pick-up super easy in this technique. Once the first row of a motif has been woven, there’s no more counting to do . It’s very easy to see exactly which threads need to be selected for subsequent rows.

I got the basic idea for the irregular leaf shapes from one of Svetlana Rogatykh’s crochet patterns. The lines in her designs are particularly suitable for Finnweave. The proportions, however, will be quite different and need adjustment. I just took her idea of irregular leaf shapes and went on my own from there. I think that any shape pretty much works. I don’t think that there’s a single “leaf” shape there that actually looks like a leaf on its own. I added butterflies along the way to connect the two layers of the double weave and chose to make them solid rather than outlined shapes. The poor butterflies are flitting about looking for something colorful in that flower-less garden.

Finished and still on the loom. I wove a length that I thought would work well wrapped around my neck, and then some. One thing I didn’t do in my sampling was take before and after wet-finishing measurements. Hopefully not too much of it will be wasted.

And so, while I continue spinning cotton, another project has come to mind. I am really enjoying this exercise of picking through my stash and coming up with projects as opposed to coming up with projects and then shopping for yarn. Years ago, I bought a cone of 20/2 white UKI cotton. I have just finished scouring a good amount of it (I learned the hard way some years ago, that this needed to be done before attempting to dye it) and am planning a warp-ikat project. I want to use the finished fabric to construct something this time…so, no wall hangings, scarves or neck wraps…there will be cutting and hand-sewing involved. Maybe I have become cocky after my successful bag project! It’s been many years since I created an ikat piece with cotton.

The last ikat I did in this same 20/2 cotton became a drawstring bag for my Kindle.

My goodness, the water was soupy after scouring the UKI cotton. Any of you that have UKI in your stash will know about the spinning oil that it carries. I suppose all thread has it but I seem to be more aware of its presence in this particular brand.

Now I have to come up with the motif that I want to create in ikat. I am hoping to use two colors.

In my last post, I said that I was gong to talk more about the backstrap loom in this one. I got carried away talking about other stuff. Let’s see if I can manage it next time 🙂

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