Category: dyeing

Backstrap Weaving – Seasons

Daylight Savings is over and we continue what feels like a rapid slide into cooler temperatures here in the Blue Mountains. I welcome snuggling under multiple layers on these cold nights but don’t care much for having to climb out from under them in the morning. We didn’t have Daylight Savings time in Bolivia and I was surprised by how long it took for my stomach to adapt! I kept finding myself restless at 11:30am with my stomach complaining that it hadn’t yet been filled. I still do a large cooked lunch in the way to which I’d become accustomed in South America. And that post-lunch drowsiness is hard to kick too. I can’t blame the tropical heat for it any more.

With the cooling temperatures came the rolling down of shirt sleeves and the layering of coats. I’d have to put away all my wrist cuffs for a while.

In their place out came my woven scarves and neck gaiters that I’ve been accumulating all these years. It was never cold enough in Bolivia to wear them. Sometimes I’d take them traveling to the northern hemisphere spring and fall only to drag them out of a packed bag looking like pieces of crumpled rag and too ugly to wear.

The fall temperatures here have been perfect for wearing things like this light cotton scarf that I wove about eight years ago and never ever got to wear.

I wove this with handspun cotton singles that I’d bought in Guatemala back in 2008. I used my bamboo reed to achieve the sheer open look and used the same cotton as supplementary weft to weave in patterns. It’s a style that I had been wanting to try ever since I bought a sample from the Coban area of Guatemala.

I enjoy my woven book cover in naturally dyed silk even more now that I am actually living amongst these colors. I was very spoiled by being able to visit Vermont on the Columbus Day weekend many years ago and experience the fall colors there. It’s nowhere near as stunning here but it feels special because I’m living it rather than just visiting.

This little book along with others that I made is now settled in my new home next to books about textiles from this side of the world, places that perhaps I’ll be able to visit some day.

I finally finished the project in which I used my Bolivian teachers’ handspun wool. That project traveled through an entire year of seasons with me and I named the resulting bag Four Seasons in One Bag. The wool went from the sheep of the central Bolivian highlands, washed in mountain streams, into the hands and spindles of my weaving friends and teachers.

I’m pretty sure that the wool was spun during the October spinning event in 2024 in which my teachers and other ladies in the community compete for prizes to see who can spin the most wool. I bought three balls of the doubled singles and dyed some of it with indigo while I was up in the highlands visiting with Maxima during my last Bolivian summer.

It traveled with me to Australia where I spent some of the winter and spring dyeing it with Australian plant materials. The following summer, I moved here to my new home in the Blue Mountains and started the long task of plying.

While I love spinning with a drop spindle, I can’t say the same for plying. I find it downright tedious and I just wanted the task to finish. I’d ply at my craft group gatherings, on the train, at the Arts Society gatherings, at the spinning and weaving group….it just seemed to go on and on.

When I had just about finished all that plying, an Ashford Wee Peggy spinning wheel together with a bunch of accessories became available on Marketplace at a bargain price and I was able to buy it. There it sits waiting to be spruced up a bit until I next need to ply. Perhaps I’ll use it for spinning too. Who knows. The wheel came with lots of bobbins, a niddy noddy (I’ve never owned one), hand carders (I’d had to leave mine behind in Bolivia), a flicking tool and even an apron. A friend at my spinning group has supplied me with a new spring and hooks to replace rusty ones.

I managed to squeeze in some time at the loom between hiking trips. It took two attempts to wind a warp to my liking from all those fabulous natural dye colors but I had to face the fact that I just wouldn’t be able to get them all into the one piece.
Four seasons motifs in progress. The heddle arrangement may look awkward but it works well. I had seen weavers in Bolivia use similar arrangements for their double weave pieces.

Here’s the finished cloth…

The figures as well as the colors are meant to represent the four seasons. The yarn I had dyed with cochineal just didn’t belong here. It can wait along with the greens for another project.

Once I’d decided that this cloth would be a bag, I set about weaving a strap….

I didn’t want to use the handspun wool as weft for either of these pieces and used instead some unidentified soft and very loosely spun ”stuff’ that a friend had given me. It worked well except for the fact that it was somewhat slippery and wanted every now and then to slip out of the shed at the edges rather than lie there snugly. I’d had that very same experience with luscious alpaca yarn that I’d spun once upon a time.

Then came the usual dilemma of deciding which face of the fabric I preferred. The bag would be lined and so one of the two faces would never be seen again. I knew which face I had decided would be the “good” one. The problem was that when I asked others for an opinion, they always chose the other! I stuck with my original plan, though.

