Category: bags

Backstrap Weaving – Mind Blown

First of all, I should point out that this post is not about anything woven on backstrap looms. I just always happen to start my titles with the term Backstrap Weaving.

The Ayoreo are a formerly nomadic indigenous people who live in the eastern lowland part of Bolivia known as the Gran Chaco. I’ve always admired the work they do making fabric using fiber from a plant in the pineapple family.

An example of the Bromelia Hieronymil plant from which the fibers with the local name garabatá are extracted.

Information about the Ayoreo people is sketchy. Population estimates in different sources range from seventeen hundred to four thousand Ayoreo people, distributed amongst seven to ten clans. They use off-loom netting, twining and knotting techniques, sometimes with the aid of a needle, to make a type of shoulder bag called utebetai using a fiber called garabatá fino from the Bromelia Hieronymil plant. The fiber is twisted and plied by rolling it on the thigh using ashes to take away some of its stickiness. It may also be dyed before use.

Chatting with one of the ladies representing the Ayoreo people and their work at the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico many years ago. The group has been invited many times to attend the Market.

 A special looped stitch is used by the women to create fabric which is then sewn into the utebetai bags that they use in their daily lives.

An example of one of the bags on display at the Arte Campo Museum here in Santa Cruz where I live.

The bags are of different sizes according to their use and are named accordingly. Each of the clans has its own unique patterns but in recent years it’s said that new designs are being created along with modified versions of the traditional ones. According to a booklet put out by CANOB (Central Ayorea Nativa del Oriente Boliviano), the designs used include representations of the patterns on armadillo shells, clouds, snake skins and the eyes of a jaguar.

I did at one stage own a few of the bags. I had unpicked the seams so that I could display the fabric opened out at full length. Later, I gave them away to appreciative friends along with almost all the art and handcraft pieces that I had gathered during the years I’ve spent here in Santa Cruz. It’s what you have to do when you are planning to move to the other side of the globe.

The three pieces that I had owned.

I have always wanted to learn about this but gave up some time ago trying to find a willing teacher. I’d had many leads but they’d all ended in dead ends.

But then….just a few weeks ago I spotted an ad by the Arte Campo Museum here in Santa Cruz about a very short workshop in which an Ayoreo lady would be teaching the special looping stitch that they use to make the bags. I couldn’t believe my luck.

I can tell you that there’s nothing like having an experience like this to make you appreciate the tremendous skill that goes into making these pieces. I’ve always admired them and do so even more now that I know just a little bit about what goes into making them. I can only hope that the things I post online and the classes I give have had a similar effect on my students and readers in that they have a greater appreciation of the textiles that are created in the highlands and lowlands of these South American countries, the people who make them and the simple tools with which they work.

I can’t believe that I actually went to the class thinking that once I learned the “stitch”, I’d be able to make myself a little bag. Ha!

First I explored the museum and took notes and photos, dreaming of the wonderful patterns I was going to be able to create.
The pieces are worked while tied to the leg. Luckily I had chosen not to wear a skirt that day which is my usual attire in the tropical heat.

Samples were handed out to the ten participants. I was thrilled with mine as it was in one of my favorite color combinations. The idea was to have us stitch a couple of rows and then sew the little piece into a miniature bag that could be hung around the neck. Easier said than done!

I’m very much used to the “look-and-learn” style of teaching with all the experience I’ve had studying weaving techniques with my teachers here. There are no explanations….just watch. “You look, you know”, as my Vietnamese twining teacher would say to me. However, those were one-on-one experiences. It’s quite different when there are ten people battling to get a good view and capture every move on an iPad or cell phone…plus the garabatá thread was so fine! I didn’t even try to record it.

I soon realized that the row that I was supposed to looping onto was black and that I couldn’t make out a darn thing! Sadly, I swapped my beautiful sample for another so that I could stitch onto white. My active thread, however, was brown and that was very hard to see too. There were moments when I was thinking, Wow, maybe I’m getting too old for this!

The younger ones reviewing footage on phones and iPads.

