silk – Page 2 – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Between Science and Magic Part 2

“Between Science and Magic”…this is the second time that I am using this title for a post. I saw it being used as the title of a review of a new book about hummingbirds and loved it. It is such a fitting description of these amazing little creatures. You sit and watch as they magically hover by a flower in a buzz and blur of wings. Then you watch some brilliant BBC slow motion footage that reveals the science behind their ability to do so. And yet the science doesn’t in any way diminish the feeling I get that I am witnessing magic.

As I sat sketching, crunching numbers and planning the next book cover that I wanted to weave, it dawned on me that the phrase is also a fitting one for how I feel about weaving. I decided that it would be fun to include the phrase on the cover of a book that I will call A Weaver’s Journal.

My planning notes look kind of scientific with all those numbers, diagrams and other scribblings. I don’t trust gut feeling or instinct when it comes to planning a project. I can’t eyeball width by winding warp threads and just stopping when it looks right. It all has to be figured out beforehand.

Colors don’t just magically come together in my head either. I don’t have a natural talent for that and envy it in others. I look at what I have in my stash and then go online for help hoping that I can somehow put together something similar.

**I started with teal and then looked online for ideas**.

I only have natural white and a color called “rye” in 30/2 silk and so needed to dye some of the white to teal. I have a jar of teal dye which didn’t work for me the last time I used it. The yarn simply refused to take up the blue component of the dye and ended up a very odd green. I am horrifyingly unscientific about dyeing. I don’t weigh the yarn. I make my best guess as to the amount of dye to use. I don’t measure the temperature of the water. If I get the intended color, it’s pure magic. And I don’t take notes! I mixed two blues that I have, one that is green-ish and another that is more like a standard dark blue and hoped for the best.

The balls of teal are the ones I dyed. They’re 30/2 silk. I wanted to get a color that was close to the tube of 60/2 teal. The fact that I did indeed get something close is magic to me! I would weave the hummingbirds using multiple strands of the 60/2 teal on 30/2 rye just like in the sample band pictured above. They would be surrounded by 30/2 teal, which would have other supplementary-weft patterns in gold. I didn’t manage to work the pale blue into the plan.

Warping…I am very methodical. Nothing is left to chance, wizardry or magic!

**The strings at the top are to create sections and make counting easier when laying in the pattern.**

I don’t wing patterns. The hummingbirds had already been designed, tested and adjusted. I had yet to design the words. I was made aware of just how clumsy I had become with cursive writing! I think that in Australia I was taught a Victorian style of cursive. The lower-case ‘r’ we were taught is not as attractive as those I see in other styles, and designing it so that it connected smoothly and, more importantly, without taking up too much space, was beyond me. So, you will see that my ‘r’s are socially distanced from one of their neighboring letters.

**At this point, I was regretting the gold stripes. I dealt with those later. My phone’s camera sees the teal as more turquoise-y**.

**I am done with the ‘r’s at this stage. Good. My ipod camera is more teal-friendly.**

I am using DMC #12 2-ply mercerized cotton for the heddles on this 30/2 silk warp. They play very nicely with the silk.

It’s a short warp and I wanted to see what my heddles looked like at the end. People often ask me if I re-use my heddle string. I don’t. But I just might pick the fluff off these while listening to a good podcast or two one of these days. The fluff forms a bracelet around the heddle thread and so it’s not just a matter of giving the heddles a good shake or beating. Each little bracelet ring needs to be broken.

The amount of fluff that collects depends on the kind of materials being used in warp and heddle string as well as on how you are handling the heddles as you use them to raise threads. It’s perfectly normal for small amounts of fluff to accumulate as the heddles naturally inch their way along the warp as the weaving advances. I am never aware of shifting them myself. They just seem to magically move along. When I was at the end of this warp and with far less space in which to work, I had to slide the heddles back out of the way so that I could insert a sword and my pick-up stick. Then I had to slide them forward again in order to continue operating the loom. I suspect that most of this fluff accumulated due to all that sliding back and forth at the very end.

I hadn’t wet finished the cloth for the first hummingbird book cover. I felt that the fine, non-mercerized, grabby, tightly-woven cotton that I used for that one really didn’t need that kind of finishing for its role as a sturdy book cover.

**30/2 non-mercerized cotton that I brought back from Guatemala in 2008**.

I had to face the fact that the silk piece did, and that wet-finishing was going to alter the carefully planned dimensions of the cloth…carefully planned to perfectly fit my book. Silk weft and silk warp did not give me the tight secure warp-faced weave that the grabby cotton had. Wet-finishing also made the cloth floppy and drape-y, lovely characteristics for a wearable piece, not so much for a book cover. It was very fiddly applying the floppy cloth to the book….but I got there.

**The finished book and the good ol’ contact cement that makes it all possible**.

You may have noticed that the gold stripes are gone. I wove a vey narrow length of tape in the 60/2 teal silk and used it to compensate for the lost width from the wet-finishing process as well as cover the gold stripes that had been annoying me. The tapes also covered some of the more irregular turns of supplementary weft…a bonus! I love the way it turned out.

There might be one more book coming if I can scrape together yarn from my stash that fits the idea that is developing.

