Category: ikat

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 – My Favorite Things

I have been trying to gather my favorite things so that I can think about what needs throwing or giving away. I felt the weight of possessions most during the worst of the pandemic knowing how impossible it would be to just pick up and leave at those times when family felt so far away. And so I have been de-cluttering yet again and hopefully there won’t be too many regrets at some later point. I managed to find a school that was more than happy to take the hundreds of handmade flashcards that I had created and accumulated during the sixteen years I taught English over here, eleven of which were at this place, the Centro Boliviano Americano. We would earn US$19/day for a six-hour day in the classroom and that gave me a fairly decent living.

I have fond memories of fun and enthusiastic students (well, mostly), chalkboards, squeaky ceiling fans and cassette tapes.

Those were simpler times. During some of those eleven years I lived here, renting two of several rooms that surrounded an inner courtyard. On nights when it was intolerably hot, we would turn the tv around to face out the window and sit in the courtyard to watch. We could look up at the stars through the leaves of the palm tree that grew in the center of the yard.

I took a chance and left English teaching in 2009, a year after the school celebrated its 50th anniversary, to see if I could do something with my weaving. It seemed that as soon as I left, a whole bunch of funds was pumped into the place and it was modernized beyond belief! It became way too modern with its interactive boards and air conditioning to be interested in my old flashcards. However, there are still some of those humble low-budget institutions around which have no choice but to use what we used to call “barefoot” teaching materials. I am glad that they found a new home.

As It turns out, teaching was so much in my heart and soul that it wasn’t something from which I could just walk away in 2009. I am lucky in that I have been able to combine two of my favorite things…teaching and weaving… over these last ten years or so.

Here are some of the other favorite things that I have been pondering. They may not look like much but each has a story to tell. You might wonder, for example, why I am so attached to that basket. It has its story.

For fun, I wrote three verses to the song from The Sound of Music:

Intricate patterns on bamboo and gourd,
A beater, a shuttle, a small weaving sword,
Plant fibers twisted and woven like string,
These are a few of my favorite things.

These books are the ones that I made by hand to record new techniques that I had learned from my various indigenous teachers. They are filled with diagrams, drawings, small woven samples, miniature warps, charts, and photos. I made eight of them.

Bone tools and wooden ones shaped just for picking,
Others to strum across threads that are sticking,
Laid out before me the pleasure they bring,
These are a few of my favorite things.

Books that tell stories of teachers I’ve known,
Covered with fabric and carefully sewn,
They hold the memories to which I will cling,
These are a few of my favorite things.

And then came the other books…all the ones I have bought and collected in my travels over the years here in South America… from way back in 1993 when I had first started playing with sewing thread strung between nails on a wooden frame I had knocked together. I ordered books looking for pattern ideas. I have books from that trip in 1995 to Utah and Colorado where I had crashed my mountain bike and, due to being on crutches, had learned Navajo-style weaving instead of taking the hiking trips I had planned. I returned to Chile armed with books on Navajo weaving. I will eventually go back to Australia and I can’t possibly take all these books back with me. So, which are my favorites? Which ones can I bear to part with? Many, while not all that special in themselves, have special stories associated with their purchase.

There’s this one, for example. It doesn’t happen to have any special story behind its purchase. In fact, I don’t remember how it came into my hands but I have always been so impressed with what I call a gem of self-publishing. It was published in 1974 and originally sold for $4.00. I wrote in a blog post many years ago about how this little booklet had given me the courage to self-publish books of my own. It is a beautiful documentation of the set-up and operation of backstrap looms in northern Ecuador which became all the more meaningful to me after I went to that part of Ecuador myself in 2005 and witnessed the process. I had always wondered about the author, simply noted as Redwood. Male or female? First name or last? There was an address inside…Santa Cruz, California…a place which I have visited many times as I have several backstrap weaving friends there. What was their story?…what took them to Ecuador? The guild in Santa Cruz had a loom from Ecuador in storage that they had been given.. Had this perhaps been a gift from the mysterious Redwood?

Anyway, long story short, a Mr Redwood Kardon suddenly showed up on Facebook asking to join the Backstrap Loom Weaving Group for which I am the administrator. I read his answers to the membership request questions and put two and two together. I couldn’t believe that he had suddenly shown up after my having loved this book all these years. We have corresponded and he has shared among other things some of the photos of the ikat process that he was able to observe in the Cuenca area of Ecuador from back in the 70s. Now this has become one of favorite ikat pictures…

This is how to turn the rather tedious part of the process in which the wrappings are removed from the dyed warp into a more tolerable activity…sit about in a family group, distribute sections and unwrap together enjoying each other’s company.