So, much of the two-hour class was spent just trying to figure out the basic stitch. Mine were too dark and too tight to really tell although Teresa, the teacher, kept telling me that it was okay. I wasn’t convinced. She did point out that my work was too tight. I don’t know how she could see anything at all! No one got to make their little bag in the allotted time. We were all struggling! Some people got discouraged and left early. I stubbornly kept going. I don’t know how many times I ripped it all back to the beginning of the row. Now I can see that it’s actually a very very simple two-part process that was made complicated because ten people all wanted to be helped at once.

As with all these kinds of things, tension is key. You can have the stitch down, but it just won’t look right if it hasn’t been properly tensioned. The ends have to be pulled this way and that as the loops are tightened in order to position them correctly. I stitched along to finish the brown row and went home still not knowing if I was doing it right. I then changed to white which happened to be thicker than the brown and then quietly at home without the chaos of ten people all competing for attention, I started to get the hang of it.

You can see my squashed and uneven brown row and then my much nicer white one in progress.

And now, I’ve run out of garabatá. I think it’s quite amazing that we were given the laboriously prepared and precious thread to work with in the class in the first place instead of some industrially prepared substitution and I really appreciate that.

I decided that I needed to get out some chunky stuff to continue practicing stitching with proper and even tension. I have to say, though, that here is absolutely nothing charming about the work in this size thread and in these colors!

And now you can all get a closer look at it. Perhaps you’ll find that you already know how to do it.

I think I’ll go down in thread size now and continue practicing.

So I simply had to go back to the store and buy a bag and I was blown away by the quality of the work I saw there. The stitching is even tinier and more dense and beautifully even than the pieces I bought all those years ago. It actually makes the samples we were given in class look quite clumsy. I can’t get over how beautiful the bag that I bought is. Now I’m thinking that the teacher prepared the samples with larger, looser and more open stitches to make things easier for us.

The Ayoreo create their pieces flat and then sew the sides together. They work from left to right and then turn the piece over to work the next row so that they are always working in the same direction. In my thick-thread example above I was attempting to create it in a continuous circular form thinking that it would somehow look neater than having to create a seam. I have a vague memory of having read somewhere that the same looped stitch is used in Papua New Guinea to make bags but that the pieces there are worked in circular form.

However, the joining of the two sides in the piece that I just bought is so finely and beautifully done that the stitching is practically imperceptible. The sides don’t overlap. They are perfectly butted together. I’m so pleased to have this piece! It feels so good and has the most wonderful plant-y smell. And how in the world do the Ayoreo ladies go about adding in the colors to create those shapes is beyond me. That was actually one of my main motivations for buying a bag…I wanted to be able to study it and discover what was done with the start and end tails at the color changes. I can’t tell! It’s so expertly done. Mind blown.

Was I equally enthralled when I bought those three pieces twenty-four years ago? I wasn’t. I certainly admired them but then eventually gave them away. The difference has been having just that tiny introduction to the technique and that tiny amount of interaction with Teresa, our teacher.

Here again is the young lady I met in Santa Fe showing how she twists and plies the fiber. Of course, looking back at this photo now, my eye is captured by her wrist cuff.

So, if I never get to make a bag in this lovely looping technique, maybe I could aim at making a wrist cuff instead if I ever figure out those color changes. A simpler striped one may have to do for now. But maybe I’ll find another teacher before I have to move away.

I’ll finish with a photo I took recently of my cuffs in Fall colors, even though it’s Spring here. I happened to be in an Autumn kind of mood. I always get questions when I post these photos from people who’d like to know more about how I finish my cuffs. I might make my next blog post about that.

Backstrap Weaving – I Have a Cunning Plan….

I was actually originally going to simply call this blog post “Oops!” and leave it at that. I made a mistake in my latest ikat. Oops! Of course to me, the maker, it’s a glaring one. However, I’ve since come up with an idea which just might turn the blip into “beauty”…if not beauty, at least something acceptable. The lesson learned is to be extra careful when my first dye color very closely resembles the color of the ikat tape.

Anyway, more about that a little later.

Since I last wrote I have had and recovered from Covid…almost exactly two years since the last time I had it. For me it’s not a question of whether I have a just a regular flu or Covid….the symptoms are different enough for me to be quite sure it’s Covid. Nevertheless, I did get tested just in case it turned out be something else altogether that needed antibiotics.. We still have to do PCR tests here as the home RAT test kits are not available. I have no idea from whom I might have picked it up and I’m pretty sure that I gave it to a friend before my symptoms showed the day after our lunch together and I think that two days earlier my dentist might have been exposed to it from me as well. This is just awful and unavoidable unless we all go back to routinely wearing masks again.