In the meantime, I have had a little distraction, although it is still hummingbird-related. A Facebook page about archaeology recently shared some pictures from the textile collection of the museum of the University of Princeton. The description reads: Cross-Loop Stitched Border Fragment Featuring 54 Hummingbirds, 100 B.C -A.D. 200. Camelid Fiber and Cotton. Peru, South Coast.

This is magic….the fact that this shows up in my news feed on Facebook at a time when I am into all things hummingbird-ish. And how astoundingly gorgeous is this piece of work! I love that we have this evidence that people were just as in love with the magical hummingbird two thousand years ago as we are today and felt the desire to depict them in their art. The depth of color in this two-thousand-year old piece is incredible.

I know this technique as cross-knit looping and was taught it as a decorative and protective edging by my weaving teachers in Bolivia. I have also seen it referred to as needle knitting, the needle in this case being a sewing needle that carries the thread though loops rather than a knitting one. I have not come across anyone here in my travels who is using this technique to create these three-dimensional figures although I know that the Center for Traditional Textiles in Cusco (CTTC), Peru is currently working on recovering the technique and creating reproductions. Back in 2012 when I was in the U.K, Sue Prior showed me a piece of three-dimensional needle knitting that she had created as part of the work of the Peruvian Textiles Study Group in her Guild. It was a wonderful little sample. My email contact for Sue is out-of-date and I wonder if she still reads my blog. Contact me, please, Sue!

I thought I would try a little project of my own in chunky cotton to see if I could get a result that looked something like those three little tail feathers.

This is a first attempt and there is plenty that I will do differently if a second attempt ever happens. This just might be a good exercise to keep me busy while I ponder my next woven project.

I’ll finish by showing you the work of Fenny in the Netherlands. She is doing a spectacular job of weaving a pattern that was designed by my online weaving friend Eladio Salas in Mexico. That was many years ago after I had published my very first book. Eladio took very quickly to designing and weaving wide and complex patterns on his backstrap loom. He allowed me to use a portion of his amazing original design in my pattern books. Fenny’s work is beautiful. She has a nice loom which allows her to comfortably weave these wider patterns.

This pattern is charted along with 131 others in my book More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns which is available as a PDF or as a spiral-bound book at Taproot Video.

I am still staying in most of the time and staying safe. Hopefully we will get our booster shots soon. I wonder which one it will be. I went out to visit a friend yesterday. Strolling the thirteen blocks home on a Saturday afternoon is very pleasant because the downtown area is quite deserted. But then I got bitten on the leg by a dog! The bite area is black and blue from the force of the bite but fortunately only one tooth broke the skin. Maybe the universe is telling me not to get cocky and to just stay home!

Let’s finish with something pleasant…. 🙂

Backstrap Weaving – Making the Most of It

Back when I was doing my training to be a teacher of English as a foreign language, I remember being told over and over to make sure that any original materials that we created were designed to be multi-functional. Why go to all the time and trouble to create something that would be used once in only one context?

I loved creating my own materials for English-teaching. Back then when I didn’t have much time for weaving, it seems that I poured all my creative juices into doing that. It was multi-functional in that I got to be creative while at the same time providing some welcome fun time for my students away from the text books. And I got better and better with using the same material in different ways with a variety of groups in a variety of contexts at different levels in their learning. And, as a bonus, it gave me a reason to buy stationery. I discovered that I have a thing for stationery.

Give me a chance to draw and paste and sticky-tape and color and I am happy as a baby.

When it comes to weaving, I have folders and closet shelves piled high with charts that I have created for projects. They got used once and then filed away, like the mega chart that I created for my Shipibo-inspired project that you can see above. Sometimes I wonder why I keep them. But then you know how that goes….about a week after you throw something away, you find that you need it, right?

My cat always enjoyed my get-down-on-the-floor-to-chart time.

So, with all that in mind, I am pleased that I have been taking the hummingbird charts, over which I have long labored, and using them in a variety of ways…making the most of all that time and effort. And, I am not done yet. I have a theme in my head for a future project…something that I wish to express, and all this sampling is hopefully leading me there. It’s all just a vague idea at the moment and I am still waiting for the light bulb to come on. In the meantime, I’ll just keep weaving hummingbirds.

I wanted to see what my hummingbird motifs looked like in a large format. I had completed my piece in 60/2 silk. In that fine thread, the stepped nature of the lines that form the various diagonals and curves is not all that noticeable. But what about in something much heavier? Would those lines then become clumsy and ugly? I combed through my stash and found that the only thing I had that would work in terms of having two high contrast colors was 8/2 Tencel and so I created a short warp for sampling. Some particularly high-twist crochet cotton made pretty heddles for warp-faced double weave.

What a dream it has been to weave with this heavier thread! Firstly, the Tencel is gorgeous to handle. It plays well with the crochet cotton heddles and is so easy to see when doing pick-up compared to to the 60/2 silk…no surprises there. I do think it is a shame to use Tencel, which is so much appreciated for its draping qualities, in a dense structure like warp-faced double weave but it was the only option in my available stash for this experiment. I promise that I won’t do it again!

Because the theme that I have in my head concerns embellishment and also the lack thereof, I decided to embellish my king-sized hummingbird to the max. I really enjoyed planning those “hippy bandanna” curls and swirls and I think they add to the playfulness, the love of life and joy of flight that hummingbirds always suggest to me. The hummingbird will be my new signature pattern.

