Category: hand spun

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 – The Empty Wallet!

With the new year comes a new (woven) wallet. I’m still very much a cash person which probably comes from the fact that I’m still living here in Bolivia. I had the experience of almost going hungry while spending an eight-hour layover in Atlanta airport recently. I couldn’t find a place that took cash but in the end was able to buy a yoghurt from a juice bar. It wasn’t quite the full American breakfast I had been promising myself after the long overnight flight. For a variety of reasons I didn’t have usable cards on me. Even the vending machines only accepted cards!

Mind you, Bolivia is moving along rapidly. It’s not unusual to see vendors in the street market displaying signs with their QR code on their humble stands. I find it’s way too easy to spend when using a card or electronic device. I prefer to go to the market with X amount of Bolivianos in cash and thus oblige myself to stay within budget.

If I were superstitious, I might think that I’m jinxing myself by starting the new year with an empty wallet! On top of that, I didn’t wear yellow underwear on New Year’s Eve which is the local superstition for attracting money. Red underwear attracts love.

If you read my last post, you’ll know that I wove a sample using my handspun cotton singles thread in preparation for this wallet project to see how it would stand up to being used for pick-up patterning. It involves a lot more handling than simple plain weave.

The finished sample showing its two faces. I used the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave.

The sample gave me the information that I needed for calculating the number of ends that would give me the right width for the wallet. I dyed some of my handspun cotton dark blue and black.

Here are my 632 ends set up with the two sets of heddles that give me my “pebble sheds”. It’s so satisfying sitting there and finally making the very last heddle and knowing that I’m all set to go.

However, in this case, I was not. I had neglected to dye some of the thread for weft. I could have got away with using white weft because I was after all planning to edge the piece with a tubular band which would cover the selvedges, but there’s always a chance that I’ll change my mind and go in another direction, in which case I wouldn’t want to see the dots of white weft at the edges. So, it was back to the dyepot. Luckily it’s summer here and things dry really quickly.

I decided to use part of the sample pattern that I had designed. And because I loved both faces of my sample band, I decided to plan this so that both possible faces could be seen at the same time.

A little progress and all going well. No broken threads yet. In the end, only one broke.
At this point, I was ready to put a bit more thought into exactly how I was going to construct the wallet and therefore, the layout of the pattern.

I got the idea of using the sample warp as a coin purse on the back of the wallet. I am always dismayed by the amount of coins I seem to accumulate when I am traveling. Australia has dollar and two-dollar coins (no one and two-cents) and the fifty-cent piece is huge. It’s not unusual for me to be carrying up to twenty dollars in coin! And in the US I’m forever handing over notes to pay for things because I never know how much something will cost until the tax is added at the register. With a line of people behind me, I don’t want to be scratching around in a tiny coin compartment for the right change. Urgh….all those pennies!

So, I wanted a large coin compartment from which I could quickly and easily fish out what I needed as well as comfortably carry all those bulky Australian coins.

This meant that it would be a waste weaving pattern for the back of the wallet only to have it covered by the coin purse. I got to do some plain Andean Pebble Weave instead which certainly accelerated the pace of this project. I returned to the pattern just to weave the final section for the closure flap.

Here are the completed pieces. From left to right, the front, plain back and closure flap. Construction can begin.

As usual, fusible interfacing was my friend when It came to cutting the cloth. I had a selvedge at one end but I cut a curve at the other for the closure flap. I used some black fabric that my friend Claudia had given me for the lining and to create the pocket for bills. All these pieces got held nicely in place by the tubular edging. The woven tubular edging that I use is woven and sewn at the same time around the edge. The sewing thread doubles as the weft. It fully encloses the edge rather than just perches along it. It’s a wonderful way to stabilize and protect cut fabric.

It can be plain (which is how I wove it for the wallet and the bag flap above) or patterned as you see below in the edging I used for a wrist cuff.

You need to get creative with how to hide the cut unwoven warp ends when you have stitched around and returned to the beginning. On the wrist cuff, I wrapped and sewed the cut end to the cloth. It wasn’t pretty but it was secure. I then covered it with a button which was part of the button-and-loop closure that I often use for my wrist cuffs.

For my wallet, I simply sewed a small tab of black fabric to cover the join.

Then came the task of figuring out card slots, zippered sections etc. on the inside. I created some black stitched shibori fabric for this. I included an unusual tiny pocket that I have always wanted to have in a wallet….a pocket that can only hold my door key. Nothing else fits! I get fed up with searching for my key in pockets amongst all the other paraphernalia that accumulates there.

