cross knit looping – Page 3 – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Different “tribes”, different customs.

Different places, different customs…are you one for grits, biscuits and sweet tea or bagels, lox and giant mugs of coffee for breakfast? I love seeing all these different things when I am traveling. Different “tribes”, different places, different customs…

Christmas, Hanukkah or Festivus?

I had fun the weekend after Thanksgiving helping to decorate the tree in Claudia’s home and then we ran into this Festivus sign (for the Seinfeld fans out there) in Poolesville. Maybe the Festivus pole will make its appearance soon.

I am enjoying the cold weather here in the US getting wrapped up in scarves and gloves. It makes me nostalgic for my skiing days. I have been invited to spend a week in colonial Williamsburg with Claudia and friends and I hope it snows.

In the meantime, I have more to show and tell about the time I spent with the Montagnard weavers in North Carolina. They are all grouped under the general French title of “Montagnard” but Ngach, a Jarai women, tells me that the hill area of Vietnam is home to over sixty different tribes with their many similarities and differences in customs, textiles and weaving styles. I was able to meet people from the Jarai, Rhade , Bunong and Koho tribes during my stay.

My twining classes were with Ngach from the Jarai tribe and Ju who is Rhade. I ended up spending more time with Ngach who seems to have had more experience with the kteh technique and whose eyesight is better able to deal with the fine threads that are used.

We twined this small border design on a child’s skirt as that is all that time would allow. Normally this would be followed by a large central design three to four times the width of this one and then finished with the same border. Ngach was a wonderful teacher, as I said last week, with a quick eye for catching my mistakes and a lot of attention to detail.

She would start a row and work it to the midway point and then let me take over and finish copying the design while she went back and started the next row. So, pretty much the entire left side of the work is Ngach’s and the right side is mine. You can certainly tell the difference between the two halves.

She asked me a lot of questions about Bolivia and was pleased and surprised by the similarities in climate, vegetation and food between the hills of Vietnam and lowland Bolivia. I showed her pictures of llamas from the highlands, weavers and weavings of Peru and Bolivia and told her about the custom of chewing coca leaves. She would ask me again and again to repeat the words in English so that she could tell, I imagine, all the stories to her husband when she got home.

She then shared a story with me about how she had learned the kteh technique at the age of ten.

She was visiting her sister-in-law in her village who happened to be doing kteh that day and immediately fell in love with the designs and insisted on being allowed to sit and watch and try it. She stayed all morning instead of going home to prepare the rice for lunch as was her duty.

Eventually, angry messages and threats of slaps, in Ngach’s words, started arriving from her mother who had come home to find that lunch preparations were not underway. Both Ngach and her sister-in-law decided that it would be better for her stay on and pratice the kteh in the hope, I suspect, that her mother’s anger would pass. I don’t know what happened when she got home but Ngach soon became the one to whom other weavers would bring their finished loin cloths and other woven pieces so that she could make the intricate twined patterns. she would be paid with a leg or pork or sometimes cash.

She told me of one time that she stayed awake all night thinking about and planning her design and then got up in the morning to go straight to the store to buy her thread so she could get to work.

I think I really lucked out having Ngach as my teacher!

And she softened and finally agreed to sell me two of her lovely cement bobbins. She also has wooden ones from Vietnam but I have not seen her use those. The cement ones are a little heavier and feel really nice in the hands although they can be a bit rough on the thread.

And here is the design finished with only the border stripes to go…that’s the easy part.

final twining session — Dear Ngach working at the kteh and then the two of us celebrating the end of the design.

Betsy Renfrew, who is working with the Montagnard weavers and who made all this possible for me, has several books on the textiles of the hill tribe weavers of Vietnam. I had just been admiring a particularly beautiful piece, which was labeled as Maa in one of the books and which unfortunately was not detailed enough to allow me to see the technique, when in came Rah and her daughter Sel who are of the Bunong tribe (Betsy has found many variations of the spelling of this name), armed with a woven basket full of Bunong textiles. There was a piece with the very same technique that I had been squinting at in the book.