I have Dennis Penley’s book on ikat, Paños of Gualaceo (a small town outside Cuenca), published in 1988 which helps me to better understand how the weavers in this area set up their ikat warps. I am still not quite sure about this but it seems that instead of folding the warp in order to tie repeated sections of pattern, they simply gather and bundle all the sections that require the same wrap position, and there might be as many as four or five of these across the width of the warp, and tie the resist material around them together. I am sure that the way these sections are gathered together and wrapped as one large bundle must produce a natural attractive shift in the patterns, in the same way that gathering all the hair in one’s bangs into the center and cutting a straight line will not give you bangs with a perfect horizontal line. I am still struggling a bit to make sense of the descriptions. I also have a piece of video that I was given by the director of the museum in Gualaceo which shows parts of the process. I collect and keep these things for years, not paying them much attention at all and then suddenly they come into focus and are of prime importance to me. This is my big fear about having to abandon books when I eventually make my move….things that aren’t my favorites now could well be needed later and not all of them are replaceable. Sigh.

Old weavings have also surfaced as I pick through almost thirty years of stuff. I found the very first piece that I wove when I returned to Chile after my first trip to Peru in 1996.

In Peru in 1996 with one of my teacher’s woven pieces draped on my shoulder.

And here’s the piece I wove with my newly acquired backstrap loom skills on my return. I wove a little sampler of all the figures I had been taught, arranging them in three columns just as my teacher had done. There’s a puma, a dog, llamas, a person on horseback, and several kinds of birds, all motifs from the Ayacucho area of Peru. Later, I cut the band and sewed two pieces together to make a photo album cover. I used the album to carry photos with me when I went on other weaving adventures. My teachers loved to see pictures of where I live, family etc and I also liked to show my weavings as a way to break the ice. Sometimes they would even ask me to teach them motifs or techniques that they saw in the pictures. This piece is definitely one of my current favorite things.

But back to the present and my latest adventures with weaving ikat using my own hand-spun cotton thread. Before the pandemic I had started asking contacts if they knew of any place in Indonesia where I could study ikat. I wasn’t interested in studying with weavers who used hand-spun cotton because I knew that I would never consider doing that myself. I figured that there would surely be special methods used for the particular challenges associated with using hand-spun rather than industrially spun thread and that I would never have to deal with that. But, here I am just a few years later doing ikat with hand-spun cotton. Never say never! The pandemic is responsible for my finally getting the cotton sliver out of the closet and trying to learn to spin decent thread from it.

Sea Island cotton singles

In my last post, I showed you some of the process pictures for this newest ikat adventure. Here’s the design idea I came up with which I tied onto the warp once I had folded it in half….

Here is the warp after its two dyeing sessions, unwrapped, opened to its full width, mounted on my backstrap loom, heddled, and ready to go. I always spend quite some time admiring it at this stage because it is by no means a done deal at this point. Any number of things can happen. Just because it looks quite orderly here, doesn’t mean it will remain so. Threads can break and there’s a greater possibility of this happening because I am using hand- spun singles….threads that have been spun by someone who is not very far into learning how to spin good thread.

I was so pleased with the colors!

It behaved itself surprisingly well. There was just enough shift to create an attractive blur. I like my figures to be sharp but fully appreciate that this is a big ask from thread that has not been spun with a uniform amount of twist. There was some curl at the corners of the finished cloth which sorted itself out once the fabric was folded and sewn into the little zippered purse. That eliminated the need to edge it with a tubular band.

This is now one of my favorite things!

I felt confident enough after this project to try another a little bit longer and wider. I don’t think that I pushed things too far in terms of width and length but I do believe that I was over ambitious in my choice of pattern.

I was very much inspired by a design I had seen on a scarf on the Threads of Life website….a lovely ikat piece in black, grey and white that backstrap loom weavers in Indonesia had created. I only had enough space to create a very short and modified version of it but it was still too much for my level of experience.

I folded the warp to halve its width so that I would only have to tie half the pattern on the two layers of warp threads. That would give me an automatic mirror image of the pattern I had tied once the warp was opened out to its full width. The pattern also had a halfway point at which it reversed lengthwise. This is the part with which I had difficulty.

My paper pattern and the warp after its first dye bath.

I have created designs in the past on warps that I have folded to halve the length as well as others where I have folded the warp to halve the width…but not both at the same time. And so, with this warp, I was taking on the task of tying the first half of the pattern and then being able to perfectly replicate it on the second half. That turned out to be beyond me! I was tying tiny one-centimeter sections. If sections were out by even a millimeter here and there, those variations would go accumulating until the pattern lines were noticeably off track. It was possible to make modifications and compensate for that to a certain extent but I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to replicate all that in the second half. So there it ended at the halfway point and I re-designed the pattern to suit.

