silk – Page 7 – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – The Bands Play On

The bands play on…

In a time when my weaving goals are geared toward going wider, finer and longer, there is a surprising amount of narrow band-weaving happening on my backstrap loom. I guess I am satisfying the desire to go finer and longer, if not wider, in some of these projects. At least the 110-inch band that I wove as an edging for my wool blanket falls into the long and fine category.

Two years have passed since I took the panels for the wool blanket off my loom and now I have it finished at last along with its red and brown partner.

Now….bring on the cold weather so that I can snuggle under these!

I stayed with fine thread for the next band project which only satisfied one of my three goals. I wove a strap for my new iPod neck pouch. First came the tubular bands for the sides of the pouch followed by the neck strap. I set up the warp for the strap with four sets of heddles and zoomed along.

I was able to fit three of the four cat patterns from my latest pattern book on the back of the pouch. After attaching the tubular edgings, I sewed coil stitches to cover the raw edges at the bottom of the pouch. The mouth of the pouch ends in selvedges that don’t need protection. I want to re-do the coil stitches as the needle I used was too thick for the weight of wool and I think I can make the coils more compact with the finer needles that I have.

And then it was back to 60/2 silk for another band with lots of pick-up. I am using only two sets of heddles this time and so my pick-up stick is getting a good work out.

This band is for my friend Tracy who makes the most adorable sprang pouches.

I asked her if I could buy one…they are just so darn cute and I loved the colors. I know that it is hard to put a price on these kinds of handmade items and so we came to an arrangement to make a swap…a silk neck ribbon for a sprang pouch. Tracy surprised me by delivering that pouch quick smart. You can see it pictured above.

I am afraid that I am sadly lagging behind on my end of the deal. I am so happy to have this ribbon underway on the loom now.

I am using the same snake pattern that I used for a neck ribbon I wove for myself some time ago. I hang a pendant on it and use it as a necklace. This is a pattern that I adapted to fit the number of threads I am using from a pattern woven by my Guarani weaving teacher. When I showed this to some online friends, one of them pointed out the little red “rubies” that appear in the bends of the snake when you look at the other face. I hadn’t noticed that before.

So there have been a handful of narrow projects on my loom while I have been contemplating my next big project. This one will be wide. I will be on the road again before I can even hope to get this next one started. Besides, I think I need to buy more thread for it and I’ll bring that back with me when I return.

I have played around with a handful of what, for me at least, are wide projects in the past….

This was the first time I tried 60/2 silk as warp.

Another wide-ish one in 30/2 cotton. I’d like to stress that these are only ”wide” in terms of what I normally weave on my backstrap loom. They are not at all wide compared to the pieces that are routinely woven on backstrap looms in S.E Asia! Take a look at these images of backstrap weavers from Laos and Vietnam with their tremendously wide warps (used with kind permission from the folks at Above the Fray Traditional Hilltribe Art.)

I felt I needed to stand to get my friend Janet’s wide wool warp started unlike the gentleman in Ecuador who skillfully works at his wide and very heavy wool warp while seated…

A Peruvian weaver, below, stands and “dances” with her loom as she manages her 39-inch light cotton warp…

The challenges of going wide…firstly, there’s the equipment. Long beams, shed rods, cross sticks, coil rods and heddle rods are no problem. There no end of wooden broomsticks and such things down the street in the market. What I am lacking are swords of the right length. I rummaged around and pulled out my biggest ones…

Only one is the length that I feel I need. I could have some made for when I return (make them myself?…I am useless at that sort of thing!) But then I started thinking about the double-width cloth that many floor loom weavers make when their looms are not wide enough to accommodate the width that they want to weave. They weave half the width in two layers which then unfold to make one wide piece.

Time to experiment.

I have no idea if the following small experiments will really give me any clue as to how easy this will be to handle with many more warp ends. I guess I was more curious at this point to experiment with sett and how that affects the fold in the cloth.

What I liked while making these experiments was the ability to cut off a sample and clamp off my warp. That way I could wash and press the sample, take notes, plan changes and then continue using the same warp for the next one. The width of the warp you see on the loom below is half the width of the woven cloth.