Above you can see the work on the central panel of Rah’s gorgeous skirt.

Rah understands English quite well but has difficulty expressing herself.

I don’t think she had any problem understanding my excitement over this piece and my desire to learn how to do the patterning technique.

However, her fourteen year old daughter Sel told me that, although her mom would love to teach me, unfortunately she had not woven this particular piece nor had she ever learned this kind of patterning.

It had been sent over from Vietnam. Sel was happy to show off the baby carrier that her mother had made for her – a piece for which she has an obvious strong attachment and affection. Her blouse was woven by her mom too.

There are examples of Bunong skirts on the Tribal Trappings website where the structure is described as “a soumak-like technique”. As I am now the happy owner of Marla Mallett’s wonderful book on woven structures, I am hoping to perhaps be able to pin it down from her pictures and descriptions. It could be countered soumak but I need to look at this more closely. Any thoughts from my readers would be very much welcomed.

In many ways the patterns resemble those that are created using one of the warp wrapping techniques I learned in Guatemala. The main difference is that the Guatemalan style is worked in a shed on a warp faced ground weave and does not show on the back of the piece. The Bunong piece has a balanced ground weave.

rah with skirt — Rah wearing her traditional Bunong skirt. Betsy tells me that Bunong textiles generally stand out from those of other tribes for the use of green in the designs.

Here is the beautiful “backpack” ‘basket in which some of the textiles had been brought to Betsy’s home…

Rah enjoyed watching videos that Betsy has made of Montagnard weaver Ju Nie at work at her loom. Sel said that Rah had had a loom at one stage here in North Carolina but also said that some of the loom parts had been confiscated by airline security when they had attempted to bring them over from Vietnam. We are hoping that she may feel inclined to take it up weaving again and that even Sel may decide that she would like to learn.

One more look at that gorgeous skirt piece, this time showing some of the other float patterns…

I loved this next piece too – a bag that Rah and Sel brought to show with all-over supplementary weft pattering on the body and supplementary weft patterned figures on the flap…

As I mentioned earlier, I was happy to be able to swap my Andean Pebble Weave book for the first edition of Marla Mallett’s book with someone who had recently purchased the second edition although I must say I am itching to find out what I am missing from the updated version!

I simply haven’t had time to take a close look at it but one thing I did notice is that the cross knit looping ”stitch” which is often used by the Montagnard weavers to join their blanket and skirt panels or edge bags is a well known stitch in the world of embroidery known as the “Van Dyke stitch”. After seeing Ju’s blanket panels so effectively joined with this stitch I used it myself to join two of my woven pieces to make a tool bag.

A closer view…

For those of you who would like to try this on your own work, I found a great video tutorial on Van Dyke stitch and I particularly like the way she starts the stitch which is not at all like the way I was taught by the weavers in Bolivia.

Marla Mallett shows an example of it on a south Persian bag. It’s amazing how these techniques show up across the globe. The Bunong weavers use it too and Rah’s bags were edged with it.

My visit with Betsy also included an afternoon at the Seniors Center where a group of Bhutanese ladies and gents, recently brought here from refugee camps in Nepal, have English classes with teacher Mary Ellen. Betsy had organized to give a weaving demonstration during their class and so we took along the loom on which Betsy has been learning from Ju and a narrow double weave piece still on the loom that I have been working on while on the road. Again, Betsy is hoping to find weavers in this group who may like to take up weaving in their new home here in the US.

The demonstration certainly aroused a lot of interest and chatter with two ladies in particular very keen to help Betsy manage her loom. Betsy is learning to weave a narrow band on a very large loom which is not at all suited to this size of weaving. The loom, therefore, is very unwieldy. Ju weaves two bands at once side by side on these large looms to help overcome this problem.

One of Betsy’s helpers indicated with gestures that she weaves much wider pieces in Bhutan and showed the way she throws the shuttle across the warp. She patiently sat by while Betsy explained that she was just learning and still having problems opening the sheds until, finally, the urge to lend a hand became too great.

Above Ranmaya and Bhimaya Gurung are helping Betsy to open that nasty heddle shed.