The tiny key pocket is just to the right of the card slots. There’s a zippered pocket on the right for other odds and ends.
I remember being so pleased when I discovered that my key fit perfectly in the tiny pocket in this pouch that I wove. This pocket is part of the original warp and was not added later. Creating that special kind of warp that includes a pocket is a technique that I learned with one of my teachers here in Bolivia.

Here’s the coin purse on the back of the wallet…..

It was nice being able to use the sample for something.

And because I am skilled in creating expandable sides after my two recent folder projects, I added expandable sides to this purse. It’s very easy to get my hands inside, quickly find the right coins and avoid receiving yet more unwanted change.

So, wallet number one is complete. As I mentioned in my last post, I think I’ll make another using an ikat pattern this time. I’ve crunched the numbers and can start warping.

Here’s a reminder that I wrote a tutorial some time ago showing how I cut and prepare my woven fabric to take the woven tubular edging. At the end of the tutorial there’s a link to the tutorial that shows how I weave the actual tube.

I’d also like to give a big thank-you to those who responded when I plugged a couple of my books in my last post. Thank you for your support!

I hope you’ve had a wonderful start to the new year. Take care and see you next time.

Backstrap Weaving – Cotton Tales

While scrolling through my Facebook feed last week I was surprised and excited to see an ad from the Museo ArteCampo here in Santa Cruz for a workshop being given by two Guaraní ladies on spinning cotton. There are three recognized groups of Guaraní people here in Bolivia living in the lowlands between the Chaco and the Andes. Artecampo has been working with people from the Isoseño group since 1984 helping them to recover and preserve dwindling knowledge of technique and motifs while providing a market for their handwoven hammocks, bags and wall hangings.

Examples of GuaranÍ textiles at the Museo ArteCampo.

The timing of this workshop couldn’t have been more perfect considering that I have only recently started to spend a serious amount of time spinning the stash of cotton sliver that I have accumulated in my closet…all generous gifts from my weaving friends. I haven’t seen anything like this being offered in all the years I have been here and who knows? I may not have considered taking the workshop if it had come along years ago.

Learning to spin cotton in Ecuador in 2007.

Two video classes on cotton spinning by Joan Ruane and Stephanie Gaustad as well as a short in-person demo with weaving friend Elizabeth in Australia (who had gifted me a takli spindle) had helped me to get started with using a takli. I am sure that some of what I had witnessed and tried during my stay with a family of cotton spinners and weavers in coastal Ecuador way back in 2007 also helped. I had really been way more focused on the weaving during that stay. Although I was curious and interested, cotton spinning at that point hadn’t captivated me. I just couldn’t see myself having the desire to do it or having a need for hand-spun cotton thread.

This was also true when I’d had the opportunity to study with Ju Nie, a Montagnard (Vietnamese hilltribe) weaver and spinner. She showed me how she first teased the cotton with a bow and then spun it on her spinning wheel. It was fascinating but I had considered that demonstration of such beautiful traditional skills and tools as just an interesting interlude during my studies of the beautiful patterned weft-twining that she was using on the fringes of her woven pieces. You can see the frame on which we were carrying out the twining work in the background. I recently learned that dear Ju Nie passed away last October.

And so, my time had finally come during the pandemic to focus more closely on cotton spinning. And then came this workshop. A miniature Guaraní loom sat on the table at the workshop with a piece of weaving in progress but I didn’t allow myself to get distracted!

Under a tree dripping with mangoes, fourteen of us gathered to learn how to spin cotton on the typical spindle used by the Guaraní ladies.

I already own a spindle that I had bought from my Guaraní weaving teacher many years ago. She only had a little cotton on hand and had given me a very brief demonstration. That had been enough to satisfy my curiosity as, again, I was much more interested in the weaving at that time. She did tell me at that time that cotton was being grown in the community of Isoso and that the inhabitants were not willing to give the seeds away to anyone….not that I had asked for any. I have nowhere to grow it. At the workshop, however, we were free to keep the seeds that we were removing from the cotton.

Angela back in 2010 giving me a short demonstration of how she spins cotton.

The spindle I bought from Angela as well as the ones we were given to use in the workshop, had thick pieces of rubber for whorls. The rubber pieces look like they have been cut from the soles of sandals. A simple groove is sliced into the end of the shaft.

The workshop spindle.
The spindle I bought from Angela in 2010 has a beautifully shaped end rather than just the simple cut groove.