The two faces.
I somehow always find myself on the floor at the planning stage. I didn’t have a choice in Bolivia but I’m in a bigger place now with table space. I still end up on the floor.

I rounded off the flap of the bag…always scary cutting into the cloth…and covered and protected the raw edge with coil stitches. The sides then had to be woven, lining attached and everything sewn together…the most challenging part for me.

Here ‘s the completed bag being displayed at the Blackheath Arts Society members’ Easter exhibition. It was so much fun seeing it out there on display!

I managed to also get it in at the last minute, thanks to a kind friend from my spinning group, to the Hawkesbury Show where it won a blue ribbon. I was never able to enter shows like these when I lived in Bolivia and I am very excited about this ribbon!

A buddy from my craft group went to the show and surprised me with this photo while she was there….

So, you will have gathered that my hand and shoulder are now allowing me to be busy at the loom. The one-year anniversary of my accident has passed and things are improving. My wrist at the carpal tunnel level is still clogged and blocked by scar tissue which I don’t believe will ever stretch. My hand is a block of wood first thing in the morning but here I am typing, weaving, spinning cotton and plying. My shoulder is thawing very slowly and my range of reach out to the side to pass shuttle and insert sword is improving.

I am, however, in easy reach of all of this beauty and I just have to ask myself every day what I have done to deserve it!

I’m in a couple of hiking groups and get to go out at least twice a week.

I wonder if some Blue Mountains scenery and colors will start creeping into my work. I have a long-ish list of things I want to weave, some of which I spent a great deal of time designing last year when I couldn’t weave at all. I remember starting out charting with my left hand and the great deal of concentration that was required to fill within the lines!

I’ve actually started sampling for that large project now that I’ve decided on the thread that I will use. I need to get an ends per inch reading and also make sure that the proportions of the woven figures match those of my charted ones.

The “real” project will be much wider than this.

I started off the year weaving various narrow items just to make sure that I didn’t overdo things, Last year I had jumped back into weaving too early and messed up my shoulder as a result.

The Canberra Guild of Spinners and Weavers asked me to weave bookmarks/award ribbons for their AGM. This seemed like a great way to start the year even though they weren’t due until March. It’s extremely rare for me to take on commissioned work but the guild folk had made it easier by choosing and providing the yarn and being very specific about the layout. I got to choose the patterns and I had a lot of fun with that. I used the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave.

I wove a name tag for myself once again in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave which produces a quirky style of lettering. The lettering on the award ribbons is less so because the letters are capitals and well spaced. I have joined so many new groups up here that it is a struggle to remember names. At least this tag will help them to identify me and then I can embarrass myself by not being able to identify them in return!

I live above the Aboriginal Health Services office and one day while chatting with the ladies, I admired their lanyards with their indigenous art print. The next thing I knew, one had been popped into my mail box. So, I replied with a woven keyfob. I love these kinds of exchanges.

I had no trouble at all finding a place to set myself up for weaving on my backstrap loom. The previous resident left one of those huge Ikea book cases with 25 cube spaces. I have it filled now with cubes holding pretty much everything I brought over with me from Bolivia. I place C clamps on the edge of the lower shelves and can place my warp beam behind them. It’s a good sturdy anchor point.

Here I sit weaving with some of my late mother’s treasured possessions. She would have had to make the tough decisions about what to take and what to leave behind, just as I had when leaving Bolivia, when she left India in 1962 to come and live in Australia. These things had been in storage waiting for me since my mum died in 2013.There’s a biscuit tin with images of places of interest in Bombay, a pressed tin trinket tray with images of Hindu deities and her sewing basket…all selected by her as being too precious to leave behind. I love that I am able to have them here near me as I weave.

And…one more thing I wove….I converted the pouch I’d made from my handspun llama yarn into a phone carrying pouch for my hikes by weaving and adding a strap…

Between weaving and hiking and other activities, I try to turn this flat, which had been left in a somewhat shabby state, into a cosy home. This town of Katoomba in which I live is Op Shop heaven and I have acquired most of my things there or via Marketplace. Op Shop is the Australian term for a thrift or charity store. There have been a few flat-pack furniture purchases too. Assembling them on my own made me feel like I was playing a game of Twister.

Would you believe I got these Indonesian ikat pieces at a local op shop for the equivalent of US$ 3.50 each?!

I couldn’t believe that after having admired the Indonesian ikat textiles for so many years, particularly the ones from Sumba, that I should run across these in an op shop?!