I really felt the need to sleep a lot and rest this time. The problem is that I really don’t do well with not being productive. Fortunately, I had a little unfinished object which allowed me to sit and do some quiet work.

You may remember that I had gathered all these left-over scraps from old projects in order to test my idea for my wallet project. This was meant to be the prototype but I abandoned it because I had become convinced that my plan would work and that a sample wasn’t necessary.

At the point of abandonment I had sewn my stitched shibori cloth as lining for some left-over pebble weave fabric which formed the main body of the wallet and created the storage pocket for bills. I’d also just started to construct card slots with the shibori fabric. There’s some left-over blue ikat fabric woven with my own handspun cotton singles as well as plain black cloth that was at the end of another ikat warp, again in my handspun cotton. It’s hard to throw handspun scraps away!

So, I picked it all up again to finish. The part I enjoy the most is adding the tubular edging. This enables me to cut the closure flap of the wallet into a curved shape knowing that the tubular band will enclose and protect it.

I used multiple tones of blue for the tubular edging band rather than making it just one solid color. I love the way it came out.

The tubular band gave me the chance to use even more leftovers. I had dyed cotton thread various tones of blue to use in a complementary-weft project and there were just odd short lengths left over. They were perfect for this project.

The project that had combined both complementary-warp and weft structures had required only small quantities of each dyed weft color.
If you think that two wallets is one too many…..well, how about three? Yep, my latest ikat cloth is also destined to be a wallet.

The ”scraps” wallet also as a coin purse with expandable sides on the back. I used the black handspun cotton cloth for the sides. I took a deep breath and threw all remaining scraps away but only when I was completely convinced that they weren’t going to be useful in any way for any thing.

I was really delighted recently to see this picture of scissor bags made by Shahsavan nomads of northern Iran (courtesy of one of Sue Richardson’s wonderful posts on textile events on the Oxford Asian Textile Group blog).

The image is from a recently published book, Scissor Bags and Sheep Scissors in the Nomadic Tradition, by Peter Umney-Gray.

I have to wonder if the fabric for these bags was specifically woven for this purpose or if the nomads are using off-cuts or leftovers from larger projects in much the same way I have. I love that so much care has been taken to house these important implements in such a beautiful way.

I’m currently working on a three-color ikat piece (two dye colors plus original warp color) with my handspun cotton singles for wallet number three. The design is one that I have used before. I just added more threads to each ikat bundle this time in order to make it a bit wider.

The warp is double the width you see here. It’s been folded in half so that I can tie the repeating pattern on both halves at the same time.

While looking around online, I’ve seen various ways that ikat artists measure out and mark the pattern on the warp which is then tied with tape. Here’s a photo that my friend Pam shared with me of a gentleman in Uzbekistan just eyeballing it while marking the pattern lines with a charcoal stick.

I’ve seen weavers in the islands of Indonesia mark out an entire grid of lines on the warp which helps the artist tie sections of equal length and consistent spacing. And I’ve seen an artist working with the warp suspended over a grid of lines as a guide rather than having the grid marked on the warp itself. I haven’t come up with a good way yet. I just measure and mark with charcoal pencil as I go. If I get out of alignment by a millimeter or so here and there, it all adds up and then things end up noticeably misaligned. I tend to find it much easier in my larger pieces, like this one…..

Larger patterns with wider ikat bundles seem to be easier for me to measure and mark. This one is 60/2 silk.

Or with smaller scattered patterns….

Using 20/2 cotton with a scattering of small individual motifs.

Here’s the warp after the first dye color….so far so good.

The pink tape is reserving all the parts of the warp that I want to have remain the original white. Before I dye the second color, I need to add more tape to reserve the areas that I want to remain red. The final dye color, black, will cover all the remaining unprotected red areas.

And there’s the blip…can you see it? At this point the warp is stretched out on my backstrap loom and I’ve removed the second application of tape which reveals all the red areas. However, one bit that was supposed remain red is now black. I’d neglected to wrap it….after having checked three times!