We took the seeds out of the cotton and teased it apart with our fingers into a light airy sheet. Then we copied our teachers’ movements and rapidly lifted and dropped the sheets multiple times a few inches above the table before very gently forming them into loose rolls. One problem we faced was that Sabina, the teacher at my table, was left-handed. She loaded each spindle from scratch and then handed it off to us. As soon as we right-handed folks started turning the spindles, the thread was un-spun and subsequently broke. Not a big deal. We all laughed.

Sabina gets the spinning started while we prepare the cotton.

Although, I am very much used to the watch-and-copy style of teaching used by my teachers here, I had also had the benefit of lots of spinning explanations from my video and in-person experiences as well as lots of trial-and-error practice on my own. And so, I managed to get on just fine. I could understand very well the struggles of the other participants because it wasn’t so long ago that I was experiencing the same difficulties.

Clara worked with a group of participants at another table.

I really wanted to use this workshop as an opportunity to see how the Guaraní ladies manage to spin much heavier thread than I do. They weave hammocks with their plied thread and it is thick and sturdy and so I spent the workshop time trying to focus on that. I created thread that was just a bit thicker than what I have been creating at home but it was nowhere near as thick as Sabina’s and I wasn’t able to keep it consistent. Sabina kept laughing at my fine thread but also told me, with what seemed to me to be pride, that her grandmother had been able to spin very fine thread. My other interest in the workshop was to chat with the teachers about their experiences learning to spin and weave as children. Plus, I wanted to see if I could manage to spin decent thread from cotton I had prepared myself in such a basic way rather than with the beautifully prepared sliver that I had been given.

Cards had been placed on a table so that we could see the Guaraní words used for describing what we were doing. Our attempts to correctly pronounce the phrases brought on more laughter.

GuaranÍ spinning vocabulary and Spanish translation.

As for my cotton spinning at home, I am still working my way through the color labeled Cinnamon. I boiled the color labeled Mahogany and was astonished to see how much it changed its tone. I love it. Either some of the brown comes off in the water, or this cotton was particularly dirty…the water became a mucky, murky mess!

The boiled Mahogany in the center with the original color below right. Above is the original Cinnamon color with the boiled and not-boiled greens on the left.

Now for the latest ikat project using my hand-spun cotton. I might try this particular idea again some time, but not with my hand-spun cotton. It turned into quite a business! I wanted to have a white ikat pattern on a background of various tones of blue. You might remember a project I did a couple of years ago in which I used a multi-colored warp for ikat. This was industrially-spun and naturally-dyed silk and the project was relatively simple: tie the ikat tape on the multi-colored silk…the dyeing of the warp thread had already been done by someone else…and then dye the whole thing one solid color, in this case, black. I loved the result.

I am able to get quite sharp images when using using uniformly spun thread.
The color-inspiration picture.

The current project is more or less the opposite in that I wanted the ikat to be a single solid color, in this case, white, with a multi-colored background. I wanted the change in the blue tones to be fairly subtle. And so I had to tie the pattern and then split the warp into sections and dye two sections at a time separately so that the outer sections were very dark, gradually lightening toward the center. The very center section was dyed grey (which I now regret doing…I should have just gone with light blue) as I was using a picture of my choosing for color inspiration as part of a group weave-along and grey was part of it.

What a task it became! I was using my hand-spun cotton singles. The small individual sections totally twisted up on themselves in the dye bath and so the dye was not able to fully penetrate some parts. I had to repeatedly remove the thread from the bath and try to separate the individual threads and then poke and prod and pick at them in the water. The poor things took quite a beating. And then they would dry and I would find them to be too light and the contrast between the strips of blue too great and so back into the dye bath they would go. Yes, so next time I try this particular ikat idea, it will not be carried out with hand-spun singles. There was way too much picking and pulling and wrangling of the thread going on. I just knew that I was going to have a lot of shift in the pattern as a result. So much fuss over such a small piece. I had been planning to weave it after adding natural green cotton to the sides to make a piece wide enough for a pouch but I decided not to risk my precious green on a project that seemed doomed to fail. Perhaps it could be a wrist cuff instead.

Another goal of this project was to arrange the angle of the diagonals in the pattern so that the diamond shape was more curve-like. That part seemed to have worked out quite well. As always, I really enjoyed unwrapping the plastic ties to reveal the pattern and then sitting down to finally weave it. One of the center threads broke. That’s a problem when it’s ikat unless you have another tie-dyed thread to replace it. But everything else went smoothly. There was a lot of shift in the pattern but that was expected and I was happily weaving away at this point.

After looking at the finished piece for a few days, I decided that it wasn’t so bad after all. I decided to go ahead and weave the green sides separately so that I could piece together a useful item. Yes, another pouch. After all that work, the ikat piece really deserved to be made into something. I planned the layout combining the darker boiled and not-boiled green with a little blue that I had already dyed for a previous project.