Next on the agenda is dyeing with lichen. A friend gave me a jar of lichen that she had collected from fallen branches on the coast. It’s been soaking in a mix of cloudy ammonia and water for almost two weeks now and the color it’s releasing is amazing. I still have some of the Bolivian wool left. I just have to wash it and then give this color a go. I hope to find lichen locally that will perhaps produce other colors although I doubt that anything could be quite as astounding as this.

This photo was taken after one week. It has developed even further since.

The sun is streaming in through my sunroom windows and I feel so guilty for being indoors on such an utterly gorgeous day. But at the same time, I have been feeling bad for having neglected my blog for so long.

I want to thank everyone for making purchases before Taproot Video closed at the end of March. I really appreciate your support and hope to have the PDFs back up for sale elsewhere soon. I thought that launching a new publication would be a good way to introduce my new point of sale but I don’t see that happening quite quickly enough. Hopefully it won’t be too much longer before I have my publications available for sale once more. The flurry of purchases at the end of Taproot Video will help keep me afloat until then.

For those who don’t see my blog banner on their particular device, here’s what it says….Stay tuned.

Backstrap Weaving – My Books!

My Books, My Books, My Books…..I have been researching my options for a new home for my books between settling into my new home, finding new community, rehabbing my frozen shoulder and wrist, which is all stuck up with scar tissue again and, and, and…..!!!. So….I haven’t settled on anything yet…. but am getting close!

If you have no idea of what I am talking about, you may have somehow missed the announcement emails that the folks at Taproot Video, who sell my books, have been sending to their entire customer base these last months telling everyone that the website will be closing on March 31, 2026.

No need to panic if you’re hearing this for the first time.

If you’ve purchased one of my books in PDF form and downloaded it to your device, there’s nothing you need to do. If you haven’t yet downloaded it/them, you need to do so before the website closes. You have until March 31.

If you’ve purchased the PDFs that come with supplemental video clips, you don’t need to do anything either. You will continue to have access to the videos by clicking on the link to the folder of clps that you’ll find in the chapter titled Videos. Access to the clips will continue after the Taproot Video website closes.

There are four titles that come with clips:

  • Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms
  • Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms
  • The Eye-pattern Tubular Band and Other Decorative Finishing Techniques
  • The Eye-pattern Tubular Band of the Peruvian and Boliviain Highlands

ACTION NEEDED FOR THE FOLLOWING:

If you purchased a printed copy of one of my books that comes with supplementary video clips (‘those listed above), you will need to download the clips to your device before March 31 if you haven’t already done so.

Access to these clips is provided via a link on the Taproot Video website. Naturally, that link will no longer be available to you after the site closes. So, if you haven’t downloaded the clips yet, please go to taprootvideo.com and…..

  • Log in.
  • Click on the Purchased Items tab.
  • Click on the title of book you purchased. That will take you to a page with the link to the folder of videos.
  • Clck on the link.
  • Download the videos to your device.

These instructions are also outlined in the books themselves in the chapter titled VIDEOS.

There are only two or three titles now at Taproot Video that have remaining copies of the printed books. I won’t be selling printed books again after Taproot Video closes. My books in PDF form will soon be available elsewhere and I’ll let you know as soon as that’s up and running.

In the meantime, yes, I have been weaving! And so, I ‘ll finish this quick post by showing you what I’ve been up to using the handspun wool I purchased from my Bolivian weaving friends in the highlands in January last year. You may remember that we dyed some of it with indigo while I was there. I dyed the rest in Australia last year with local plants. I love that my new community of friends in my transition home up on the mid north coast contributed so much to that project with their contributions of mango leaves, silver dollar eucalyptus leaves, local info on where to find a peppercorn tree, onion skins and rusty nails for my iron water.

This a celebration of connections made in what I’ve left behind and where I now find myself. The images depict the four seasons considering that now that I live in a place that truly experiences all four. We had two at best in my tropical home in Bolivia! I’m going to make this into a bag so I can carry those connected memories with me.

Bye-bye Taproot Video and thank you.. Thank you to all those who have purchased my publications over the years and supported me through following my blog as well as leaving me kind comments and reviews here and on my other social media pages.The blog will continue. I have a lot saved up to post! You’ll be hearing again from me soon.

Backstrap Weaving – Dyeing to Weave

Well, hello…….. Here we are well into 2026 and yes, I’m still here. And here is a long overdue blog post. Typing at this laptop keyboard was not doing my shoulder any good while I was still unable to rotate my wrist into a full palm-down position. As a result, I am still stuck with a frozen right shoulder and a wrist that turns most of the way but which I fear will probably never recover its full range of motion.