I could just leave it as a reminder to be careful in future or I could find a way to “make it work”. Hopefully my plan will work. I decided to do what is called “spot dyeing”. Black dye is added (outside the dye pot) to other red areas in order to balance the mistake and add symmetry…..in other words, make it look like it was meant to be!

I’ve seen videos online of ikat artists in India routinely dong this spot dyeing, not to mask a mistake as I am doing but rather to add additional colors to their ikat warp. They carefully dip a small section of warp that is flanked by resist ties into a dish of dye and vigorously work the dye into the fibers with their fingers. I don’t know how wash resistant this kind of spot dyeing can be but it seems to be a normal part of the process for adding small sections of fourth and perhaps fifth colors to an ikat piece in certain parts of India.

I’ve also seen additional colors being painted onto ikat warps in some parts of Indonesia. My wallet won’t be getting washed at any stage and so I think that my spot dyeing will be safe. I am however very curious about the dye solution that is used by the artists in India and Indonesia for this kind of spot work because I’m quite sure that the fabric they are creating will be laundered many times. If I were making an item to be worn and washed, I’d just throw the warp back into a black dye bath and overdye all the red areas black. That would cover the mistake and give me a simple black-and-white pattern that I know would be safe to wash.

I had some experience with spot dyeing many years ago when I created this ikat fabric for a book cover. It’s a piece that has never been laundered.

I was using Dylon cold water dyes for cotton for the book cover project. Terracotta was the first color which was then overdyed with blue to give the darker chocolate-like color. These were three separate warps which I later combined on the loom. The easiest way for me to overdye the terracotta cross in the center block with blue was to spot dye. However, this was back in the days when I was using cassette tape as my resist material. For some reason, I made up a dye solution for the spot dyeing with very hot water. The cassette tape didn’t like that water temperature at all and the blue color seeped under the tape into the white. So then I had to rescue it by also spot dyeing a section of white with the blue to even out the bleeding. It added something totally unexpected to the project.

You’ll find out in my next post if my not-all-that-cunning spot dyeing plan worked. I’m still at it. If I remember, I’ll also wrap and spot dye a small sample so that I can see how it goes in the wash.

I’m going to leave you with something that I think is really spectacular. As some of you know, every now and then I do some reversible three-color Andean Pebble Weave and I get a lot of requests for instructions. I will be publishing on it but I can’t say exactly when. Life is a little topsy-turvy at the moment. The instructions that I have published on Andean Pebble Weave so far have been on the much more common two-color version which in itself is an awesome technique. For those who are hankering after the additional color and complexity of the three-color technique, I hope you find it interesting and inspiring to see what can be done with the basic two-color structure and a little imagination….

Julie Beers sent me this photo of her work with one of the double dragon patterns that I have published.

The richly-colored Lunatic Fringe cotton that she’s using really makes this piece glow and I also think that it makes it look deceivingly complex. It’s still just the two-color structure that we all know and love. Thank you, Julie, for allowing me to share this here. It’s so inspiring.

I gathered together a handful of these historic double dragon patterns that I’d seen on tablet-woven bands and transposed them into the Andean Pebble Weave structure. They’re published in my More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns book. I’d originally been asked to transpose one of the dragon patterns by a weaving acquaintance on Ravelry so that it could be woven with string heddles rather than with tablets. I shared the chart and this is what Penelope Hemingway did with it, adding it to a hat that she’d made with nalbinding.

I don’t have the stash to be able to get into the kind of colorful work that Julie is doing right now. Or do I? I just remembered this…..

My 30/2 silk cochineal stash. I’ve yet to come up with a project for it.

This might be next on the drawing board. I have more white 30/2 silk left as well as a new supply of cochineal. Maybe I’ll be able to add some more colors to this collection.

See you next time.

Backstrap Weaving – The Inner Chaos

The Inner Chaos…..I’m only talking about the chaos within my weaving tool bags and my weaving journal…nothing introspective….well maybe just a little bit. I am pretty jumbled up below the surface when it comes to my thoughts about my eventual move back to Australia. Now that I’ve let the cat out of the bag, I’m constantly being asked “when?”. I don’t know. There are so many complexities to be sorted out at this end!