I wove the two strips separately but at the same time…if that makes sense. It fit better in my weaving space if I wove it this way rather than as one long strip cut in two. Besides, I could keep a better eye on matching width this way. Again, it was just lovely to be at the loom doing simple plain weave and enjoying the look and feel of the hand-spun cotton. Three broken threads were easily replaced…no tie-dye to worry about this time. The broken ones happened to be the not-boiled green…coincidence, or does that say something about a change that takes place during the boiling process? The threads broke when I was moving the coil rod. Note to self again…set up the coil rod right at the end of the warp and leave it there.

A first look. The sewing isn’t finished yet. I’ll just use a large snap at the mouth of the pouch. I am very happy with the curviness of the pattern.

Here’s the gang of hand-spun ikat projects all together.. The pattern of the latest one repeats on the back as I had folded the warp to halve its length and was therefore able to tie once and get two patterns.

I have another ikat idea developing using my 30/2 silk and reds…maybe cochineal? In the meantime, I will keep spinning cotton. I want to boil small amounts of the new Cinnamon color for different lengths of time to see if that produces different tones. Right now I have some 60/2 silk on the loom and am using double weave to create some jewelry pieces….experiments. I already have a nice ikat pouch in which to keep them…lol. I am thinking ahead to my eventual move back to Australia and considering the eye-wateringly high cost of living (compared with Bolivia). It will be helpful if I can perhaps sell some woven items at craft fairs.

One other thought that just popped into my head is to once again dye sections of pre-warped (but not ikat treated) hand-spun singles allowing them to twist on themselves. Perhaps the differences in dye penetration along the length and breadth will create interesting patterns. It’s hard to believe that this is me writing this….the one who likes everything to be controlled!

Until next time….

Backstrap Weaving – Another Lifetime

I recently realized that I have spent almost half my life here in South America. The first five years were spent in the Chilean Patagonia at the southernmost tip of the continent…a pristine, wild, cold and windswept landscape from which I could look across the Straits of Magellan to the island of Tierra del Fuego. It was a hiker’s paradise and I had to be careful to make sure that I took advantage of the windows of calm and pleasant weather to explore as much as I could of the various national parks in both Chile and southern Argentina.

The Torres and Paine massif in the Torres del Paine National Park. The Circuit is a popular multi-day hiking trip.
The Circuit trail runs alongside Grey Glacier on the western side of the Paine massif.
Adelie penguins on Paulette Island, the first first of several species of penguins that we saw.

I hiked in the parks – the lands of the guanaco – and kayaked the fjords, explored some parts by zodiac, traveled down to Antarctica and over to the Falkland Islands but also spent a great deal of time huddled indoors.

All that indoor time is what is responsible to a large degree for my having taken up weaving and it was from there that I started traveling to spend a few months away now and then in order to learn to weave with women in the highlands of Peru and Bolivia.

Weaving a four-color Andean Pebble Weave piece in wool on my Navajo-style loom in Chile. This was in the very early days before I had the confidence to try wide and complex pieces like this on a backstrap loom.

The rest of my time in South America, when not out and about on my weaving explorations, has been spent basking in the tropical warmth of lowland Bolivia. This has become so normal to me now that I forget to stop and appreciate all that makes his place so delightful. Of course, thoughts of the eventual return to Australia are what have mostly brought this on. I lived on and off for 30 years in Australia, another 30 here….are there 30 more years left for another total change of scene? The place where I am hoping to live when I return is in the Blue Mountains, just west of Sydney…a place in which I spent many a weekend in my late twenties climbing and hiking. It’s far from tropical! The Blue Mountains is a beautiful area. That’s me on an easy, yet exciting, rock climb. I think that I am still game for activities like these…probably just not physically able anymore.

I went for a stroll one afternoon last week to buy dye and ask for advice from my local yarn store. It’s just four blocks away. I took a slightly different route home through the street market and returned with this…all of this fruit plus the dye for around $5.50 total….The fruit stalls carried the strong aroma of a yellow, smooth-skinned fruit called maracuyá. It smells and tastes exactly like passionfruit but sure doesn’t look like the purple-skinned ones that I have always known. This is one of the delights that I take for granted here….living in easy walking distance of pretty much everything I could ever want or need and having it all affordable considering my low income. The fancy, expensive malls and entertainments are further away, but who needs those?