So I’ll attempt to fill you in with just a little of what has been happening starting with way back last year when I joined a group called the Fiber Artists Network up on the mid-north coast of NSW. What a group! Such an incredible collection of talented women who use a mind-boggling array of techniques to create their textile art works. I wasn’t sure how exactly my work fit with this group but I enjoyed every opportunity to get together with them and soak up inspiration. And here I am now moved to my home in the Blue Mountains where I can only continue to see their work from afar.

Another new member to that group, Dale, immediately after joining, invited a group of us to her home for a day of natural dyeing. Everyone was there to do some botanical printing except me. I’d brought my own pot, which I’d lugged all the way over from Bolivia, and was planning to dye some of the wool I’d bought from my teachers in the Bolivian highlands on my final visit (sniff!) in 2025.

I took along the dried cochineal bugs that I’d got in the market in Santa Cruz (and before you ask, I did declare it when I arrived in Australia. I had hardly even begun explaining when the bored officials waved me through). This caused much excitement in the group and although the focus remained on botanical dyeing, I ended up with quite a mix of fabric and thread in my dyepot alongside my wool skeins.

Dale provided a nice variety of plant material from her own garden for the botanical printing.

This included leaves from what is commonly known as the Silver Dollar gum tree which produce a gorgeous burnt orange color. You’d never imagine by just looking at the silvery leaves. She gave me some to take home. I posted messages in the local Facebook groups hunting for more and a lady drove over one day with a small bucketful for me.

Trying to stir and poke more fabric into the pot.

I was happy about the rosy red color we were getting from the cochineal after all the trouble I’d had in Bolivia with the very hard tap water there when I was trying to dye silk.

Later at home, I dyed another skein and shifted it to a bright red by adding lemon juice.

Next came the Silver Dollar leaves. I added to the supply by buying a few sticks of it from the local florist. The pretty rounded silver leaves are frequent additions to flower arrangements here particularly those that contain a lot of native varieties.

On top of a stunning color, it gave such an intense aroma of eucalyptus. Beautiful!

I was thrilled with the results but did have to ask myself if I was ever going to weave with so much orange yarn. A quick glance back at some of my past work reminded me that I have included this color much more than I had imagined.

Next on my list was leaves from the peppercorn tree. It’s a native of South America but was a popular shade tree at one stage used in rural areas of NSW. We had one in our school yard when I was a kid and we certainly enjoyed the cool of its shade and the aroma of his peppercorns on sweltering summer days. I hit the local Facebook notice boards again and was told of a tree offering its weeping leafy branches to passing strollers on one of the main streets of a neighboring town. Off I went. The search became a big part of the whole adventure. While gathering leaves, a silver-haired gent whose long beard was tied in a pony-tail told me that he too had had a peppercorn tree in the schoolyard. He and his mates would use the leaves to soothe the sting after a caning! Maybe the boys at my school had done so too but kept it a secret from the cane-wielding nuns.

The smell of the peppercorn leaves in the pot evoked a lot of memories.

Known as “molle” (which is part of its botanical name) by my weaving teachers in highland Bolivia, it gives a rich gold color. I was only using alum pre-mordant. I believe that my teacher Maxima and her group also use chrome during the process and achieve a much richer gold.

I had my friends in the local craft group collecting both red and yellow onion skins for me and was surprised at how much richer the color from the yellow skins was. I had been expecting the opposite. I didn’t use the alum mordant with the onion skins having read that it wasn’t necessary. However, the color was a bit uneven…but in a good way!

After connecting with a keen natural dyer up in northern Queensland on Facebook, I then tried mango leaves. They gave a beautiful buttery yellow in very little time. A second skein left in longer was more golden. I got a nice green by adding a touch of copper sulfate and some other tones using water and a bit of white vinegar in which rusty nails had been soaking for two weeks out in the sun.

Some results. You can see the indigo that we dyed up in the highlands last year. I added a natural white skein to this photo for comparison.
At last I get to keep some notes in the book with my handwoven cover.
I love these three together.
Playing with different color combinations. I have plans for this wool in my weaving but first I have to get out a spindle and ply. I’ve dyed skeins of doubled singles and have yet to twist the two single strands together. We’ll see how my wrist feels about that.

Other non-weaving activities involved updating, adding final touches to and improving some of my woven jewelry pieces.