The next time I feel like taking on something like this, I will measure and mark the basic layout of the entire pattern at the start with the charcoal pencil, perhaps dividing into halves, quarters and eighths. The other option would be to try folding the warp in both directions so that any modifications made in the first half are automatically replicated in the second. The whole thing should then look balanced.

The unwrapped warp on the loom after its grey and then black dye baths. My LYS friends told me to combine two parts of the blue dye that I have with one part black to make grey. I was skeptical. But it worked…although on its own it looks quite blue. Together with the black it takes on a more grey appearance.

As usual, I took time to enjoy this sight before heading into the great unknown! The threads shifted quite a lot this time in very irregular ways. I noted some spots of lazy spinning. One time as I was raising the heddles, I watched in dismay as an unintentional slub in one of the threads self-drafted with the effect of smoothing and lengthening the thread! Well, that was very nice of it to do so but not welcome at this particular point in the process. In any other weaving, I would just take up the resulting slack, but when it is a tie-dyed warp thread, it’s not so easy to do so while keeping the various color sections properly lined up.

I broke four warp threads but I had tie-dyed replacements on hand! Why? How? Well, that’s another story that is too long to tell here. Even so, it was hard to perfectly align the colors along the entire length of the warp. I was lucky in that only one of the four replacements created a very noticeable blip.

Now all that remains is to figure out the best way to turn this into a pouch.

One idea is a long pouch like this but I will probably end up folding the cloth so that half the pattern shows on each face.

That’s natural green cotton on my takli. I spun one coil of the natural brown and am not pleased with it. I need more practice before tackling the other brown ones. I am finding the green much easier to spin. I hope to be able to create some narrow columns of ikat on white to place within expanses of the natural green.

I don’t need any woven products! I am just having a whole lot of fun with how much I am learning about cotton spinning and the ikat process and if all of my favorite things end up being housed in hand-woven pouches and bags, that’s an added bonus 🙂

Backstrap Weaving – Ikat in my In box

Surprising and amazing things come to me via Messenger or email and I so appreciate people’s willingness to share their stories with me.

Recently when I was posting some of my ikat work on Facebook, Christina Palafox contacted me to share photos of her experience learning about the ikat work of Camelia Ramos Zamora and José Mancio Gutiérrez in their studio, Taller Xoxopastli in Malinalco, Mexico. After meeting José and Camelia at an event in Texas, Christina went to Mexico in 2019 to study with these Masters in the art of creating fringed cotton shawls, or rebozos, on both floor and backstrap looms. The shawls that they weave are patterned in the ikat, or jaspe, technique in which parts of the unwoven warp threads are bound before the warp is dyed. The bound areas resist the dye and form a pattern on the unwoven warp which can then be placed on the loom and woven into cloth.

José is seated at the loom at a fair in Texas while Camelia explains the process to visitors to their booth. The unwoven warp ends at the start of the warp will be later tied into intricate knotted patterns by specialists in the technique.

I learned a little about the ikat technique on my first visit to Ecuador in 2005, a tiny bit more on a visit to Guatemala in 2008, and have been playing with it with varying degrees of success ever since. I have added to my knowledge base through trial and error but also via the internet and am grateful to those who take the time and make the effort to so beautifully document and share techniques.

Now I have yet more to add to my knowledge base and even more reason to admire the artists that create these magnificently detailed pieces.

Christina was taken through the steps for creating a jaspe warp for a single rebozo on the backstrap loom while at the same time being able to witness the process for setting up the ninety-meter japse warps that are woven by the workshop artisans on floor looms. Commercially available synthetic dyes are used on those long production pieces. The backstrap loom pieces are dyed with natural substances.

José explaining the use of indigo and cochineal to dye the backstrap-loom-woven rebozos.

Here’s a description in Christina’s own words of the start of her adventure in Malinalco…

My course began on the day after my arrival. After great local coffee and pan dulce (Mexican pastries) we entered their sanctuary of fiber and tools. I was thrilled to hear the clacking sounds of the standing pedal looms (4) the sound was like a symphony to me. The weavers were in ages 18 to 80 and most were kin or friends to José and Camelia.  Jesus was the youngest, Guillermo, Oscar, and Antonio were fast at work creating textiles. The rhythm was delicious. I felt like I was in heaven surrounded by textiles, threads of various colors, old looms, handmade warping mills and hand-cranked bicycle wheels that served as bobbin winders and other miscellaneous weaver’s tools. The ambience was enhanced by four great and well-behaved street dogs that had unique and pleasant personalities and who provided a nice diversion from my zealous attempt to learn the multiple processes I had never attempted. An added visual delight was that the studio was beautiful and set in the foothills of Malinalco. Wrought-iron glass doors and windows swung open to the beautiful mountains and yard of his house. There were hummingbirds (colibri) darting around the bougainvillea. Before work and after coffee, the weavers ceremoniously but quietly light a candle to the Virgen de Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico, ensuring the day’s work goes well and thanking her for watching over their work.