I felt that the curve-like lines and stepped diagonals looked fine. I certainly did not feel distracted by the fact that the steps in these lines are more obvious than they are in finer thread. In fact, I would have to say that I was pretty thrilled with the whole thing.

So, what was next? I could see that 8/2 in warp-faced double weave in something of this width (3″) would simply not be useful for much…too wide for a sturdy belt or bag strap and much too thick and heavy for anything else. So I turned once again to my stash for something a little finer. I happen have, courtesy of my friend Deanna, a good supply of natural-colored 30/2 silk along with a small quantity of it that I had dyed in a color called “rye” for an ikat project I wove last year. The problem was that I did not have any other color that would allow me to weave pick-up patterns in double weave. Yes, I could dye some but…sigh…I wasn’t in the mood!

Solution….use supplementary weft to create the patterns. Bonus: for the supplementary weft structure, I can use the same chart as I do for double weave. I like to use several strands of a finer thread for the supplementary weft which gave me a nice selection from which to choose in my stash of 60/2 silk. I went with rye warp and teal supplementary weft.

The pattern color that you see in the double weave version on the right comes from warp threads that do not float as opposed to the silk piece in which the pattern is formed by floating weft threads. I love the added dimension that the supplemental weft threads give to the cloth. Bonus: I only made one set of heddles for this structure as opposed to four for the double weave piece. The double weave bonus: I can create horizontal lines of any length I please which I can’t do in the supplemental weft structure as the weft floats need to be limited to a certain practical length. That meant that some parts of my original charts needed to be modified. Long horizontal lines for wings needed to be transformed into sweeping curves. It took some time but wasn’t difficult to do and I am really pleased with the way they turned out.

While I wait for that light bulb to come on which will enable me to figure out how exactly to compose the themed piece that I have in mind, I will weave these embellished hummingbirds into something useful. I think I will use my embellished hummers with some indigo-dyed cotton from Guatemala that I have and use it to make journal covers as I have in the past. That will involve an outing to the stationery store to find a nice sized journal. I want something quite big so that I can squeeze in a lot of hummingbirds. I am hoping to get something that has paper that is nice for sketching.

The indigo and champagne colored Guatemalan thread along with the initial width sample that I wove for the first journal.

I used this 30/2 cotton in the past for mini-journal covers which I have given away as gifts. I wove my friends’ initials into the spines of the books…no re-gifting allowed!

For these, I used embroidery floss for the supplementary weft but I can tell you that removing strands from the slightly twisted six strands of floss is a royal pain if you are wanting to use very long lengths. I like to split all six strands and then lay them back together again so that all twist is removed. That way they lie flat and ribbon-like on the cloth just the way I like it. Yes, it’s a pain and so I might use silk instead. Combining threads to create multi-stranded weft is so much easier than pulling stands apart.

In the meantime, Zoom time is still spinning-and-plying time and progress is ever so slow. It gives me lots of time to think about how I would like to over-dye some of these colors and what I would like to weave with them. The planning is all the more important when using one’s own handspun and I already blew it by over-dyeing a really nice green with black the last time I used this handspun to weave some cuffs.

I also have another idea for an ikat project developing in which I combine it with three-color reversible pebble weave. I am sure that it will happen long before this handspun is ready for use.

And so I keep myself busy and out of trouble and keep my spirits lifted. Book sales at Taproot Video are keeping me afloat and I am hoping that the cooler temperatures in the northern hemisphere mean more cozy time at home weaving for those who live up there and maybe time to try some of the patterning techniques that I teach in my books. As always, thank you all for your support!

Backstrap Weaving – It isn’t all in the Wrist

The Garden Bands are finished and now the question is whether to use them in a project and, if the answer is yes, how?

In my last blog post, I showed you the first of the two bands sitting alongside my hummingbird band.

When I had finished the hummingbird band, I had been thinking about cutting it into two or three pieces, placing them side by side and making “something”. Friends in one of my Zoom groups were not enthusiastic and suggested I weave two bands to flank the hummers and use the whole thing as a wall hanging. I liked the idea of not having to cut (and possibly regret having done so). On top of that, weaving accompanying narrow bands meant that I could once again try out the little flower motifs and the subtle color transitions that I had been sampling in 20/2 cotton.

Now both bands are finished and here they are together…..

I am really pleased with them and may never use them for anything at all. I just really enjoyed creating them. I will play around with placing them next to the hummingbirds in various ways to create symmetry or even asymmetry as some of my weaving friends have suggested. I might keep the borders or perhaps fold them back so that they are hidden. I might hang them together so that they look like one complete piece or leave space between them.

Right now, I think I just need to leave them be and think about all that. Put it this way, there won’t be any cutting or sewing happening just yet.

What I would like to do next is sample these motifs in heavier thread. I have some 8/2 tencel that I would like to try. It will be interesting to see how wide the piece will be in this tencel. I have quite a few people asking me if I plan to publish these patterns and I am not really sure how they will look on a larger scale. They are fine and delicate in 60/2 silk. How will they look in 8/2 tencel?