I know that the apples are not exotic for most of us but whenever my students and I would talk about our favorite fruit when I was teaching English here, they would name apples, oranges and strawberries as their favorites…not the magnificent mangoes and the luscious papayas and pineapples that I find so wonderful. In fact, people who have mango trees in their yards here consider them a nuisance. The fruit falls, rots, and attracts flies faster than they can be gathered and consumed. It’s pineapple season right now and the street corners have little carts where you can buy thick slices of fresh juicy pineapple to eat while walking around. There is no such thing as a bad pineapple. The same goes for papaya. There was a time when I ate so much of it that the palms of my hand took on an orange hue.

As for the dye that I bought, I was consulting the store owner on how best to get a certain pastel green with the available dye colors that he carries. His chart said to mix eight parts of yellow with one part black. You may remember from my last post that he had advised me to mix blue and black to get grey and that I had been skeptical. Imagine my thoughts about the yellow and black mix to get this particular green. The grey that resulted from my having followed his recommendation was quite nice and so I can only listen to him again and try a sample with the yellow and black mixture. Of course, the recommendations are not his personally…they come from the manufacturer of the Brazilian-made dyes that he sells.

The blue-grey that I created for my last ikat project.

The pastel green is one of the colors that I might want to use in my next ikat experiment. I am hoping to create a fairly narrow strip of ikat pattern using two dye colors…blue and green… and then weave it flanked by expanses of natural green cotton. This is just one of a couple of ideas that I have floating around. The fact that one of the groups on Ravelry is holding a weave-along based on colors inspired by a picture of one’s own choice, might send me off in another direction.

This painting by Paule Bernard Roussel inspired my silk paisley scarf project some years ago. I might use those various tones of blue to inspire an ikat project….perhaps a white ikat pattern on a background of various blues.
The silk paisley-patterned scarf in which I used four tones of blue to flank white.

Spinning the green cotton has been interesting. I had heard many a time that the natural green color darkens when the thread or woven item have been washed. I boiled my singles to help set the twist but was not prepared for the dramatic change in tone that resulted! Amazing.

This is the green cotton immediately after being boiled. It’s still wet and so looks darker than the color it took on when dry.
Now you can compare. The two balls lower right are the pre and post-boil colors.

Now I am wondering if I can somehow avoid boiling just a small amount of the green thread so that I can weave a piece that incorporates both versions of the green. I’ll just have to deal with the thread’s high energy. That is, after all, the point of these projects…experiment, explore the what-ifs, trial and error. I need another lifetime to fully explore the use of hand-spun thread and ikat.

Natural green alongside mahogany and white Sea island.

I have drawn a pattern that I want to use and I will fold the warp to halve its length this time. I could use this project to try folding in both directions but I think I will leave that particular challenge to a time when I am not using my handspun. My pattern is more or less a diamond but its sides curve outward ever so slightly. Let’s see if I can manage to make the curves work.

In my last post, I showed you my black, white and grey ikat piece off the loom.

Here’s a little picture summary of the process from spun thread to loom…

The warp was folded to halve its width and only half the pattern tied. The picture of the pink ikat tape, therefore, is a collage of the half pattern next to its mirror image.

I folded the finished cloth this way and that to see how best to make it into a pouch. You might remember that the pattern had been planned to be twice this length. The original idea was to fold the cloth at the half way point in the full pattern and form a pouch that way. But I had given up on that idea when I realized that my pattern tying wasn’t as precise as it needed to be and I abandoned tying at the halfway point. I modified the motif so that it could end there without, hopefully, looking too odd.

So, this is the pouch that I created in the end. It holds the surprising number of USBs that I have accumulated.

The brown thread that you see in the picture was labeled as “mahogany” in the bag of sliver that my friend Betty had given me. I found it challenging to spin with its very short fibers. Now I see that not all browns are equal. I have just started on another coil of sliver labeled ”cinnamon” and it is completely different in character. In yet another bag, I have more brown that is accompanied by a Fox Fiber card which calls it “Coyote Card Sliver organic ’89”. This color has a bit more warmth to it. The card says that the color will progressively darken the longer it is boiled so that “many shades of color unique to you can be created”. That’s pretty exciting. I shall have to experiment with that. Looking at the next picture, I am thinking that the takli’s hook could make a nice reed threader in the absence of a proper one, although I wouldn’t be able to insert it very far.

The paler cinnamon is on the spindle next to a ball of mahogany. I haven’t boiled the mahogany yet.