But enough of that. Let’s talk about weaving and tool bags. I showed you the little box bag that I made recently in which I can carry basic sewing supplies. I love how it opens up to give me a clear view of its contents. My large tool bag often has me digging around in the dark and getting stabbed by needles until I eventually give up and tip out the contents. I don’t help matters by tossing in all kinds of random odds and ends that I pick up from the floor when I sit down to weave….the used cable tie that I am determined to pick open and re-use, the rubber band that broke and that I’ve tied into a knot, the little chunk of eraser that really is too small to be of any more use.

I love this little box purse. The project also gave me a chance to practice my hand-sewing skills.

The long zippered tool bag was a bonus that I could make with left over fabric. It holds several of my small swords and the smaller of my pick-up sticks.

A variety of things that I use to pick up threads to create patterns…hair sticks, shawl pins, chopsticks, a dpn and a stick from my teacher in Guatemala. The shorter ones fit in the zippered bag.
Just a few of my smaller swords. These were all made for me from Australian woods found in the state of NSW (my home state).

But what about the longer tools that don’t fit in the zippered bag? Well, of course, they need another bag of their own, another box-like purse, except longer. And then what about the poor old large tool bag that has served me so well all these years?

The old faithful tool bag that has been everywhere with me, looking bright and sparkly, fresh off the loom in 2010, and the way it looks today.

It won’t be abandoned. I finally decided to invest in a good pair of fabric scissors and a pair of pinking shears. They now live in this bag all on their own. I’ve been told that I really should learn how to do French seams rather than rely on the pinking shears and I’ll get to that one day.

And so I got down to planning a larger box-like purse. I decided to use the champagne-colored cotton thread from Guatemala. I had epi information on it from past projects. I just needed to dye some of it brown and decide on a pattern for it in supplementary weft.

One of the journal covers that I wove using this thread.

Some years ago, I took paisley figures and arranged them in order to create a pattern of my own. It was a lot of drawing, sampling and modifying…a lot of work before I could start weaving. I used it once in a silk scarf project and that was the end of that for several years. I decided that it needed to be used again.

I fished the large paper pattern out of the folder. Luckily it was still legible. My pencil patterns often get really worn and smudged during the course of a project. Sometimes I even throw them away! I think, well, that was a lot of work…I’ll never weave that again! Now I always photograph them when they are freshly drawn.

All the sketching and ideas go into my weaving book. At that early stage its all fairly neat and orderly. It’s when the time comes for number crunching that it all goes to hell…the chaos within the pages begins. I would love to be one of those people who can consistently write neatly, sketch beautifully and create art within the pages of their journals. I do keep detailed notes but they are a mess! I often need to return to them and then I might have to spend quite a bit of time deciphering just how I got from A to B. If you want to see an absolutely amazing journals (dedicated to travel), take a look at jose_naranja on Instagram…unbelievably beautiful.

Weaving cloth covers for my notebooks has made note-making so pleasurable. I just wish the insides were as pretty as the outside.

These ones are still blank.
My current notebook.

I made a little video that takes you inside…..

I’m glad that many years ago when I was making books to document all that I had learned from my various indigenous teachers, I was patient enough to write out everything neatly, make precise drawings and diagrams, illustrate with photos, as well as glue in woven samples. Some even have miniature looms complete with heddles to illustrate the warping set-up. Each of the eight books I made had some kind of weaving on its cover.

The first one, bottom left, was started back in 1996 when I was still living in southern Chile.

Here’s a glimpse of the inside of a couple. These have already gone to live in Australia…

The last project in my little video is the start of the long version of the box-like purse. Here it is on the loom….

After weaving the main paisley motif which sits on the curved flap of the purse, I just wove a very simple version for what will be the base…

And here it is finished. Lessons learned when I made the first box-like purse served me well. I am really pleased with it.

I posed it next to another pouch that I wove with the same thread some years ago. The color has changed quite a lot over the years but it’s not really apparent in this photo. It has lost its golden hue on that old pouch.
It lacks the cuteness of the smaller one, though.

So now I need a bag in which to carry around all the individual tool purses…lol. Actually, my next project idea is to make a fabric case in which to store all my pattern charts. They’re currently stuffed inside a plastic box folder. The elastic straps that hold the cover in place have perished. I wonder if I could design some kind of concertina inner so that each technique has its own section. The fabric would be the outside cover. I’ve started planning the cover using the mill-spun singles wool. There’s some dyeing and sampling to do first as I’d like to use the three-color reversible pebble weave structure and need to see if the singles yarn will stand up to it.