My two boxes of jewelry-making bits and pieces made it over to Australia. I spent ten days house-sitting for a friend at Shelly Beach and needed an activity.

All the dyeing paraphernalia had been put away and I spent my time refurbishing and creating pendants and wrist cuffs between walking around the deliciously cool nearby pocket of littoral rainforest and visiting the beach in the evening to watch the paragliders take off in the evening breezes.

While this strangling fig isn’t being very kind to this tree, it makes a very fascinating and eerie sight.

Lying crumpled up within one of the boxes of jewelry findings was a small strip of silk that I’d woven. It was the piece on which I’d been sampling the figure of a weaver at her loom to be included in a larger project. I was able to cut off the final version and turn it into a pendant. I couldn’t believe that I just happened to have the little hand charm to add to the bottom.

Other things that got refreshed and updated…my garabata pouch pendant and wrist cuff. I didn’t make the earrings. I bought those from an Ayoreo artisan.
It was never a good idea to wear jewelry in the streets of Santa Cruz. I learned that the hard way in a couple of incidents during my first months there. Anything was fair game. I’m enjoying being able to feel confident about wearing my things out and about here.

I spent a couple of very peaceful weeks there at Shelly Beach keeping Catherine’s beautiful garden watered. It gave me a chance to see just how independent I could be hand-wise and if I was indeed ready to make the bigger move away from my brother’s home to my real home in Katoomba. Spoiler alert: I’m there now….but more about that and my return to the loom in my next blog post.

And then came Christmas. A dear friend bought me a (quite expensive!) ticket to a wreath-making afternoon. I must admit that I was reluctant to go. Anyone who is a regular reader of my blog will know that I don’t do Christmas. But hey, this was my first one back in Australia. Let’s make it a memorable one in that I actually participate!

I did feel extremely handicapped. I didn’t have enough grip strength to handle the secateurs on the thicker branches and I struggled to work the florist wire and weave the stems in and out of the frame. But I gave it my best shot..I finished mine ages before anyone else in my group who spent so much more time selecting and planning. This wasn’t their first time and I should have probably slowed down and put a bit more thought into it. I was just a bit frustrated and disappointed with my hand and shoulder’s performance and wanted to get it all over with.

There was weaving involved and so I guess this does deserve a place on this blog….

I based it mostly on silver dollar leaves.

There was a Christmas party with the Fibre Artists Network group out in the beautiful lush Bellingen countryside. We played Secret Santa, or Kris Kringle, as they say here in Australia, and were charged with making a brooch for one of the other members.

Here they all are after being randomly distributed and unwrapped…..

I can see more natural dyeing coming up hopefully with my own handspun especially now that I have borrowed this book to peruse….

And here I’ll end this post. There’s so much more to tell as a whole new chapter has begun and is well under way but here’s a look at the beginning of that new chapter which marks the end of this long, long roller coaster of a journey from the other side of the world.

There lies within my life’s possessions!

The most I’ll tell you for now is that I am very happy!!

The brooch that I got in the Christmas exchange on the left…..and the result of another Christmas exchange in a different group on the right. In that exchange we were presented with materials and asked to stitch a Badge of Honor with a word that describes another person in the group. We drew names from a hat. I stitched Vivacious for Francie and Present was chosen for me.

I happily put on my badge for the group photos knowing that the time has indeed come to exhale and live in the Present and if that’s the impression I gave the person who stitched my badge, I am thrilled. Time to stop holding my breath and worrying about my future here in Australia. Time to stop feeling sad and doubtful about having left Bolivia.

Until next time….(.there will be weaving to show!)

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 – Sifting through Stash

I have mentioned before that I am trying to limit all my projects to using yarn that I already have in my stash. I had no choice but to do so during the pandemic and found that it was an interesting challenge that often took me to unexpected places. It had me spinning all the wool that had been stashed away in my closet as well as learning to spin cotton. It’s been quite easy so far and I am trying to continue in this way. My projects are slow ones which means that my yarn goes a long way in terms of time. I made sure not to bring back any yarn on my last two visits to Australia but I did bring back some dyes and a pin loom.

The pin loom has kept me happily busy using up odds and ends of wool yarn that I have accumulated from the finishing techniques workshops that I sometimes teach. I guess I’ll sew these squares together to make a lap blanket for my eventual return to Australia and my new cold-ish home in the Blue Mountains. But what has made the pin-loom weaving all the more interesting is the chance it has given me to experiment with a little warp-and-weft ikat. That’s been fun.

So far, my ikat projects have all been about warp ikat. The fabrics have been warp faced with the weft threads completely hidden. I wrapped resist material only around the warp threads.