I suspect that these wooden clamps that I inherited from a guild were home made. I have searched on Google for similar things but haven’t turned up anything yet. I have two of them and they work well at holding the threads while I cut off a woven sample. I clamp one to the unwoven warp while it is under tension and then cut off the woven cloth. I lash the clamp to a dowel when I want to start weaving again.

You can see the first two samples above. I calculated the width I should produce with this number of ends of 60/2 silk based on pieces I have woven in the past. I wove the first small piece at a closer sett. It’s not the width that would normally be produced in my hands and I had to work to stop the cloth from widening. That resulted in uneven selvedges. The density also made the sheds that much harder to clear. However, of the three samples I wove, this one was the only one where the fold in the cloth was not noticeable at all.

I let the second sample go wider than I normally would, which made shed management much easier. I also practiced a new pattern that I had charted in supplementary weft. The fold in the cloth was quite obvious in this one. It wasn’t noticeable when the cloth was just lying flat but it certainly was when held up to the light. The warp ends were spread further apart at the fold, enough so to create what I would consider a fairly weak spot in the cloth. Again the selvedges were not tidy because I was forcing the cloth to be a width which was not natural in my hands. The only advantage had been that the slightly more relaxed sett made opening the sheds easier.

I let the final sample sit at its natural width…yay, selvedges I like at last. The fold is only slightly noticeable when the washed and pressed cloth is held up to the light but I don’t believe that it affects the integrity of the cloth. It’s amazing how much variation there can be in width while still producing good warp-faced cloth.

Each sample had its advantages…1. invisible fold line, 2. easier loom operation, 3. a more natural rhythm for me and neat selvedges. It’s a toss-up between numbers 1 and 2. I won’t have to decided until I get home from my next trip. Most likely I will want to weave more samples. In the meantime, I can think about colors. Or…if I don’t go with double width, I’ll come home to some new long swords.

As usual, I have some pieces to show you that were woven by my weaving friends. I will limit the selection this week to four different techniques…

Ann wove this wool band using a backstrap set-up and one of my favorite patterns. I discovered this one on a pre-columbian fragment that I was shown and it is charted in my second book (you may have gathered that I have lots of favorite patterns)…

I think it is magical how the pelicans flow from light on dark to dark on light. Of course, you may not be seeing pelicans. You might see cogs and gears, as one weaver remarked. Ann wove this using a temporary picking cross, manually selecting threads for every weft shot.

Kristin’s beauty is based on an adaptation of a central Asian pattern that I charted. Those colors!!! This is stunning. This pattern allows the optional use of two sets of “pebble heddles” and I am pretty sure that that is the method she chose for her backstrap loom.

This is Nicole Stronge’s warp-faced double weave using the two basic sheds on her inkle loom. I have more projects from Nicole to show in which she has continued to create her own patterns, beautifully personalizing her bands for the intended recipients. I will save them for future posts.

Martina has created a really cool set-up for her backstrap weaving in her home. She’s using the backstrap she wove herself and is creating a band decorated with patterns in supplementary weft.

Cut into lengths, the band was made into key fobs and a book mark.

There are free tutorials for the last two techniques right here on my blog. Follow the links I posted above. I am also producing a pattern book and dvd on the double weave technique which extends and deepens the basic tutorial I have provided here.

Now it’s back to my loom and my wee silk ribbon. I also want to follow through on all my good intentions and surprise friends by weaving the bookmarks and ribbons that I have had in mind for them. Goal: get these finished before I hit the road again.

By the way, Australian friends….If you live in the Newcastle area I will be teaching two workshops there in August. There are spaces available! Contact me if you are interested via a comment on this post.

Backstrap Weaving – ”Big” Projects

I decided some time ago that I wanted to devote myself more to ”big” projects on my backstrap loom….longer and wider and with a greater number of ends.

But, as I put my latest big one aside, I felt that it would be fun to play around with some smaller ones for little while, something like a pouch for my iPod, for example.