Poshupati (I am guessing the spelling) came along to act as translator.

He told me that he used to be the director of an artisan training center in the refugee camp that taught weaving and leather work amongst other skills.

Once most of the class members had returned to continue their lesson of “family” vocabulary with Mary Ellen, we were left alone with Ranmaya and Bhimaya and our looms and got along just fine without our translator.

I was surprised to find that I could remember a few words of Nepali from my two trips there in the eighties like the words for “finished”, “thank you” and “sister” which seemed to be a word used for any female companion.

One of the big problems with Betsy’s loom was the fact that the heddle stick kept falling out. This was not due to poor heddle making but rather to the fact that the loom bars are so wide that it is difficult to manipulate the sheds without tipping everything from side to side.

I told you all in a previous post about how Ju and Ngach set up their heddles during the warping process rather than later once the warp is on the loom. It is a tremendous time saver but I am far too fond of my string heddles with their extra hitch to adopt this method. I did, however, try it at home just to see if I understood how it is done.

Here is a short video clip that I made on my last visit with Ju in August in which you can see her winding the warp and making her heddles as she goes. The stick she is using ensures that the heddles are of equal lengths.

BACK IN MARYLAND…….

Claudia has been coming along well with her tubular woven bands to the point where she doesn’t need my help any more. I suspect she will have the directions memorized soon.

I made another trip to the Textile Museum so that I could revisit the Central Asian ikat exhibit with a guide and use the museum’s library. The tour was good, our guide enthusiastic, but I was disappointed not to find any information on what appeared to be warp twined bands on the edges of some of the garments. I seem to be twining mad at the moment.

In the library I got to see David Fraser’s work “A Guide to Weft Twining and Related Structures with Interacting Wefts” which, sadly, can’t be had for under $300 these days but, then again, there it was in the library for me to peruse for free. It was quite a coincidence to find a mail from a Weavolution member a couple of days after with a link to a site which gave a virtual version of the talk which David Fraser had given on the weft twining in what he calls plateau bags at the Textile Museum in August.

There is a great photo here on the same site which I really like of a woman twining a bag in much the same way as I have been doing at home with the piece simply held in her lap…no loom and no tools, except that she twines with the warps extending away from her.

Upstairs in the Education Room at the museum, the only place, the guide told me, where one can take photos, I was able to clear up my confusion about the different kinds of ikats.

This is weft ikat where horizontal resist dyed yarns are predominant in the fabric.

Both warp and weft yarns can be resist dyed separately and then used to create independent designs in a balanced weave fabric. This is called compound ikat.

In double ikat the weave structure is balanced and resist dyed warps and wefts meet to produce a single design.

I don’t think I had ever seen a piece of just weft ikat fabric until once again along came someone at Weavolution with a link to a gem of a video on traditional Laos weaver Bounxou Duoheuang and her inlay work. Wait until you see the piece of weft ikat that she prepares towards the end of the video.

I will finish off here by showing once again the wonders of the online Worldwide Weaving Guild which is, by the way, the way I first found out about Betsy’s work with the Montagnard weavers. This week I would like to show you what Tracy has been up on her backstrap loom in Qatar. Check this out!!

I was going to give you the whole story here but Tracy has covered it on her blog with lots of background and details so you can read about what it took to produce this gorgeous piece.

Above is a sneak peek at the work in progress but you really need to read the story of how this all came to be. Note the plastic tape that she uses for her heddles.

And here is the amazing backstrap that a friend gave her as she took her first steps in backstrap weaving. Does anyone have an idea about its possible place of origin?

Next there’s a balanced weave piece on the loom that I know is already off the loom and done.

I am saving a few more stories from the Montagnard weavers for next week’s writings from colonial Williamsburg. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

I have a million thanks for Betsy Renfrew and Andrew Young who hosted me during my stay in North Carolina and made all these encounters with the Montagnard people possible.

Backstrap Weaving – Loops, braids and edgings

The tajibos have finished blooming and now the city is splashed with the red flowers of the ceibo, the national flower of Argentina, which grows equally well here in Santa Cruz attracting all kinds of small birds to noisily feast on its nectar.