At the same time I am not even sure if I would like to publish the hummingbirds. The hummingbirds have become part of my pandemic experience…they represent my yearning to be out of all this and zipping about freely. My friends in the States tell me that it is time to take in their feeders as the hummingbirds start their migration south. It must be so nice spotting the first ones arriving at the start of the season the following year. I have often thought about doing a similar seasonal change by spending the mild winters here in Bolivia and the summers in Australia but that was a pre-pandemic dream. I am not sure if I can pull that off any more. I, like many of you I am sure, have had to modify plans with the times.

This is the warp I created for the second band…

In this photo, I have finished creating the heddles for one half of the warp in this warp-faced double weave structure (one heddle set for all the light threads, and one for the darks), and have just started creating a third set for the light threads on the other side of the cross. A fourth will hold all the dark threads on that side of the cross. Those of you who have used my book Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms will have learned a two-shed set-up for this same structure that is perfect for the inkle loom. I only use four sets of heddles when I am weaving with a lot of ends and especially if the thread is fine. The inkle loom is perfect for the more basic two-shed set-up with heavier thread and fewer ends. Bolivian weavers who use this structure will use the method that is traditionally used in their community. Some of them use the two-shed method even when the threads are fine and numerous. This was the way that I was initially taught. Others use a four-shed set-up.

Working with multiple sets of heddles for a warp-faced structure on a fixed-tension loom, like the horizontal ground looms that are used in certain areas of Bolivia and Peru, is challenging.

Bunches of string heddles control the colored layers of warps on the horizontal loom of Taquile Island, Peru

In my experience, using a loom where the weaver can modify tension at will with his or her body makes the process of using multiple heddles much easier. Of course, I am talking about the backstrap loom. The weaver can control just how much the warp threads are able to rise and bend to form as large a shed as necessary without dragging up any sticky neighboring threads that don’t belong, and without causing abrasion.

A two-heddle set-up for Andean Pebble Weave for one of my Within These Walls panels.

When I was first taught Andean Pebble Weave way back in 1996 using narrow warps with quite fine thread, I was shown how to manage two sets of heddles. It took quite some time to figure out what was going on. I would just watch my teachers hands deftly manipulating the heddles, magically and effortlessly creating clean sheds, but at first was not able to replicate the moves. What I wasn’t noticing was how the rest of the body was also involved in the process. It wasn’t only about what their hands were doing. My teachers had to move to slightly relax tension on the warp while working with their hands. I broke a few warp threads in my rough handling before that key piece of information clicked. Those broken threads did not make me popular! You might understand what the title of this blog post is about now.

On narrow warps, I was able to wrap one set of heddles over one hand and roll it away while pulling up on the other heddle with the other hand. The wrapping and rolling tightens all the threads in those heddles. It holds them taut and in place so that they simply cannot grab on to neighboring threads and become part of a shed in which they don’t belong.

Here’s 7-year old Lily doing just that:

This and some of the following images are screen shots from videos that I took and will be blurry as a result. I think they still allow you to see what is going on. You can see how slack Lily’s warp is because she has relaxed tension (more than is really necessary as you can get away with very slight movements when the warp is this narrow). One hand is pulling up the second group of heddles while the other wraps and rolls the first set away.

Here’s my student Berna doing the same: (Hi Berna! I know you read this blog from time to time). She is raising the first heddle while rolling the other away. You can see how her left pinky rests on the warp and acts as the pivot point for the roll. Having placed her other pinky within the shed to save it, her body is on its way to returning to the “neutral” position in which the tension on the warp is no longer relaxed. She had relaxed tension just enough to enable her to save the shed on her finger. She can later replace her finger within the shed with a sword to beat.

Susan learned all this about operating a loom with two sets of heddles on narrow warps from me during my visits in the States. She needed to contact me recently after having set up the beautiful Andean Pebble Weave warp (below) with its two sets of pretty heddles as it’s her first time attempting something this wide. She works with wood and has had to prepare swords that will suit the width of this new project. I hope that she sends pictures of them.

The heddles on their rods fill a narrower space than the width of the warp as some of the heddles hold two threads. This difference in width is expected as the woven cloth will be a fair bit narrower than the width of the warp as you see it here. The fact that this structure uses warp floats on both faces of the fabric means that the fabric will be narrower and thicker than one with the same number of ends in plain weave.

Isn’t this warp gorgeous? I can’t wait to see what she does with this asymmetric layout.

This is Susan’s first attempt at this kind of width having woven several beautiful Andean Pebble Weave guitar straps for friends and family which have given her plenty of practice in winding nicely-tensioned warps and making string heddles. Of course, now her question is how to manage these two sets of much wider heddles. A hand is simply not large enough to wrap and roll these.

For wide warps, I was taught to substitute a sword for the hand….

Here I am demonstrating doing this for a group of friends and exaggerating somewhat to show the effect of moving my body forward to relax tension on the warp. The more I move forward, the larger the shed. The edge of the sword rests on the warp and is the pivot point. Once the shed is open, I can let go of the sword in the wrapped-and-rolled heddle, maintain the forward position, keep pulling up on the heddle rod, and save the open shed on a sword. You can see how my sword is completely wrapped within the heddles and rolled. So, an important tip is to take account of the width of your sword when you are making the heddles. If they are shorter than the width of the sword, this move will not work so well. If they are a lot longer, they will be clumsy.