Because I have had a little experience of my own creating ikat pieces on a backstrap loom, what initially stood out for me when Christina first started telling me about her experience in Mexico, were the differences in the methods and tools that were being used. I have been using a Japanese plastic tape to wrap the threads after a few false starts in which I tried to use agave fiber and then cassette tape. It was interesting to see the use of cotton string as the resist material in José and Camelia’s work. The other interesting thing was their use of liquid corn starch sizing before they tied the patterns. The starch helps to keep the fine threads stiff in their bundles and, therefore, easier to wrap. The warp is stretched out to dry and I love the idea of placing bottle caps between the bundles to stop them from sticking together as the starch dries.

The 90-meter warp, enough for 30 rebozos, is stretched outdoors.

Here are a couple of screen shots from a video that Christina sent me which shows José wrapping bundles with the cotton thread. He uses a blade that is strapped to his hand and with a flick of the wrist is able to cut the string when he finishes with each bundle. It’s ingenious but I know I would create havoc if I were to try using something like that!

Wrapping the warp with cotton string.
The blade strapped to José’s right hand.

I use charcoal pencil to mark the pattern on my warp after having read about the use of charcoal by ikat weavers in Uzbekistan. I once used a black marker pen but the yellow component of the black ink bled into my pattern. Jose and Camelia mark with ink which doesn’t bleed and which gets covered by the dark dye colors. Some patterns are marked free-hand while for others, wooden blocks are used….very handy for the tiny repeated patterns. The measuring and marking is quite a job and the blocks must make the process so much easier. I have seen other ways of marking patterns in India in which an entire grid of perfectly spaced lines is drawn onto the warp so that the “wrapper” does not need to stop and do any measuring of wrap length or spacing along the way.

Wooden pattern blocks used to mark the warp before wrapping.

The long floor-loom warps weigh around 20kg when wet. It’s quite a job wringing them out when they emerge from the large galvanized buckets of dye.

Christina’s backstrap-loom warp took three days to dye in blue and green. Plain green warp threads would be placed alongside strips of blue jaspe thread.

Christina undoing the string wrappings. It’s a tedious job but so exciting to see the pattern emerging. José calls this “work for crazy folk”.
It’s so gorgeous seeing the threads together like this. The threads will be combined as the warp is placed on the beams of the backstrap loom.
The combined warp.

Of course, string heddles need to be made before weaving can commence. But there is also another task. Any remaining corn starch is removed from the threads with the aid of the brushes (the best ones are made from agave fiber) that you can see here in this display of tools.

Heddled and ready to go….so beautiful!

Christina tells me that although there are 90-meter synthetically-dyed warps on the floor looms, José and Camelia spend time every day weaving single one-of-a-kind naturally-dyed pieces on backstrap looms. These are their finest pieces which are often entered in shows and awarded as well as worn on catwalks at shows that honor Mexican craftsmanship.

I have a backstrap weaving friend in Mexico who has just finished his first japse patterned rebozo on a floor loom. In his Facebook post he states that a rebozo without a knotted fringe is simply not a rebozo. And so, it would be remiss of me not to mention the beautiful knotwork, rapacejos, that goes into the fringe once the cloth is off the loom. Two sisters in their seventies who live in a remote village and who have been knotting fringes since childhood, do this finishing work for José and Camelia.

In Christina’s words….

Camelia and family with their textile business support 70 indigenous families in the communities around her, others who like these sisters do the finish work on the rebozos. Camelia knows how to do the knotwork as well, but since she is so busy being the jefa (chief) negotiator, designer, shopkeeper, she prefers to farm out the finishing to the nearby villages. Camelia’s work ensures sustainability for these little communities.

Here is an example of knotwork on a shawl that Christina commissioned to honor her grandmother…

You can see more of Camelia’s work on her website, on Instagram and on Facebook . José and Camelia are happy to welcome students to their home. Maybe one day I will be able to travel there and meet them. You can contact them via these links to ask about that. Many thanks to Christina for sharing all this with us.

I will leave you with my little ikat efforts for the first time on my own hand-spun cotton. I am not willing to attempt anything grander for the time being until I have woven this and seen how my hand-spun cotton behaves. If it works out reasonably well, I’ll sew the cloth into a zippered coin and card purse something like these that I made many years ago.

I have folded my warp of hand-spun cotton so that it is half its width so that I can tie the pattern onto two layers of warp at once. When I later unfold the warp, I will have the mirror image of what you see here on the other half. I am going to use the same blues that I used for my recent cross-body bag. Again, I am not willing to try anything new until I know that my hand-spun cotton is up to this. I had been thinking about using cochineal but decided not to risk it.