And once again we are experiencing heat, smoke and humidity after a five-day lull where rain preceded low temperatures and provided perfect conditions for Anna from The Netherlands and her boyfriend Alistair to come down from the highlands to visit.

Many backpackers abandon the cold and dry highlands for a few days of sun, swimming pools and lazy afternoons swinging in hammocks in jungly lowland Santa Cruz but Anna and Alistair were quite relieved to find cooler more pleasant conditions. They have been riding their bicycles since May 2008 starting in Alaska and plan to finish their journey in Tierra del Fuego at the very end of the Pan American Highway in February next year.

Occasionally they leave their bikes behind for a side trip here and there and so, after having crossed the Salar de Uyuni by bicycle and taken some spectacular photos including some of their campsite on the salt on the night of a full moon, they took a bus to Potosi and on to Sucre before flying in to Santa Cruz.

Anna had taken backstrap weaving classes in Huancayo, and after having found my blog, we started corresponding. She proposed getting together to weave. She seemed so unsure of her route and movements…one moment she was coming from La Paz and then the next from Salta, Argentina… that I really didn’t believe she would make it.

But I know how it is. I am guilty of making grand plans to visit many people when I go to the US only to run out of time and money. I also know how difficult it is to keep to a schedule when one is backpacking. So, of course, I was pleased and surprised when I got her mail saying that they were on their way. It was a four-day visit and we crammed as much fiber fun as we could into that time and my small living space while Alistair, who happens to be Australian, went to the stadium to see a football game with my boyfriend and educated him on the finer points of Australian Rules football.

Day one was a chance to brush up on warping and shed making for Andean pebble weave. Anna’s teacher in Huancayo, at her urging, had warped up a long band and so Anna had only had the opportunity to see the warping process once. When I had studied there, I came away with at least four short bands and so had been able to practice warping quite a lot. I was tickled to see that Anna had downloaded my Andean Pebble Weave book and had been carrying its pages in her bicycle panniers.

Anna learns how to pick up the warps to form patterns in pebble weave.

The band on which she learned in Huancayo just happened to have been set up for eight revolution motifs and so she was able to weave many of the patterns from my book while on the road. While with me she practiced making the sheds the “Huancayo” way that I show in the appendix in my book.

Now she has several warps to take along for the rest of her trip and I supplied her with wider patterns to weave. She now has the technique totally under control and I am expecting to see pictures of some beautiful bands and especially of her weaving in some spectacular places between here and Ushuaia.

They are heading to beautiful southern Chile and Argentina and will probably pass through or very near to Punta Arenas on the southern tip of the continent where I spent my first five years in South America.

annas purchases — Anna brought some colorful weavings that she had bought in Sucre and Tarabuco – a tapestry weave bag, another in a complementary warp weave and a striped warp faced plain weave unku, a short poncho-like man’s garment only worn now for festivals.

She also bought a bag with the typical red and black weavings of Potolo as well as a double weave belt which prompted her to want to learn this technique.

Above she is learning the basic steps of double weave while weaving some simple triangles. We made some more warps and copied some more complex charts for her to take away.

spindles wichunas — At my request, Anna had gone to the campesino market in Sucre and got me some drop spindles and llama bone beaters called wichuñas here in Bolivia and rukis in Peru. In the picture on the right you can see a “new” wichuña after having been boiled and cleaned on the right. The middle one has had some use and is already changing color from having been handled a lot and the one on the left has taken on a nice dark polished sheen from many years of use.

When first bought in the market, the wichuñas are really quite disgusting with scraps of meat and sinew still attached. They are not so bad in the very dry atmosphere of the high plains but once down here in humid Santa Cruz, they are not at all pleasant and need to go into a pot and be boiled before they can be considered tolerable!

I have a lot of llama fiber here at home and recently got some alpaca from the US so, of course, Anna got a quick lesson in spinning on a drop spindle and took some fiber away for the trip.