This still-shot which I grabbed from one of my videos, shows a backstrap weaver in Peru positioning herself to wrap and roll her sword away while her other hand lifts the heddle nearest to her. She chooses to use a sword rather than her hand even on this relatively narrow warp. Her sword sits just below the heddle stick which shows that her heddles are the perfect length for this. That is what I always aim for. No doubt she has been doing this for most of her life and doesn’t even need to think about it.

Now you can see her raised heddle a lot more clearly and her forward position is evident.

So, this was precisely what I was doing on my double-weave Garden warp. I would roll Heddle One away with my hand while lifting Heddle Two. And I worked Heddles Three and Four in the same way. It enabled me to work with this fine 60/2 silk without breaking any threads from abrasion and achieve nice clean sheds every time.

When working with just one heddle together with a shed rod, I like to use what I call the “twisty stick” method. You can see this in action in this video clip. Twisting the two sticks tightens that layer of threads so that the threads remain taut and in place while I bend and raise the threads in the other layer. I go into this in more detail (how to set it up etc) in my video class Operating a Backstrap Loom.

You can see me using the twisty sticks a few times in this next video where I am nearing the end of a warp of 60/2 silk…

Of course, it is important to point out that there are many many different methods used by backstrap weavers to operate their looms. I share with you some of my current favorite methods that work well for me with a variety of warp materials. There is no single correct way to do any of this. Some materials, for example, are just friendlier in terms of stickiness and work well with simpler methods. Some materials are so sturdy that the weaver can get away with simply grabbing and pulling up on the heddle while sawing it back and forth along the warp to clear the shed and remove any stray threads that don’t belong.

How I would love to be there with all of you who are venturing into weaving on backstrap looms. Who knows when that will be possible? In the meantime, I hope that some of what you have seen here today is helpful and perhaps interesting even to those who don’t use a backstrap loom.

It’s time to wet finish the Garden and Hummingbird bands and give them a good hard press in order to better enjoy the loveliness of the silk. Right now they could easily be mistaken for cotton. I am looking forward to bringing out their sheen.

Until next time….

Backstrap Weaving – Thinking Outside the Walls

Is there anybody out there?! This was taken on a visit many years ago to the fabulous Salar de Uyuni here in Bolivia.

Fully vaccinated (albeit with the Sinopharm one in which I have little faith), I decided it was time to think outside the walls and venture out for my first outing, since the arrival of Covid-19 in Bolivia, that didn’t involve the supermarket or the dentist.

What would I find out there? Would I find that I have been behaving in an overly cautious way all this time and perhaps one of the few still hiding away within walls?

Would everything be completely normal? After all, we are not under any kind of restrictions now. Case, hospitalization and death numbers rise and fall from day to day as the third-wave curve wends its way downward. The fourth wave has already been predicted to arrive in October. Have we all just learned to live with this?

I have always been good at physical distancing! This was taken on a visit to a large expanse of sand dunes that inexplicably emerge from the surrounding jungle right here in Santa Cruz where I live.

This outing wasn’t about visiting spectacular salt lakes or mysterious sand dunes. It was simply about eating a burger with a friend in one of my old favorite hang-outs…the main Plaza here in the center of Santa Cruz. I used to live one and a half blocks away from it and would pass through it every day on my way to and from work. After finishing work at 10pm, I used to love stopping to sit there on balmy summer nights. The place would be full of activity as others gathered to enjoy the relative coolness of the evening before reluctantly heading home to face a restless night within heated walls.

My companion suggested the Plaza. The thought of being amongst all those people doing something that required the removal of masks made me nervous, even though it was an outdoor setting.

A typical sunny weekend afternoon would see the Plaza completely full…standing room only… as families gathered to eat ice cream and watch the world go by. There would be wandering coffee cart vendors in their crisp white uniforms, others selling cotton candy, balloon animals and toys and trinkets, people feeding the pigeons, kids chasing the pigeons, teenagers gathered in their little groups in every corner, the shoe shine guys poised ready for the next customer, elderly men playing chess surrounded by youngsters studying their moves, wanna-be models having their photos taken outside the cathedral. The Municipal Police would be strolling around although it is hard to imagine anything “bad” happening in that place of good clean fun. In a city in which it is often impossible to escape the blast of salsa and cumbia music, the Plaza is blissfully music-free.

And so it was with a mixture of relief and sadness that we found the Plaza almost deserted. There was no need to make circuits while looking for a place in the shade. Clearly people are being careful and largely staying home which is a big ask when home can often be a simple adobe or single brick dwelling, the interior of which resembles a pizza oven on hot days. It was sad to see this popular cooling refuge abandoned in this way.

Yes, I admit that it is strange to be writing several paragraphs about an outing to get a burger! So I’ll get back to the weaving now. In my last post I showed you the start of my hummingbird piece. This is another effort to think outside the walls and capture a feeling of uninhibited movement and joy.

I am weaving this in warp-faced double weave. It is certainly not the fastest patterning technique that I know. However, you might remember that I have just spent seven months picking up threads one by one to form intricate patterns on four panels. As a result, nothing feels slow any more and I just simply enjoy watching each and every one of the little figures I have created emerge. I loved designing the plants and piecing all the figures together. Weaving this lifts my spirits!