One of my warp ikat projects.

Warp-and-weft ikat, on the other hand, requires a balanced fabric in which both warp and weft threads are exposed. The pin loom gives me that. I was able to apply wrappings to some of the threads that run warp-wise as well as weft-wise. Where they intersect, you get an area of solid color from which extend finger-like sections of just weft ikat and just warp ikat. I’m doing this just for fun…just for something different, as well as for a chance to try out some of the new dye colors I had brought back with me from Australia.

It’s been a fast and low-risk way to play with warp-and-weft ikat. Not much yarn will be wasted if it all goes wrong. My favorite of the three ikat squares above is the one in the middle. The “fingers” that extend from the solid light square are just that little bit more out of alignment and I like the way that looks.

While I sit and weave these little squares, I ponder what my next backstrap loom project will be. When I took out the bag of grey mill-spun wool singles that I had bought from the farmer in California, within I re-discovered the piece that you see below that I had woven way back in something like 2004. It’s woven from my own handspun llama yarn and used to be part of a shoulder bag. The cotton base for the shoulder bag onto which I had sewn this llama-yarn band eventually got worn and shabby. I cut off the llama band and threw away the cotton cloth thinking that I could easily re-use the band. It still looks as good as new! And, besides, it’s handspun and some of the first I had ever done…I couldn’t discard it.

And so I am thinking that my pin loom might be getting its own handwoven pouch. I’ll flank the llama band with the singles wool in plain weave and use some sewn finishing techniques to decorate it. I’ll need to line it so that the loom’s pins don’t get caught in the weave.

Which brings me to talk about lining. I finally got around to making a couple of stitched shibori experiments. Being an absolute beginner at this, I wasn’t expecting much from these initial efforts. For that reason, I thought that the finished cloth would make good lining fabric. It would give me some practice in basic techniques as well as something useful which will be largely hidden away if it turns out to be hideous. It’s been a lot of fun. I really enjoy the part where I can sit quietly and stitch.

Stitching the second attempt. I am just stitching on a single layer for now and haven’t yet started to explore folds. Once the simple running stitches are in place, the threads are pulled tightly so that the fabric puckers. This creates areas of resist when the cloth is dyed.

That’s the first experiment and one of my ikat pouches. These little purses and pouches are the kinds of thing that I would like to line with this cloth. Of course, my technique needs a lot of work but even so, after having completed this first piece, I don’t think that it’s possible to create anything truly hideous even with clumsy beginner attempts. It all looks pretty nice to me.

This is what it looks like when the threads are pulled and the cloth is ready to go into the dye bath.

Of course, traditional shibori artisans use indigo dye and there’s a beautiful video that I shared on my personal Facebook account of a Chinese gentleman taking all the steps to harvest the indigo leaves and prepare the dye bath before stitching and immersing the cloth. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find it on Youtube to share here. I am just using cotton dye made in Brazil that I buy from my LYS. It gives a very pretty blue.

This is the second attempt which is a sampler of different shapes. It will be ironed eventually but I quite like the crinkly look the cloth has when the stitching is first removed.

I might use this piece to line this tool bag that I made about twelve years ago. It has traveled all over the place with me and is nowhere near as bright and clean now as it is in this picture!

I cut a long strip of cloth that I had woven into two pieces and joined them to make this zippered tool bag

You can see the Van Dyke stitch that I used to cover the join. My Vietnamese backstrap loom teachers used this same stitch to cover theirs. Below, you can see how it looks after twelve years of laundering and heavy use! The blue Anne yarn bled and toned the whole thing down and the green has faded a lot. I quite like this more subdued and weathered look….like a favorite pair of faded denim jeans. Now it will get a pretty lining. It will make me happy every time I look inside and see the shibori cloth. This bag is constantly by my side as I sit at my backstrap loom. It holds swords, pick-up sticks, scissors, small shuttles, measuring tape, elastic bands, sewing needles, seam ripper, sticky tape etc etc

As for upcoming projects on my backstrap loom…while looking around online, I have found inspiration in the form of certain color combinations that I just can’t seem to get out of my mind. The problem is that I don’t have the colors in the right weights of yarn to carry out any kind of plan. So, some of my time is being spent at the dye pot trying to get something that will match my expectations. I’ll be pleased when I have finally settled on a project and am back seated at my backstrap loom. In the meantime, there are pin loom squares, a woven pin loom case (woven on my backstrap loom), stitching and dyeing to keep me creatively occupied.