However, after several days of searching through books and web pages, finding ideas for patterns, adapting them and charting, erasing and re-charting, I have come to the conclusion that even the projects that are small in physical terms are, in fact, ”big”….and that’s why I like them. I like putting in the time to search and sample. I could do without the do-overs that are sometimes necessary but that is all part of the process.

It’s nice to look back at the first steps towards the weaving of my most recent project…the silk paisley scarf… and then look at the finished scarf lying on my bed. I think that perhaps the first thoughts about tones of blue sitting next to crisp, clean white entered my head when I came across the image of the Roussel painting, above.

Gathering colors…three tones of blue, white and assorted colors.

Other first steps involved sampling, lots of it. I have three small abandoned paisley samples which I am now willing to throw away plus a chart that is well-worn from all the erasing and adjusting.

There’s the memory of this first warp which got put back on the warping stakes and unwound back to zero. One of my stakes had shifted on the first attempt and the tension was off.

I have a tangle of blue 60/2 silk…the one part that didn’t survive my attempt to unwind and re-warp. I tell myself I’ll sit down one day with a good movie and untangle it, but I doubt it!

And now the scarf is done…washed and pressed and showing off its lovely sheen. Until the iron started pressing and lifting the dampness from the fabric, it was refusing to look or behave like silk at all. I am really happy with it.

Now what should go next on my loom from the list of ideas I have?

I have been carrying my iPod around in a sweet sprang bag that Tracy made for me but I decided that it really needed a woven bag of its own…a bag big enough to carry the iPod as well as its charger.

I had seen some photos of pre-Columbian textile fragments online and a particular motif had caught my eye. I charted something based on that and added a border pattern with the idea of weaving it with supplementary weft on a ground of 30/2 cotton I had bought way back in 2013 from Mayan hands.

It’s the same cotton I had used for the journal covers I wove some time ago so I knew how it behaved. I had all the figures in my notebook from those projects and so I didn’t need to sample. I just needed to figure out the width I wanted and calculate the number of ends.

How do you like that bright pink tatting thread for the heddles?

I installed a coil rod because the cotton base structure would be plain weave.

Of the number of ways that I know of preventing the ”corrugated” look that my plain-weave cotton fabric sometimes gets, the coil rod is my (current) favorite. I much prefer it to another method which would involve turning the loom around and weaving an inch or so at the other end.

This cotton is not mercerized. There was a kind of tearing sound as I opened the sheds as the threads clung and scraped past each other but there were no breaks despite all the strumming I needed to do and everything stood up well.

Cindy and I bought this cotton at ANWG 2013. I bought a bag of this color labeled ”champagne” and Cindy bought the indigo. We shared the two colors.

Here’s the finished motif…

I was content to have a motif on just one face of the pouch and so I finished it off with plain weave, doubling the weft so that the rest of the fabric would have the same weight as that which included the supplemental weft.

And here’s the finished pouch…hand sewn. I was glad that I hadn’t forgotten how to put in a zip.

This project was supposed to give me a small break before launching into another ”big” one….but then I got distracted by a post in one of the online groups about the ”turned Krokbragd” that many people are weaving on their inkle looms and it reminded me that I had always wanted to weave a music-themed bookmark for a piano-playing friend of mine.

I chose to do it in warp-faced double weave using 60/2 silk so it would be fine enough to make a good bookmark. I set up my warp with four sets of string heddles, something I only do when weaving double weave if the thread is particularly fine or if there are a lot of ends.

I didn’t need to sample as I knew how the silk behaved in double weave, thanks to various woven samples and the notes in my notebook. Of course, I didn’t feel that I needed to chart the piano keys. However, I got a little cocky and tried to eyeball the length of the black keys rather than count threads and paid the price for that in the first two attempts.

Placing a marker on the 55th black thread made picking the colors for those black keys much faster. After a couple of repeats of piano keys, I got bored! Then I decided that it would be fun to weave a couple of bars of music. And now, of course, the ”project’ has turned into a ”sample”. My piano-playing friend will have to wait for his bookmark because weaving in those bars of music will make this piece much longer than any bookmark needs to be. Once my curiosity has been sparked, I need to follow through. The ”small” project has suddenly become big as the charting paper comes out.