This is the final third of the band which I photographed so that you can see what the two faces look like. The plant at the very top is the one which is showering the scene with its parachuting seeds.

There was never meant to be an end product but I did find myself thinking about cutting this strip into three and sewing the pieces side by side to make something useful. But then a couple of people in a recent band-weaving Zoom gathering suggested weaving two more strips to flank this one. They could reveal more of the garden that surrounds this happy scene. I like that idea. It spares me the agony of having to do any cutting. All of you who produce hand woven cloth will know exactly what I mean. Plus it gives me a chance to do some more designing in this fun double- weave structure. It amazes me how far removed this is from the kind of pieces that I generally choose to weave.

And so I get to sprawl on the floor and do some more double-weave doodling. The chart for the hummingbird piece ended up being 130 inches long! I suppose I could photograph it in sections, erase the drawings and re-use the paper.

I was very pleased to see that Vicky Erker has been designing her own double-weave motifs after having learned the technique from my book Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms. My book includes a section on designing in which I use a leaf motif as the example. Some people take to designing more easily and quickly than others while some have no desire to design at all and are happy weaving from charts that have been provided in books.

This striking hand petroglyph is the first pattern that Vicki showed me…..

And then she blew me away with this pattern that she based on a Quetzal motif that is often used in textiles of Guatemala. In Guatemala it is woven using completely different patterning structures.. Isn’t that awesome!

If you are wondering about the H and O lettering on Vicki’s swords. it is something I suggest doing to help you keep track of the shed in which you are working when weaving double weave. You can always mark tape and apply that to the sword if you don’t want to mark your sword. The H stands for Heddle Shed and the O for Open Shed. It is one of the tips I give weavers for working in double weave which of course will make much more sense when you are using the book. I hope you might consider trying warp-faced double weave. There are plenty of charts in the book and perhaps you will feel motivated to try creating some of your own designs.

When I was going through my old photos and finding the ones I posted earlier of the Uyuni Salt Lake and the sand dunes, one of my first thoughts on seeing those pictures, was…wow, not a single tree to which I could attach a backstrap loom! Of course, a tree would not be entirely necessary as backstrap weavers can turn themselves into completely self-contained looms using our feet or toes to hold the end of the warp.

Carolin shows here that if you happen to find yourself at the Uyuni salt lake while cycling from Alaska to Ushuaia, one’s bicycle can always provide a handy anchor point for the end of the warp….

Carolin with tiny loom tied to her bike and weaving on the salt lake.

Others have chosen to create something a little more comfortable that can be picked up, carried around and enjoyed both indoors and out. I don’t quite remember who started the frame-making thing in the Facebook group but several members have found these to be a really nice idea when they got fed up with looking for suitable places in their homes, both indoors and out, to which they can attach the ends of their warps. Here’s the one that Martina in Germany built….

Here’s Jenny’s with a clever pool-noodle hack to stop the beam from sliding….

And here are models by Carlos on the left and Rosemary on the right…

Ritika Mittal allowed me to show this image of a weaver in Nagaland using a study frame to hold the end of her warp and provide a nice place for her to brace her feet.

Nancy’s anchor point isn’t exactly a portable one, but I always enjoy seeing a simple backstrap warp being attached to the more complex floor loom…this is Nancy’s first ever backstrap loom project and its a beauty.

When I was having my Operating a Backstrap Loom class filmed, we had some trouble finding an anchor spot in the studio that was close enough to the set because I insisted on sitting on the floor. Eventually we managed to pile a lot of heavy stuff into a portable storage bin and use that.

While on the topic of that video class, Operating a Backstrap Loom, I’ll take this opportunity to let you know that the stock of DVDs is really low now and that I won’t be replacing them when Taproot Video runs out. The purchase of the Lifetime Streaming option caught up with, and now far outnumbers, the purchases of DVDs. So, if DVDs are your preference (they still are mine), you might want to make sure you get one while they are still around.

I showed Nancy’s first-ever weaving on a backstrap loom. I neglected to ask her if this piece is destined to become a backstrap. The dimensions are right. The backstrap itself is often a new backstrap-loom user’s first project and I am happy to see that the article I wrote about weaving your own backstrap way back in 2009 is still being used and enjoyed.

Here are a couple of backstraps that have been woven recently by Lieve on the left and Louise on the right….

My birthday is on Friday (lucky Friday the 13th) and I’ll hopefully be venturing outside the walls again for a little celebration.

Until next time.

Backstrap Weaving – The Road to Double Weave

Weavers often classify themselves as being either Color and Texture people or Structure people. I know that I fit very well into the latter category. There might also be categories for those who are more motivated by Product or by Process. Again, I am all about the latter. The other thing that I love is imagery. I love to weave pictures.

I am in awe of the iridescent effects that floor loom weavers are achieving these days. The cloth is astoundingly beautiful. However, I don’t have any desire to create that kind of cloth myself even though I would be happy to wear it! These days, more and more, I find myself turning to pictures. And lately, it has become more about a desire to tell a story.

Standing outside my seasonal rented home in Vald’Isere. You can just make out the date in stone above the other door…1627.