The completed pattern. The warp gets soaked and then goes into the pot for the first dye of light blue.
After the light blue dye bath, I wrapped all the areas that are to remain light blue before dyeing the warp dark blue. The ball of white is there to remind me that I also need to dye some thread for weft….how many times have I forgotten to do that! The cotton dye that I buy here leaves a slightly greasy residue in the pot. It will get a good scrubbing before its next use.
After the second darker blue dye bath. I might need to go darker.

One thing about dyeing at night….it’s hard to tell what color you are getting under artificial light. This isn’t as dark and inky as I would have liked it to be. I will unwrap one of the light blue sections and see if I like the way the two blues look together. If not, this will go back in the dye bath with a bit more black added to the blue…and I will dye in daylight! I just don’t have the instruments to accurately weigh and measure these very small quantities and so it is hard to follow the notes I have made for other larger dye projects.

Because I am using cotton singles, I expect the woven cloth to curl. You can already see the curl in the threads in the above photo. I hope to use a tubular edging on the little purse which will flatten the cloth. Andean weavers often add tubular edgings to their pieces. Perhaps the primary purpose is to strengthen and protect the edges of the cloth but the tubular bands also have the effect of calming the curl in the cloth that has been woven with their high-twist plied wool yarn.

This is the discontinuous-warp piece that I wove in high-energy hand-spun alpaca yarn from Pitumarca, Peru. Once off the loom the piece would not lie flat…..

Two corners curled over and the other two curled under.

Here is the same piece after I applied the tubular band. The tubular band has its own curling energy which possibly works against the curl of the cloth. The piece then lay nicely flat.

To finish, I am would like to show you some bands that have been woven by friends on Ravelry. Brettchenweberin contributes to the Backstrap Weaving Group while the other ladies have been contributing to a band weaving WAL that has been running these last few months in one of the other weaving groups. The band-weaving WAL brings us all kinds of band-weavers who use string heddles, rigid heddles or tablets to create their pieces using backstrap, inkle or shaft looms. I have been thrilled to see people using and enjoying both my instructional and pattern books and will use this opportunity, if I may, to also remind my readers of my publications. Things have been a little slow lately business-wise and I am guessing it’s because this is the first summer in the north since the start of the pandemic that people feel comfortable enough to get out and about. I have vague plans to travel next February and hope that things only further improve for all of us between now and then.

Brettchenweberin has used figures from my two pattern books – Complementary-warp Pattern Book and More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns. If you have used either my Complementary-warp Pick-up book or any of my books on Andean Pebble Weave to learn the technique, you will be able to weave all the patterns in the pattern books. I love the color combination and think that there might be plans to sew these strips together to make a wider piece.

This one from Beverly has one of my favorite patterns because of the memory it brings me of a cool sunny winter’s afternoon sitting on the grass in the Bolivian highlands with my teacher Maxima. She had taught me the technique so that I could continue on my own without her supervision. That allowed her to continue with her own weaving and sewing projects and we sat side by side concentrating on our work and enjoying the peaceful afternoon together. This pattern is charted in my Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms book as well as in my Complementary-warp Pick-up book.

I love everything about this picture from Dunja Roberts. Can you imagine sitting on the grass in the shade of that tree weaving this? I love living in the tropics but I am afraid that this kind of activity is not so pleasant here. It is either too hot and humid or there are too many bugs! This pattern is charted in the Complementary-warp Pick-up book.

Rebekkah has been weaving lots of motifs from my pattern books. The knotwork pattern on the left is one of several in the More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns book. She added a wavy border to it which looks great. Then she took the little viscacha figure from my Complementary-warp Pattern Book and created her own layout for the little guys.

This is adorable! Nancy has been weaving patterns from my books for some time now and has just sent me her latest original creation…her own Andean Pebble Weave pattern of a cardinal. I love it when people feel inspired to start creating their own patterns.

And here’s some more “adorableness”. This comes from Brettchenweberin. She used my tutorial on the Bedouin al’ouerjan pattern (free for all to use right here on this blog) to weave a band and use it so beautifully on a bag that she sewed.

And with that, I shall leave you all until next time. I am hoping that I like the way the two blues look on my ikat project because I would really like to get back at my loom and put the dye pot away!

Backstrap Weaving – Proud!

I have woven a lot of things that have made me very happy but my latest piece is something of which I am particularly proud. That might sound a little obnoxious…but I can’t help it. The little cross-body purse that I just hand-sewed has me grinning from ear to ear. I guess it’s because I remember my school days when I was convinced that I was a total klutz when it came to any kind of craft project. In the end I even stopped handing in the work all together and my report cards would say “No work presented”, “Assignment incomplete”, or “Disappointing result”. I remember having a friend’s mother take pity and rescue and do

the sewing part of an assignment for me. My mother was also convinced that she had no craft-related skills or talents and I guess I just assumed I would be the same.