And…to finish it all off we did some braiding so that Anna could put a nice finish on her Huancayo band. I dragged out my journal to teach her a six-strand flat braid that I hadn’t made for a long time. Thank goodness I have recorded everything I have learned with diagrams and directions.

anna braiding — I had forgotten about this braid and decided to revive it by using it as the zipper pull on my new blue tool bag.

It was a fun few days of weaving, spinning, braiding and chatting. I lived ten months in a backpacker hostel when I first came to live in Santa Cruz and used to teach weaving to many foreigners who were passing through town. It has been many years since I have done that. We learned from each other and this is one of the things that Anna taught me…

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — One of Anna’a gifts to me…a bunch of bicycle spokes! I have been using steel knitting needles and piano wire (in the upper part of the photo) to create my third selvedge on my weavings and struggling to find things that weavers can easily get hold of and use. I used to suggest cut down coat hanger wire which is really a bit on the thick side, but bicycle spokes are perfect!! I think that even the smallest town must have a bicycle repair place or somewhere where spokes can be purchased.

Anna and Alistair are back on the road now and riding, if I am not mistaken, by back roads into Argentina. You can start reading about their adventures and enjoying their photos here.

So I had dug the old journal out to brush up on the six-strand finger loop braid and while flicking through stopped on the page with my cross knit looping diagrams and instructions for other edgings and finishes and decided it was time to brush up on some of these forgotten techniques. So you will be seeing some of those appearing in my projects in the next few weeks.

It seems that I had gone a little cross knit looping mad after I first learned the technique in Potosi back in 1997. The woven cover of my journal is edged with it and even some of the pages within. Pretty much anything with an edge got looped!

cross knit triple — Triple columns of cross knit looping on the edge of a felt pouch I made many years ago. The button is piece of gourd from Peru. On the right is a page from my journal where I describe different bands, braids and finishes and have worked cross knit looping along the edge.

I always did triple columns as that is what I had been taught in Potosi and never thought to experiment with any other way until recently when I saw that the Montagnard weavers use single columns of this looping to decorate edges as well as to join two pieces of fabric together.

cross knit edging — At left, the Montagnard weavers have used this technique to join the side of a bag to the main body. They work it in sections of various colors. I used it in the same way to decorate the edges of some small pouches I recently made.

I was keen to try it as a joining stitch to join two pieces of fabric side by side. I had woven a narrow table runner some time ago and, as it wasn’t being used, I decided to cut it in half and use it for my joining stitch experiment.

joining stitch front back — I think the joining stitch goes well as its form mimics the comb design that I had originally woven into this piece of fabric.

Above left is the front of the fabric. At first, I ended up with a not particularly attractive column of diagonal stitches on the back. Unless the diagonal stitches are exactly the same length and at the same angle they just look untidy and I unhappily pulled out the stitching and redid it several times. I then looked at an article by Lila O’Neale which contained a diagram showing how the looping can be worked simultaneously on the back of the fabric and so that is what I did. The photo above right shows the back with its row of looped stitches and I am much happier with the way that looks.

And now…finally a tool bag long enough to fit my longest shuttles and a few of my medium sized beaters.

Then I wanted to try it out as a decorative stitch in the middle of a piece of fabric rather than along the edge…

Here it has a different appearance to the work on my tool bag. On the tool bag the looping had to hold two pieces of fabric together and so the “legs” of the stitches had to be spaced widely in order to span the two pieces of cloth. In the example above, they did not.

I have to thank Sue Prior of the Online Guild of Weavers Spinners and Dyers for kindly giving me the link to the Lila M O’Neale article on Peruvian needle knitting which proved to be so very helpful. Sue is part of a Peruvian Textile Study Group in the Cambridgeshire Guild in the UK and a very interesting article about the group’s studies was published in the Journal for Weavers Spinners and Dyers this summer. In this group Sue has managed, amongst other things, to needle knit some three-dimensional figures using this looping technique. An article on this technique also appeared in the September/October 1993 issue of Interweave’s Piecework magazine and was more recently re printed in Interweave’s Knitting Traditions magazine.