When I was in my early twenties, my life revolved around mountains and skiing while I wandered back and forth between Thredbo in Australia and Val d’Isere in France. I worked three jobs in the Australian ski resort so that I could just ski without a care for the entire French season. I did eleven seasons back to back. One of the three jobs was making headbands and hats on a knitting machine and selling them in the ski shop that I worked in and eventually managed. I had a punch-card machine and wove pictures, hundreds of them! The fun part was coming up with patterns and designing the pictures.

On a visit to Australia many years ago, I was surprised to find one remaining item from those knitting machine days among the bits and pieces that were in storage. Anyone who knows me will know that I am not about color and so I suspect that the strange combination in this hat (there’s baby pink!) is the result of my just throwing together a bunch of odds and ends of left over yarn. I was happy to see that even back then I was attracted to the kinds of bird figures that are found in textiles of South and Central America.

Hummingbirds from the Within These Walls series.

Andean Pebble Weave is really nice for designing pictures and I have learned to work within its limitations figuring out how to tie down floats so that I can bend the rules a little and create shapes that would normally not be possible.

That allowed me to have a lot of fun with my pandemic story project ”Within These Walls” but there were really only a few times when I decided to bend rules.

But even without bending any rules, there are so many possibilities and I have filled two books with a wide variety of Andean Pebble Weave patterns. They include many original contributions from my students and friends who were thinking right outside the Andean box to come up with figures and patterns that had meaning in their every day lives and surroundings. In doing so, they encouraged me to do the same.

My instructional book includes 24 patterns. The follow-up pattern books contain over 200 more.

If you have been following my blog, you will know that I am once again weaving hummingbirds in a new piece. I guess that I am just telling a story of joyous freedom as they hover and turn and flit from flower to flower. It’s a nice change from all the walls I was erecting in my last project! And along the way, thanks to my online weaving friends who send me links and articles, I learn more about the role hummingbirds play in the lore and legends of indigenous groups here in South America.

One of my most recent discoveries was that the Yaghan people who live in the southern part of Chile where I used to live in the 1990s, tell the tale of a hummingbird called omora, which means “little spirit”. It battles and defeats a wily fox that has fenced off water during a drought allowing the Yaghan people to once again access water. I also read that the Mapuche people of central Chile and Argentina associate the hummingbird with life-giving water.

Another online weaving friend wrote and told me about having read an interpretation of a figure that is made up of two opposing hummingbirds in textiles of the community of Karhui in the Peruvian Andes. The two birds appear with their beaks touching. The use of these figures in this community demonstrates that the weaver has feelings of affection or love towards the textile’s recipient. And right on the tail of having received that information, my online weaving friend, Bonnie, sent me this extraordinary picture of two such hummingbirds that was taken by her photographer son, Darik Datta. I am showing it here with his kind permission….

I decided to use warp-faced double weave to design my little hummingbird figures in my latest work as this structure gives me the flexibility to design birds in all kinds of positions and stages of flight. I am weaving for the pure joy of it and for the fun of designing.

I learned to weave warp-faced double weave with two sisters in Potosí, Bolivia back in 1997 when I was still living in Chile. Since then, I have observed several other Bolivian and Peruvian weavers using this structure using a variety of set-ups. My favorite and simplest way will always be the way I was taught by Juliana and Hilda in 1997 although I choose the backstrap loom over the horizontal ground loom that they use.

My first lesson was on a narrow band. This was my first time using a horizontal ground loom set-up and I hadn’t quite figured out how to position myself to comfortably weave the narrow band. I soon learned that unless you were raised weaving on these looms and therefore developed the right amount of “bendability”, there is no comfortable way! At least back then I was able to tolerate being in bent over positions for hours but I certainly wouldn’t describe it as comfortable.

I learned to select colors using the tip of a bone tool called wichuña and manipulate the two basic sheds to form the lower layer of the double weave.

Dark and light threads are wound together as pairs when the warp is being created. By simply selecting one of the two dark and light threads in each warp pair, I was able to weave pictures of little birds in lovely solid colors…light figures on a dark background. If I had just left it at that and not taken any more steps, the colors that I discarded from each pair would have floated untidily on the back of the band as in this example on the left of the front and back of a band…

The beauty of warp-faced double weave is that all those unruly discarded threads can be woven into a second layer below the first with just a few clever manipulations of the two basic sheds. The upper and lower faces then look like two smooth-faced bands with no floats at all…example on the right.

From the simple band, I advanced to a much wider piece under Juliana and Hilda’s guidance. Juliana would keep scoffing and saying that I really needed to learn a warp-float technique and not this double weave which she considered child’s play. I am pretty sure that this was mostly said to tease Hilda who had not learned, or at least not fully mastered, the warp-float technique that Juliana had been taught to weave as a child! It is often the case where one sister had the opportunity to learn a technique from an elder that the other sister did not.

You can see the difference between warp-float patterning on the right and the smooth warp-faced double weave in these two examples of belts woven by the Mapuche people of central Chile and Argentina.

When weaving the wider piece, I was finally able to settle into a position doubled over on my knees. Unfolding myself at midday was a slow and painful task! My hands took some time to get used to gripping and beating hard with the bone tool. There were ruptured blisters to deal with.