One of the 60/2 silk ikat pieces that I wove last year.

Not that this latest project is any great feat of sewing. It holds together and looks like what I had in mind and that is enough to please me. There aren’t any zips or fancy pockets. I took sewing skills that I had learned in my recent shoulder bag project and got to apply and improve on them. I took the ikat skills that I had learned in all the silk projects that I had woven during the worst of the pandemic and applied them to cotton.

In my last post, I showed you my ikat warp on the loom, heddled up and ready to go.

Almost all heddled. There are 880 ends in total of 20/2 cotton.
A coil rod in place on one of my older cotton scarf warps.

I had been deciding n whether it would be worth inserting a coil rod. I did go ahead and use one. Next time I will insert the rod right at the far end of the loom and leave it there. This time I inserted it, as is my habit, within reach just beyond my shed rod which meant that I had to roll it along the warp each time I advanced the warp. The rod will pick up the tiniest looseness in tension in any particular thread, take it up, and sort of push it along and away to the far end of the warp where it remains trapped. This is all very well unless you are trying to keep your ikat threads strictly aligned. In this case, it is preferable to have any tension differences gradually even themselves out as you inch your way along the warp in such a way as not to be noticeable at all. Each time the coil rod pulled a thread out of alignment, I had to take hold of the thread and ease it back into place. Lesson learned.

It’s amazing how fast the weaving goes after all the wrapping and dyeing that had taken place before I could even get the warp on the loom. Of course, it is only a meter of cloth which was the amount I had calculated as being necessary for my purse. I did not have a pattern for the purse and made up something very simple that is not all that different from my shoulder bag shape, except for the absence of pleats.

Rapid progress on the loom. The coil rod, unfortunately, is out of shot.

All my weaving friends will understand the reluctance to take scissors to a piece of your hand woven cloth and so it won’t surprise you that I had to let this cloth just sit about for a few days. In the meantime, I had to scale down the paper pattern I had made for my shoulder bag.

The finished one meter of ikat cloth.

I sewed a dummy purse, minus flap, to see if the shape I had drawn worked. I felt that it did and was able to use that dummy piece as the drop-in lining. It’s chocolate brown and I guess I was influenced by these naturally-dyed quilting pieces from Threads of Life in Ubud, Bali when I came up with my combination of colors. I have also seen ikat work in Guatemala that combines natural indigo blues with chocolate brown.

Hand-spun, backstrap loom-woven cotton pieces from Threads of Life…swoon.

Sadly, I neglected to take in-progress shots of the sewing part of this project. I wove three bands, one of which became the sides and base of the purse. The other is the strap and the third is the tubular edging on the flap. I was pleased that the pattern on the flap lined up quite nicely with that on the body of the purse and I used a magnetic clasp for the flap.

Feeling proud…can you tell?
Finished cross-body ikat purse.

These are sloooow projects but I find the slow hand-sewing so very relaxing. I posted my cloth in an online weaving group and one member responded with something like….”That looks like so much work!” I was kind of surprised. That’s the kind of thing that non-weavers say when I do a demonstration of backstrap weaving at an event. I have always felt that weavers, on the other hand, just get it!

A benefit of slow projects like this is the value you get from a relatively small amount of yarn! It has certainly kept me out of trouble for a good while. It never fails to tickle me that the bits that you see below can be transformed into a patterned purse.

20/2 mercerized cotton thread, dye for cotton, and ikat tape.

Next up…an attempt to make a small zippered coin purse in warp-faced fabric as a way to test my hand-spun Sea Island cotton. My teachers in coastal Ecuador used hand-spun cotton singles doubled rather than plied, and not sized, for their warp-faced weaving. My singles have stood up well to a balanced structure in an early test sample. Warp-faced will be a different story all together with all that added abrasion. Why am I using singles? I guess it’s only because I want the thread to be that fine. I may be completely misguided in this but we shall see what comes out of this next small experiment. I don’t think I will be wasting too much thread while learning these lessons. If my single thread stands up to the abrasion it just might be because I have put in too much twist and perhaps robbed it of its rustic hand-spun qualities. There are so many lessons to learn!

Mariana weaving warp-faced fabric for a double-pocket saddle bag using doubled hand-spun cotton singles, coastal Ecuador.

In my next post, I’ll have photos and information that my online weaving friend Christina has shared with me on her experience studying with ikat weavers in Mexico in 2019 as well as some images by another online friend who was in Ecuador interacting with ikat weavers in the 1970s. There might be a little something to report on my cotton coin purse project. I might even get to use my cochineal and alum.