Three-color reversible pebble weave in my own handspun plied wool.
The mill-spun singles have worked well for me in plain weave. You can see that the heddles didn’t get clogged with fluff. I have yet to see how it behaves in a denser structure of warp floats. I want to dye some of it a darker grey and some black for the three-color project.

If the singles yarn isn’t up to the task, perhaps I’ll use the plied wool yarn and cochineal that I got in the market on my birthday.

So, in conclusion, the inner chaos of my large tool bag has been sorted. While I accept that the inner chaos of my weaving notebooks will never be, perhaps my chaotically-arranged pattern charts will get categorized according to structure inside a new case with handwoven cover.

Until next time…..

Backstrap Weaving – In the Bag

Another birthday comes and goes. I was given some lovely mini cheesecakes by a friend and we went out for a stroll around the street market that starts a block and half from my place before having a birthday lunch. Every now and then I go to this market looking for cochineal. The ladies that sell the home remedies are the ones that have it but it seemed that the source had dried up as I hadn’t been able to find any this year.

The market is big and, being in good company, we chatted and ventured further into the market than I normally find it necessary to do on my own. It paid off. I actually found the cochineal mother lode. I just bought a little and then snapped photos all around to make sure that I’ll be able to find this particular vendor again.

I often forget how different these markets must seem to my weaving friends who live outside South America. I generally don’t feel secure taking my phone out when I am at the market. This comes from experience! In fact, I don’t usually take it with me at all. But, because I had an extra pair of eyes with me on this day, I brought it along and took a few photos along the way.

I love the two white cats under the table waiting patiently for tidbits.
Crunchy snacks anyone?
One of the many “healers” who will read your fortune and find solutions for your troubles.

And then I came across another surprise. It seemed that they were stacking up for my birthday. I have never seen anyone selling hand-spun wool down here in the tropical lowlands in all the years that I have been here. In fact, there isn’t any industrially-spun wool to be found either. On this day there were three balls of handspun wool hanging in amongst the home remedies in this little store owned by a lady from Potosi.

We talked spinning and weaving and she searched about to find her spindle to show me. It wasn’t particularly fine yarn but it was such a novelty to find it here and so nice to chat with this lady that I simply had to buy a ball of it. I’ll dye it with the cochineal that I just bought.

And with this I broke my vow to only work from stash but what the heck, it was my birthday.

It has the most wonderful smell that is characteristic of those home remedy stalls.

One more stop was made at the many aisles of the indoor part of the market where the sewing supplies are sold. I needed a long zip in a certain color for the loom carry bag that I was making.

There are multiple vendors along this aisle and it’s amazing how much stuff they cram into their small allotted spaces. What’s more amazing is that they know exactly where everything is. I got my zip in the perfect color.

So, this is what has been on my loom. I showed you the warp of Mayan Hands cotton from Guatemala in my last post. I dyed the black and there are two shades of cochineal red that were dyed in Guatemala.

Each of the red sections is flanked by twelve ends of a slightly darker red. It doesn’t really show up in this photo. I goofed while warping and put more red ends on the right hand side than on the left but decided to just let it be.

The black and white section would enable me to weave several kinds of patterning styles and I decided to weave this in rep weave….alternating thick and thin weft. That would make a sturdy bag and a cushy backstrap. You might remember my plan to make a carry bag for my loom that could double as a backstrap.

I chose a pattern that I had used on a silk wrist cuff some years ago. I had woven it using the complementary-warp intermesh structure with a pattern from Joanne Hall’s book on Mexican Tapestry weaving.

I chose the pattern on the far left in these two images.

I first had to weave a sample to see how many strands I needed to make up the thick weft. Then I could get underway. Because I hadn’t used this Mayan Hands cotton in a large plain-weave project before and had only woven a tiny sample with it, I was a bit unsure about being able to set the width of the large project correctly right from the start. It’s quite common to start off too narrow. Threads that are sitting side by side along two cross sticks sit one above the other along the cloth beam and this can trick you into misjudging the width of the cloth. So, I did what I do if I am weaving with new-to-me yarn and placed four narrow strips of cardboard within the first four sheds so that I could see how the threads sit side by side.