Spring is on its way. The weather is unsettled as hot and moist weather systems from the north east collide with cooler drier ones from the south. Sometimes they battle and it gets wild. We don’t have what you would call a classic coming of spring here as there are trees flowering all year ’round. In any case, I will acknowledge spring and show you my bands of spring flowers. I hesitate to say “celebrate” spring because the heat of coming summer (which can start as early as October) and the smoke that results from burning to clear land for the planting season are two of the few less delightful things about living here. But the mangoes will become larger and more varied and plentiful and even cheaper as the months go by…so who can complain?

Warp-faced double weave flowers in 60/2 silk.

And to finish, here are some amazing flowers that have been embroidered onto the knotted fringe of an ikat shawl from the Cuenca area of Ecuador. This shawl is one of the pieces collected by the late Dennis Penley (author of the book on jaspe shawls of Gualaceo that I showed you in my last post). The images are used with the kind permission of the current owner of the collection. Spectacular! If I had another lifetime, I would consider learning how to do this kind of fringe knotting.

Backstrap Weaving – Time and Time Again

Panel 1: Within These Walls, a pandemic project.

My relationship with Time seems to be changing. I know that I am not the only one who got lost during these last two strange years, overcome by the feeling that time was speeding by… weeks and months merging into a hazy uneventful blob. Even now I struggle to separate 2020 from 2021. But I just recently realized that the passage of time is slowing down for me and starting to resemble something like normal, something recognizable from the pre-pandemic days. The calendar map that I have always carried in my mind’s eye is starting to reappear.

I resist the urge to go back and try to account, in terms of productivity, for the 24 months that have passed since we first went into lock-down here in Bolivia. Today marks the anniversary of the confirmation of the first known Covid case here. That any of us achieved anything meaningful at all is cause for celebration. And now I am talking as if it is all over. Of course, I know it isn’t, but there is definitely a change in my state of mind.

Three-panel wall hanging: Textile Trails

On the theme of Time, I am reminded of a question that I am very often asked when I show my woven work….. “How long did it take to weave that?”

I am trying very hard to think back to a time before I started weaving to see if perhaps I would have asked this question myself to a craftsperson and what might have motivated me to do so. Would it be because I was thinking of trying to make the object myself and needed to see if the time involved was worth my effort? Or perhaps I would want to know if the asking price for the object reflected the amount of time that had gone into creating it.

In any case, I find it a very difficult question to answer. How long does it take?…As long as it takes! I honestly don’t keep track. I don’t sell my work and so I need not consider time in order to fairly price an item. I am not weaving to a deadline. There is usually no exhibit for which the work has to be completed…the three pieces above were an exception as I had woven them for an exhibit at the ANWG conference in 2015. I would probably have to go back to my blog posts if I wanted to give an accurate answer in terms of the number of weeks on which I worked on a project. However, I would be at a complete loss when it came to the total number of hours.

I met a craftsperson some years ago and witnessed his response to the question…

“How long did it take to make that?”

His response:

A    l  i  f  e  t  i  m  e

I can only imagine that he very rightly considers that a lifetime of his accumulated knowledge, experience, skill and inspiration went into this and every piece that he has completed. I love his response.

So, I am willing to pour as much time and effort as is required into every piece I weave. There have been a couple of times, though, when I just wanted to get the thing done! One such time was when I had volunteered to weave six lanyards for a conference. The long piece of half-inch band with its small repeated motif did not excite me at all when the time came to weave it. I installed eleven sets of string heddles to move it along. I didn’t have to do any pick-up and that rather unique experience suddenly made the project very interesting as I came up with ways to remember which heddle came next in the sequence.

What I don’t like, is making silly mistakes and wasting time. Okay, I will admit that a mistake is always a learning experience and valuable for that reason but sometimes you just turn around and do the same old thing again!

A circular warp for a cotton scarf

Like the time I was using a coil rod for the first time on a circular warp many years ago. The coil rod (sometimes called rolling stick) is the uppermost stick in this cotton circular warp and I was using it because it seemed like an important part of a circular warp set-up. At the time, I didn’t fully understand its purpose. One of my aims for using it in this project was to figure that out.  While trying to move the rod as weaving progressed, I mishandled and broke the coil rod. I did it once…I learned something. I did it a second time…I cursed…but then I learned some more. The third time I broke it, it got flung to other side of the room and I continued without it. It was then that I started understanding its purpose because it was very much aware that it was a different experience weaving without it. And so I was happy to sit patiently and install it once again. 

(Note that I am talking about circular warps here. I do, however, continue to use the coil rod on both circular and single-plane warps if I am doing plain weave with cotton or silk (materials that have little to no stretch). I have written a lot about this tool in blog posts over the years. If you are interested in learning more, you could start here.) 