And speaking of the red color of cochineal, here’s a teaser from next week’s post as the weavers in Mexico remove an ikat wrap to reveal one tiny part of the overall pattern…just in case you have seen enough blue for today! (Note that these weavers were using synthetic dye for their large production runs of 90-meter warps but use cochineal for their single unique backstrap-loom-woven pieces).

Photo courtesy of Christina Palafox.

Until next time…

Backstrap Weaving – Ikat Progress

Threads of Life in Ubud, Bali posted a video to Youtube some time ago in which you can read about the 56 steps taken by weavers in Indonesia to create a naturally-dyed and handwoven ikat hip cloth. 56 steps!! Imagine. (I have embedded the video for you at the end of this post).

My ikat projects are pathetically simple (not even pre-kinder level) compared to the intricate tying and color work carried out by the masters of this art in Indonesia. What goes into achieving the desired depth of just one of the many colors employed is mind boggling in itself.

I have been dabbling in ikat once again because I had decided that I wanted to sew a small bag. I had had so much fun creating the large shoulder bag, below, a couple of months ago. The weaving of all the parts was very satisfying as I was able to employ a variety of techniques from warp-faced to balanced plain weave, to intermesh, three-color pebble with my own designs, and woven tubular edgings. On top of that, there had been so much to learn about hand sewing….seams that curve, drop-in linings, pleats, interfacing…..

I decided that the small bag should be sewn from ikat fabric and I set about planning a simple motif. I wanted busy fabric with small repeating motifs. I would use 20/2 cotton and was grateful for having used this thread before for an ikat project in which I had created just one large motif, Fortunately, I had kept pretty good notes about that project.

A drawstring bag for my Kindle in 20/2 cotton with ikat and supplementary-weft patterns. There’s a tiny band of pebble weave around the mouth of the bag.

That meant that I didn’t need to sample….that’s just one step that I was able to skip. Add to that the fact that I wasn’t hand-spinning the cotton (after having grown, picked, ginned and prepared it for spinning). Plus, I wasn’t going out and picking plant matter and preparing it for the dye pot. I just walked down to my LYS, a mere three blocks away, and bought some cotton dye. I scoured the 20/2 cotton thread to ready it for dyeing.

Here’s the simple motif that I created:

This is the pattern I tied onto the two layers.

Once I had figured out the number of ends I would need and the length of cloth I would most likely need for my bag, I wound the warp with my scoured cotton. When it came to tying the pattern onto the warp threads, I folded the warp in half to halve its width so that I could tie onto two layers of threads at the same time. That way I only had to tie half the pattern and in doing so would automatically create its mirror image. I could have challenged myself further by also folding the warp to halve its length but that would have meant having upside-down motifs on one half of the cloth. That would limit my options for where to cut the cloth to make the bag. I am not an experienced sewer. I don’t yet have a pattern in mind for my small bag and so, who knows where I will need to cut?

I extend my ikat warps on one of these canvas stretcher frames and use turn buckles to adjust tension.

When planning the pattern, I decide the number of threads that I will wrap for each section. That in turn will determine the total number of warp ends that I use. I mark these sections with thread before I start wrapping.

Dividing the warp into bundles, as seen above, is done before the warp is folded in half. Before folding, I enclose each bundle in half-inch wraps of ikat tape at the far end of the warp. Those wraps stay in place throughout the entire process. Then I fold the warp in half and connect each bundle from the upper layer with its corresponding partner from the lower layer. When wrapping with tape, I wrap these two joined bundles as if they were one large bundle.

By the way, the Tour de Fleece ended today.

I enjoy every part of this process except this next one: measuring and measuring and measuring again to make sure that the warp is good and square on the frame as well as making sure that I start tying in a straight line. How my eyes play tricks on me and sometimes simply refuse to believe my tape measure! Once I get those first few wraps in place, I go back to enjoying myself (even though I have to confess that I often still don’t feel 100% sure of having got it all straightened out). I wrap a few bits here and there throughout the day and then do some more cotton spinning. I don’t like sitting at it for long sessions because I get sloppy. I wonder about the artists in Indonesia and whether they sit at it all day. I imagine having that kind of time on one’s hands to devote to just this one task might be a luxury.

One other reason for doing this in short sessions is that I have taken on a new challenge of spending more time on my feet and less time sitting. I have found a nice spot on which to place my spinning bowl which allows me to spin very comfortably on my takli while standing up and want to see if I can spend all my mornings from now on only doing things that involve being on my feet.

I mark the pattern with charcoal pencil and use the tape that my friend Betty gave me some years ago. I tie a knot in my tape that sits at the center of the wrap and have what I feel is a fast and efficient way of cutting the knot and unwrapping later. Some people don’t knot but I don’t feel secure not doing so! Placing the knot in the center of the wrap reduces the risk of accidently snipping a warp thread when unwrapping.