By doing this I can move the threads around until I get the ideal coverage of the cardboard strips within the sheds. I take measurements, carefully remove the strips, disturbing the threads as little as possible while doing so, and then start weaving. This enables me to start at just the right width and maintain it for the entire project.
There’s nothing delicate or subtle about this pattern!

The motif is a complementary-warp pick-up pattern made up of two-span floats and very occasionally a three-span. Any section of white in a row that doesn’t have any white directly above or below it in the preceding or following row will be made up of three-span floats. Being complementary-warp, the piece is double-faced. It’s very straightforward. You just have to remember that vertical lines of white need to be broken up by picking up black threads in the thin-weft rows.

And here it is off the loom. I wove the start and finish only with thin weft so that they would be easier to hem. I also split them into two halves because they would become sleeves into which I would thread the cords for the backstrap. This will be clearer later when you see images of the cords in place.

I’m really happy with it! I ran out of black thick weft and switched to reddish brown which I think looked even better. In the end the color didn’t matter because I covered the bumpy selvedges in order to sew in the zip.
There’s no point to this photo. I just like the way my book looks on top of the rep weave piece. 🙂
I wove a band using the lightest of the three cochineal colours that I have in this cotton and used it to enclose the typical bumpy rep weave selvedges.

I still have to test the ideal length of the white cords so that I can cut and bind them off. I also need to decide on the best way to affix a carry strap. I’m going to let it sit for a bit while I think about that.

Here it is holding sticks, swords, shuttle and tool bag. I still have to sew to isolate the sleeves that hold the cords.

What’s next? Maybe some dyeing with cochineal and perhaps a longer version of the little box-like purse that I recently made. I have a lot of fine Guatemalan cotton for that in a color the vendor called champagne. I need to come up with a pattern for it in supplementary weft.

Keep busy lest you be accused of sloth! I was amused to see this depiction of the seven deadly/mortal sins in an episode of QI. A spinner was used to represent Sloth. How dare they! I couldn’t get a close enough view of the spinner during the program to be able to understand what that was all about. But I did find an image online and was able to see that her spindle, laden with yarn, was lying idle on the ground….the horror.

See you next time!

Backstrap Weaving – In and out of the Box

I just wanted to quickly show what I made with the fabric I was weaving in my last post.

Supplementary-weft motifs in red silk on cotton.

Bear in mind that I am not much of a sewer and that my thrills from sewing successes, therefore, come cheaply. I do love stitching by hand, though.

I really liked a box-like purse that Handymum had shown in a video tutorial. She doesn’t speak at all in these videos and explains everything with hand gestures and occasional text in English. When I can also mute the music, it becomes my favorite way to watch these kinds of videos. They play at high speed and so I need to watch them several times to be able to catch everything. I save only the very simplest ones while I improve my skills. I’m not going to risk my handwoven cloth on something that is beyond my skill level.

YET, if I’d really respected my lack of experience and sewn a sample with fabric I have floating around, I would have avoided a silly mistake I made.

The unusual layout of the pattern is due to the nature of the box-like purse I planned to sew. The plain blue that flanks the pattern would be the sides of the “box”.
I managed to get a second product, a slim zippered tool case, from the extra bit of warp I had put on the loom. I switched to a different pattern for that based on warp-float snake designs that are woven here in the lowlands of Bolivia.
Guaraní weavers here create snake patterns in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. (They call it kara kara pepo) There are so many versions of it, both simple and complex. This is my modified version of one of them. I love how it looks in supplementary-weft in my latest project.

The sides and front of the box shape collapse inward so that when closed, the purse lies quite flat. I thought this design was really cute. What I love is that you can unclip the flap, open it up and clearly see everything laid out inside instead of having to dig around inside a zippered pouch. I occasionally have to tip out all the contents of some of my larger tool pouches in order to find something.

I dyed a piece of the fabric on which the pieces sit here light blue to use as the lining. I’ve put basic sewing supplies in there…a tin of pins, a wooden needle case, snips, a stitch ripper and some dark thread.