Maybe this is something that we don’t consider when we ask the craftsperson how long it took to complete the project. Do we want them to include the time used to fix “oopsies”? After all, the fixing of the oopsies adds to that lifetime of experience about which my craftsman friend was speaking.

The first six inches of this warp were woven and unwoven twice before I found just the right weight of material for the supplemental patterning weft.

While the amount of time needed to weave a piece is not important to me, I am always interested in learning about techniques that weavers have developed to help make the whole process more efficient, like the use of multiple string heddles and pattern storage sticks, for example. However, there is one thing that I have always been a bit stubborn about and that is the use of sizing.

In weaving, sizing is a substance that is used to coat warp threads that are hairy or “sticky”, or have other characteristics that make it difficult to achieve clean sheds. Basically, it smooths the threads. I resist using it purely because of the “ick” factor. That is, I hate to think of the mess of dunking my warp into a bath of starchy goo and I don’t think I would enjoy the feel of the stiffened coated threads as I weave. Keep in mind that my hands are usually in almost constant contact with the threads as I weave pick-up patterns. Of course, it all washes off in the end and you are left with the original softness of the yarn but yech, I just don’t like the sound of it. I prefer to stay away from the sizing and just adjust my loom-operating methods instead.

Adapting my methods to the materials in use: I was able to weave with Knit Picks Palette….a soft, loosely-plied wool and create a four-selvedged piece.

My approach when working with sticky materials is to adapt the way I operate the loom…take a lot of care when opening sheds by working the threads in sections, using my finger tips to help release the grip a thread may have on its neighbors. I advance the warp more often so that sticks and heddles are not sitting on and abrading any one section for too long, causing it to shed and pill. Yes, it does slow things down but, as I said, I am not in any hurry. I suspect that using a sized warp on a floor loom is a different experience in that the weaver isn’t necessarily handling the warp threads during the weaving part of the process.

Another way to avoid using sizing might be to add extra twist to commercial wool yarn to make it smoother. My weaving teachers here create relatively smooth hand-spun yarn by using a high amount of twist. They also add twist to the synthetic thread that they buy in the market. This kind of yarn creates a certain kind of cloth. The thing is that I don’t always want that kind of cloth.

Two wool lap-size blankets that I wove using Mora yarn. It’s worsted spun which helps somewhat with the stickiness issue. I didn’t add any extra twist.

My latest project has been with mill-spun wool singles….sticky stuff. I could get a tiny heddle shed which I would then proceed to open further with my fingers. I didn’t want to use sizing. I didn’t want to ply it or add extra twist. I love the way it feels. The supplementary weft is my own plied hand-spun wool.

From the 27-inch warp I got 21 1/2 inches of cloth and my string heddles came up remarkably clean.
I always love the way the back of these supplementary-weft patterned pieces look.
There was a small amount of curl in the cloth at its opposing corners. Folding it to make a pouch for my phone and edging it with a patterned tubular band took care of that.

The fresh warp in the above photo was for a small closure tab. I used my plied hand-spun for that. I used a dense structure of three-span floats (intermesh) to produce a sturdy band…hence the two sets of string heddles.

The finished pouch.

I wet-finished the small piece on the right under the sword. The warp threads shifted slightly closer together, I took measurements, but I didn’t notice any real difference in the feel of the cloth. I didn’t wet-finish the pouch piece as I was a little concerned about color run in the supplementary weft. I had bought that roving already colored. As the supplementary weft is tightly wedged between the two layers of warp in several places, I don’t think that even a color-catcher cloth would stop the color from bleeding onto the grey wool. If wet-finishing had made a significant difference to the way the cloth felt, I may have reconsidered.

I hope that I get a chance to show this, the first of many projects in the mill-spun wool singles, to the farming couple whose sheep provided the fleece. My original plan had been to use this yarn for a shoulder bag project. I would dye the yarn to match the three-color strap that I had already woven…

I used my plied hand-spun wool for this strap. I don’t feel that I was heavy-handed in the amount of twist I used. The strap lies perfectly flat and the yarn was beautiful to weave with.

However, now that I have seen the cloth that this yarn produces, I can’t bring myself to dye it. I love all the subtle color variations from this blend of natural white and black. I’ll be using it as is perhaps for a pillow cover and will add color with supplementary weft instead.

So, I will turn once again to my Mora yarn for the bag project. I over-dyed a pale green color that I didn’t particularly like to get a dark blue that is close to the strap color. It will be mostly plain blue and with a very narrow strip of three-color pattern in the center. I have used Mora for a bag project before and know that it performs well on the loom as well as with use.