The placement of the knot is the only tip I have to share and this will only apply if you go with tying a knot. Many people don’t tie them. Otherwise, wrapping involves…well….. wrapping, that’s all. I wrap very tightly. I don’t know if this is the best way…it works for me. I get a callous on my left index finger from the tape constantly rubbing against its tip. In the following video clip I have started wrapping in the center of the section and am proceeding until the end of the section. Then I turn, (video clip stops a couple of wraps after the reverse of direction) and wrap over the top back to where I started, continue beyond that point to the other end of the section, return to the center, tie, and cut.

I let the wrapped warp soak in water for a day and a half. I used a new-to-me dye and that always makes me nervous. However, I was really pleased with the color I got. I had added a little black to the blue to “dirty” it a bit.

It’s amazing how tidy this warp was when it emerged from the dye bath compared to the silk ones that I usually work with! From here it went back on the frame so that I could add more wraps. I wanted to reserve some of the blue before once again dyeing the warp a much darker blue. This first blue was so pretty. It seemed a terrible shame to now cover most of it with a darker blue. I kept dyeing notes in my book with its hand-woven cover so that I can hopefully replicate that blue for another project some day..

The cover I wove for my Dyer’s Notebook with words from a poem by Emily Dickinson.
The warp is stretched on the frame ready for the next wrapping and then a good soaking before being dyed again.
Here it is after the second dark blue dye bath. I almost thought that I had ruined it by adding too much black but, thankfully, it came out just the kind of inky dark blue that I had been hoping for.

I don’t get so nervous about removing the wrappings any more. I seem to be using a reliable wrapping technique and so I am not worried about dye having seeped between poor wraps or having bled into the ends of the wrapped sections. The part that makes me nervous is the weaving! How much will the threads shift? Some kinds of shift are attractive to my eye while others are not. The threads just have a mind of their own and from one project to the next I am never quite sure what to expect. As I always say….Will it be a mess or success? I try to keep my mind as open as possible because initial disappointment often fades and ends up with my being completely in love with the results. But that change in opinion can sometimes take a long time! It’s best not to have expectations.

So, what did you do on Saturday night? Oh, I sat about and cut dozens of knots and unraveled ikat tape while listening to podcasts. I remind myself that this is the stage at which the pattern is probably the best it will ever look. I am now releasing the threads from their bonds and they are free from now on to wander about as they please as I get them onto the loom, retrieve the cross, put sticks in place, and make heddles.

Normally, I would only remove 6-8″ of wraps and then prepare the warp for weaving. That would give me just enough space in which to set up heddles etc, create (small) sheds, and weave. I would only unwrap more tape when I had no more room in which to work. Working that way has helped to reduce shift in the threads and keep the pattern nice and sharp. However, because I folded the warp in half, I have no choice but to cut off all the wraps. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to unfold the warp. Peeling the two layers apart and opening up the warp to its full width is super fun. I take a few pictures because anything can happen to the pattern after this point!

You may remember that at this point I do still have some wraps still in place…those half-inch ones that I placed right at the end of the warp before I folded. They do help to some extent to reduce shift but not as much as you might think or hope.

The cross has been retrieved from where it had been saved on lengths of thread and in the wee hours of Sunday I started making the string heddles.
This is as far as I got before bed.

Later, on Sunday afternoon, I took all those heddles off as the #12 DMC thread I was using was too heavy. I ended up using the same 20/2 cotton….. of course. That’s what you get for starting something like this at midnight.

Ready to roll? Maybe just one more step before I throw the shuttle. I might install a coil rod. Do I really need it or am I just procrastinating? I do believe that it plays some role in locking the threads in position. As I said, the weaving step is for me the part during which I feel I have the least control over the pattern. Getting started makes me nervous!

Here’s the warp with the 20/2 cotton heddles in place.

I will leave you here with a picture as a teaser of things to come. This picture comes to you courtesy of my new online weaving acquaintance….someone about whom I have often wondered over the years. I shall tell you more in future posts.

Now, imagine me sitting here alone on my Saturday night carefully cutting knots and rolling off the ikat tape with BBC radio to keep me company….and then look at this picture which looks to me like a jolly ol’ unwrapping party with many hands at work.

Photo courtesy of my new online friend whose name I shall reveal in a future post!

This picture was taken back in the 1970s in Ecuador and my new friend struggles to recall exactly what had been going on but it seems that the warp has been anchored on one lady’s foot while bundles fan out in all directions so that each helper can be occupied removing the wraps along their particular bundle’s length. I love this photo and like to imagine lots of happy chatter and laughter accompanying this task.

And here’s the Threads of Life video that I mentioned at the start of this post. Make sure to view it in HD if you want to be able to read the text….

Until next time…..