My aim is to be able to work many columns of stitches flat incorporating color changes and pre Columbian patterns.

While investigating on the net I found this short slide show of the work being done by a Chilean artist to make jewelry with this looping technique – beautiful!

And on re reading the artcile on the Peruvian Textile Study Group I see that Peruvian knitters are also using the versatile bicycle spokes, in this case as knitting needles.

After some more rummaging through my gigantic journal, I found my directions for a nice two-color edging that I was taught by my sling braiding teacher in Peru and so out came another table runner for a refresher on this technique.

2 color edging — The cradle of the sling that I made with my teacher in Peru is edged with a two color looped stitch. Above that you can see the stitch on the edge of my table runner.

2 color edging on placemat — I think it makes a really nice finish for this table runner. The central band is a balanced double weave piece.

Some instructions for this two-color edging…

I am right handed and was taught to hold the fabric wrong side up with the edge on the right. The two threads will be on two needles.

With color one sew an “X” which sits along the edge and bring your needle and thread back up to the wrong side of the fabric as shown.
Sew a small stitch into the wrong side of the fabric with color two to anchor the thread before passing it under the “X” formed by color one (the needle does not pierce the fabric as it passes under the “X”) and bring it back out to the wrong side as shown.
Color two will have formed an “X” in this path. Color one then passes under the “X” formed by color two and so on.

My mind is swirling with ideas….! Now I am thinking that I might decorate the piece of felt that I made with my friend Lisa on my last visit to North Carolina with this looping technique. I just have to find the right design.

Lisa is a skilled felter and was kind enough to give me a chance to learn a little about the technique when I was visiting her. I had made felt many years ago in Chile, following instructions in the Ashford spinning book, rolling it around on the kitchen floor and taking all the color out of the plastic tile! I had not felted my piece enough and had no idea about what a physical activity it was!

A felting start — First we chose colors and laid out the wool in five or six thin layers. As there wasn’t enough colored wool we used a white base.

C design placement — Shapes are cut and placed and then the whole thing gets covered with a piece of tulle and sprayed with hot water and detergent. We then rubbed the surface through the tulle adding more hot soapy water as needed.

When we were satisfied that felting was underway and that the various design elements were clinging sufficiently to each other and the base, the fun began!

x 4 — The piece had to be rolled so we both sat on benches facing each other, put on some jolly music by the Carolina Chocolate Drops and rolled away stopping now and then to unroll, turn the piece and re roll. Then came a lot of folding, slamming and pummeling. The piece was rinsed and tossed onto the roof of the shed to dry.

I have just about caught up on all pending projects. The guitar strap came off the backstrap loom, all six feet of it and so there will definitely be some left overs to sew up into something.

And here are those blue bags again. I sold the original two and made up two more from the piece I warped up for demonstrations at Convergence. My belt shuttles and sticks once again have a home. You can see the six-strand finger loop braid on the left that I used for the zipper pull. My weaving teacher in Potosi taught me this braid which we used to make a strap for the chuspa I wove with her.

Online weaving friends have been posting pictures in the forums…

lavitaaj — Amber has been studying simple warp float techniques weaving both single and two-color motifs and inventing some patterns of her own. I like her two color “S” on the background of horizontal bars.

Amber dove into the deep end earlier this year and wove mug rugs on a backstrap loom following my one-weft double weave tutorial as her first backstrap weaving project and is now weaving simple warp float bands on an inkle loom which allows her to weave in a more confined space.

Marydargie is continuing to follow the lessons in my Andean Pebble Weave book and is also working on an inkle loom producing great-looking bands.

I have a new project in mind for next week which involves charting, which, fortunately, I love so I will be down on the floor once again with paper and colored pencils to see what I can work out. I am very excited about a design I have found and can’t wait to weave it.

Finally, helloooooo out there to Anna and Alistair. I hope you are enjoying smooth riding where ever you are!

I will leave you all with some gorgeous shots from Anna and Alistair’s time in the hotspring and salt lake region on the Chilean/Bolivian border…The little animal is a viscacha and is one of the motifs in my pebble weave book.