This was the first time I had sewn in the lining before sewing up the piece and the first time I sewed everything before flipping the whole thing right-side-out. I told you about my cheap thrills, right? I was so pleased with myself! As for the mistake, I sewed too close to the thick interfacing. In her video, Handymum sews on the lines she has drawn onto the lining and you can’t see how close she is to the interfacing on the other side. Rather than draw lines, I flipped my piece over and sewed around the interfacing instead, but much too close considering the thickness of the interfacing (I used two layers). I’m all for ripping things out and doing them over but it was too late. I’d already snipped the curve of the top, cut the points off the outer corners and cut into the inner ones. And so, the seams are really strained and stretched over the interfacing and some of my (black!) stitching shows as a result.

I have some of the same Guatemalan cotton in a color called champagne and I might have another go at this sewing pattern but in a longer version using fabric woven from that thread.

Like the indigo cotton, the champagne-colored cotton from Guatemala is slightly finer than 20/2. I love weaving with this stuff.

I’m sad to see my supply of that indigo-dyed Guatemalan cotton getting low although stash-busting is my goal after all. I just know that I’ll probably never get to replace it. It’s special because of the way it has faded after all these years. I love the way it weaves up with all its variations of shades of blue. I still have loads of the champagne color, though. I’m assuming that it was also dyed with natural substances but it doesn’t seem to have faded. I’ll know for sure when I compare the thread on the inside of the cakes to the outside layers of thread.

As for the next project, it will be yet another bag, hopefully. Not another, you say?! But I like to think that I’m thinking a bit out of the box with this one. I have this crazy idea of making a long bag in which to carry my backstrap loom that doubles as a backstrap.

When I was house-sitting last year, I took my loom with work-in-progress to my new digs in a large cotton tote bag……
…..only to find that I had forgotten to bring a backstrap. It turned out that the tote bag in which I had carried it made a fairly decent emergency backstrap. From this came the idea.

I’m using Guatemalan cotton again except this is somewhat heavier stuff, also from Mayan Hands, that my friend Kate gave me. I dyed the black and it accompanies cochineal-dyed purplish-red (dyed in Guatemala) and natural white. I’m back to one of my old faithful color combinations.

I’ve tossed around various ideas for the structure and pattern and I think that I’ve finally (almost!) settled on rep weave to give me good sturdy fabric with complementary-warp pick-up patterns. I do try to learn something new with each project. I have in fact woven rep once before and so its not entirely new, hence the “almost” in parentheses. I keep thinking that I need to add a twist to this somehow. If not, creating the strange backstrap/tote bag may have to be the new part of this project.

The only rep weave piece I’ve woven so far.
It makes a nice placemat for my tray table so that things don’t slide around.

In the two new projects that I’ve shown in this post, the thread has come from Guatemala. The finer stuff was bought from Mayan Hands at a conference many years ago in Bellingham. The heavier thread, also from Mayan Hands, was given to me Kate.

Kate working with her Guatemalan loom and warp when I visited in California.

I wove this scarf using fine cotton thread from Guatemala that was given to me by Betty. She had bought it in the 1980s!

I used patterning techniques that I’d learned in Guatemala to decorate it.
I went to Guatemala myself in 2008, met my teacher Lidia and also brought back some cotton of the kind that you see here on the swift. Lidia took me shopping to get the best prices!

I haven’t done a whole lot with it because the quantities were quite small. I’d bought it with the idea of using it as supplementary weft rather than as warp. But here’s one thing I ‘ve used it for….

Fabric for a book cover. There wasn’t enough of any one color and so I had to step outside my color box and combine two.

So, that’s another stash that I’d like to get into. And, on that same trip I bought a ball of handspun cotton singles from a spinner. The ball sat in the closet for close to ten years and then I got to use pretty much all of it for this sheer scarf project….

I love this white-on-white supplementary weft technique.

I haven’t been to Guatemala since 2008 but every now and then someone puts a Guatemalan warp in my hands and I get to take a trip down Guatemalan-weaving Memory Lane….(and it seems that this post is also turning into one!)

I hope to make another trip to Australia in October and I’m thinking that maybe I could make a little side-trip to Guatemala from Miami on the way back when I’ll be virtually empty-handed. Who knows?

As for now, I need to go and figure out what to use for the thick weft in my rep piece, if in fact rep is my final decision for this project. See you next time.