Fabric for a bag with built-in pocket woven with Mora wool.
If you are curious about the Mora yarn, here it is. It’s 20/2 worsted spun and I know that both Vavstuga and Eugene Textile Center carry it in the USA.

One skein of Mora goes a long way. It gives me material to work with for dyeing with cochineal for other projects. It’s taken two years but I finally got some alum. Just before the pandemic I had been out and about looking everywhere for the “precious” stuff…precious only because I suddenly could not find it anywhere. The usual pharmaceutical supply stores weren’t carrying it any more. The little hardware stalls in the market (there are dozens of them) didn’t have it. I tried the Mennonite market because I know that they can and pickle but they told me to go to the pharmaceutical places. The little McCormick jars of alum are not available here either. I am guessing that the Mennonite folk have a massive supply of it at home and are possibly not yet aware of it no longer being available. My friend Dorinda sent me some from Cochabamba a couple of weeks ago.

I have used cochineal in the past to dye my hand spun llama yarn. With an alum mordant I get the crimson color you see in this image.

The stones you see are a mineral that goes by the Quechua name millu. Dorinda sent it along as a bonus. It is not something that is required for dyeing with cochineal but she thought that I might enjoy experimenting with it. In the co-op, they use it to darken colors. It is also sold as a home remedy and it is in those stalls that it is found in the street markets. Now that I know what it is, I will most likely be able to find some here in Santa Cruz although I suspect that the amount Dorinda sent me will go a long way. Maybe I will also dye some silk with cochineal for an ikat project.

These are all time-consuming processes. I am not concerned about the amount of time it takes. If you have ever tried ikat, you will know what I mean by time-consuming. Slow processes are just perfect for someone who is working with dwindling stash!

When I told a friend of mine about having finally got hold of some alum via Cochabamba, he took on the challenge of hunting it down in Santa Cruz and came up with this in a very upmarket store of natural vegan-friendly cosmetics. One large chunk came contained in a cloth bag inside a fancy carry bag as if it were something terribly precious…and yes, the price was precious. The accompanying card shows someone applying it to their armpits. So I guess supplies, at least here in Santa Cruz, have been entirely diverted to the cosmetics industry.

Another “slow” project is my learning to spin cotton on a takli spindle. Version One didn’t have enough twist. Version Two had…you guessed it… what I suspected was too much twist. Version Three, which is in progress, is bound to have some other problem. And on it goes. I love the little takli spindle! And Joan Ruane’s video class on it has been so good. I’ll never forget the time I was with Joan at the Mannings. I had set up a backstrap loom and she had wanted to see what that was all about. I was doing pick-up and her reaction was “Oh my god, it’s slower than tapestry!” This from a woman who spins her own cotton for weaving! She made me laugh. I guess we all have our own feelings about Time.

As for Version Two with it’s crazy amount of twist, I decided to see if it was possible to set the twist on my singles (because that’s how I want to eventually use this thread…as singles) and did some reading about that. I have Stephanie Gaustad’s book on cotton, flax and hemp and there are also online resources about simmering and immersion. The trickiest part was having to immerse the thread under tension. My solution for that is a bit wacky. It worked for these small samples.

The thread went into the pot tightly wound around these metal mesh pencil caddies. I do want to use this thread as singles so that I can once again try to weave something approximating the sheer cotton cloth that is woven in the Alta Verapaz region of Guatemala. I want the thread to be finer than the hand-spun that I used last time in this piece…

Woven with hand-spun cotton singles that I had bought in Guatemala.

And this is where that icky topic of sizing comes back into it. I will probably give in and size the thread. I wove the above piece using a bamboo reed to maintain sett. The weavers in Alta Verapaz don’t use one and I am curious to know if the stiffening of the thread from the sizing is one of the factors that enables them to maintain the sett without the aid of the reed. I stress ONE of the factors because, of course, their supremely high level of skill gathered from years and years of work is going to be the main contributing factor. In videos, I have been able to hear the sound of their picking stick on the threads. The weavers are in the habit of slowly scraping the pick along the warp threads from selvedge to selvedge right at the weaving line as if, I am guessing, to encourage the threads to remain separated and not drift into warp dominant positions. That sound is not one that I would expect to hear from naked hand-spun cotton. The sizing that is used gives the threads a coating that produces that sound. Perhaps I will need to use sound as my guide when I try this myself.

All time-consuming stuff. But I am not here to just consume time. Hopefully, I will be using it to continue learning. When I recently explained to someone my plans for my own hand-spun cotton, they asked how long it would take before I would be ready to start the weaving. I sensibly replied….years.

Until next time…..