You can see the simplicity of the set-up in this wider warp. It’s just two basic sheds of doubled threads, one of which is controlled by the metal rod that holds the blue string heddles. The other layer of threads lies on top of the long broom-handle stick that sits beyond the heddles. This simple set-up is what made it possible for me to write a book showing how weavers can also enjoy using this simple two-shed set-up on a standard inkle loom.

If you already know how to use an inkle loom and enjoy manipulating the threads by hand to create patterns, I know that you will enjoy my book….Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms. I have tried to cater to several different learning styles by providing dozens of step-by-step pictures for those who like to see the process frozen in small steps. There are detailed descriptions of each step for those who like to use text to create their own visuals in their mind’s eye. And there are video clips for those who like to hear the steps described while watching them in action.

With Hilda and Juliana I got to weave a nice variety of the bird figures that are so typical of this region of Bolivia. When I was in Otavalo in Ecuador back in 2005, it was interesting to see that many of the younger women were opting to wear the typical belt of Potosí rather than the traditional belt that they would normally weave themselves. Goods are brought from Peru and Bolivia to be sold at the famous market of Otavalo and the Bolivian belts were one such item to end up in the stalls. It seemed to be a way for the young ladies to show that they were well-off enough to be able to afford to buy an exotic foreign item rather than weave their own belt. But that was many years ago. I wonder if these belts have since gone out of fashion and been replaced by something else.

Typical bird figures of Potosi, many of which I wove into my cloth.

Hilda was always checking on how hard I was beating the cloth. The quality of the textile in the eyes of these weavers has a lot to do with how firm it is.. They are looking for durable hard-wearing cloth that is wind proof and highly water resistant. This comes from a combination of the tightness of the twist in the warp threads and the heaviness of the beat. My desire to please Hilda is what led to my gripping the bone tool so hard and tearing up my hands. It was worth it because the finished cloth was admired by other highland weavers that I met in my travels. This was the only time that I was ever praised for my cloth because since then I haven’t generally aimed at creating the kind of hard-wearing textile that my weaving teachers favor.

Over the years I have found that the warp-faced double weave structure does not necessarily need to be reserved for stiff and durable cloth. I have made lovely flowing and flexible tapes with it as well as sturdier pieces that work beautifully as belts. I have designed both angular and curved shapes, animal figures, lettering and geometric patterns.

Which brings me to my current hummingbird piece. I filled all the space on my paisley sampling warp with frolicking hummingbirds and my experiments with foliage. I then made the necessary adjustments to my charts as I wasn’t entirely happy with some of the figures. However, I do I find that over time I become less and less critical. And so I am going to listen to others who tell me to stop calling this a sample band and see what I can do with it. Because it is so difficult to choose one face over the other, I hope to be able to weave several strips and place them side by side alternating dark and light faces to create some kind of useful “product”.

The combination of my arrangement of paisley shapes and the hummingbirds was purely accidental but I think that it somehow works. It adds just the right touch of magic.

I know that I have mentioned before that possibly the only disadvantage that I can think of when using this structure is the fact that the two layers of cloth do not connect in the areas of solid color between the pick-up patterns. This can create a sort of ballooning effect if the solid-color area is vey large. You you might just be able to make out a little of that on the light side of the fabric.

It’s one reason you find that a lot of the Bolivian pieces are very busy with pattern. Little squiggles and spots are often placed between and around the main figures which ensure that the layers connect as frequently as possible to create more stable cloth. I think I have come up with a clever way to create more frequent connection in my hummingbird piece without making the whole thing look too busy. I invented a fantasy plant that is losing its parachuting seeds. The seeds are floating around in some of the open spaces.

And so, it was time to think about the next strip of hummingbirds. I could use all that I had learned from this piece in the planning of the next. Time to piece together the next pattern chart. You know how I love that part!

Once I had drawn out enough pattern to keep me busy for a while, it was time to wind the warp and make all the heddles. As you can see I use a four-shed set-up when I am using threads as fine as this 60/2 silk. I only bother with the extra time and effort to set up this way if the threads are fine like these or if there are lots of them. This warp satisfies both criteria…there are 720 heddles there! The process wasn’t as straightforward as I would have liked. When I first sat down to make heddles, I realized that I had mixed up a ball of 140/2 silk with the 60/2s when I was warping and hadn’t noticed because I was winding two colors at once. The difference in weight of one of the strands just wasn’t apparent when I was holding two threads in my hand. Back to the warping board! Unwinding doubled strands of fine thread is not fun.

The different colors in the heddle string show that I am scraping the bottom of my supply of the fine thread that I like to use for these heddles. It makes for a colorful warp.

And this is where I am at so far in the weaving. No paisley this time. I have run out of charted figures and now need to take a break from the loom to continue creating my patterns. There is still plenty of band to be filled.

I hope that this post might motivate you to try warp-faced double weave. My book includes a tutorial on designing using a lovely leaf pattern as an example and of course there are plenty of charted patterns to keep you busy before you get to the designing stage. The book is available as a PDF or as a spiral-bound book at Taproot Video.

I just gave myself my fourth DIY pandemic haircut. I went pretty short this time and I am sure that I will appreciate this length this weekend as our Santa Cruz “winter” promises to bring us temperatures in the high 80s. Until next time…..