Making a start on what I have charted so far…the key signature with the time signature soon to follow…

Once I have charted the notes and woven them, I guess I will go back to the beginning and figure out how to place all of this in a bookmark that is not ridiculously long!

Hopefully, I will be able to show the finished sample in the next post and we will see if you can recognize the melody I chose.

Backstrap Weaving – A Few Steps Back and Many Steps Forward

I don’t have a whole lot to say in this post except that I have made what feels like a whole lot of progress on my scarf with its paisley-like patterns. It has been fun planning and weaving the smaller simpler motifs along the length of the scarf after all the busy-ness at the start. I am slowly adding spots and dots to the smaller motifs building up to another splash of busy pattern in the center.

I love the stretches of plain weave between the motifs when I can get into that lovely shed-beat-weft-shed-beat-weft rhythm, leaning forward to relax the tension on the warp threads to lift the heddles for one shed and sitting back and strumming for the other.

I am using five strands of 120/2 silk for the supplementary weft in three different colors. It is interesting to see how different the motifs can look depending on how the light hits them and which color happens to dominate. I change the mix for each motif. I have deep reds, reddish-purples, blue-ish purples, purples, blues and green-ish blues, some of which you can see below (beautiful Redfish Dyeworks thread given to me by my friend Ginny)…

This warp started off as a circular one but, once I started weaving, I noticed a significant difference in tension from one side to the other which I couldn’t explain. And then I saw the cause…..urgh! The shelf to which one of my warping stakes was clamped had slid out of its bracket. I don’t usually wind circular warps and so I had needed to alter my normal set-up. This sliding must have been happening gradually as I wound the warp and I hadn’t noticed. I really didn’t feel like battling this tension difference for the entire project. That would not be fun. There would be no rhythm and a lot of fiddling and adjusting. And so I had to take some steps back before I could move forward once again.

I had wound the warp in lots of small sections and so I carefully placed a section back around the warping stakes, untied the knot and wound the thread back into a ball before moving on to the next section. I had my heart in my mouth the whole time but I only had to ditch one section of blue that got hopelessly tangled.

Then I set my clamps a different way to more reliable surfaces and wound an end-to-end warp. That meant that I had to roll up much of the warp around paper so that it could fit in my weaving space but I have done that before and it works just fine.

I am at the half-way point repeating the large motif in the middle….

I am enjoying using the unusual shuttle that I bought at the Braids conference, unusual in that it had been soaked in an indigo dye bath. It carries the supplementary weft and is a nice size for this project.

It’s great to see this project finally moving along after starting out many weeks ago with just my paper cut-out paisley shape, blank charting paper and a confusing array of paisley-pattern ideas from online searches…

I have had other largely off-loom activities going on as well. Here’s the tease picture again for the new pattern book on which I have also been spending a lot of time…

Most of the steps I have been taking while preparing this have been forward. I have around 75 patterns so far. Occasionally there is a blip where I have to take a step back to fix a chart and weave one of the designs again. Doing that is often a nice break from the 60/2 silk project. Suddenly #10 thread feels so heavy and it’s so easy to see! If all goes well and there aren’t any major steps backward, I plan to have this new book out this month.

The Cuff and Bracelet Weave-along officially ended yesterday but I am sure that we will continue to see more contributions. I, for one, have yet to finish the cuff I planned with my handspun wool (in fact, I am still plying!). Maja showed us the lovely bracelet she made with her own handspun alpaca fiber. She threaded beads on the weft and added them to the edges along the way…

Now that Marilyn has finished weaving her own backstrap….

…she has joined us in the weave-along and has been weaving a band in plain weave for a cuff and playing with color…

Katherine is always full of cool ideas and placed three narrow bands together to make this one wider bracelet…

Rosemary wove with embroidery floss for her latest bracelets and told us how much she loved using it. She mentioned how nice and tightly it packs, how smoothly sheds open and how easy it is to see. I have never used it as warp myself.And so, it’s back to the silk weaving, the book lay-out and plying for me. It so nice to be doing rather than just planning and hopefully there won’t be too many backward steps along the way to finishing all three projects.

Backstrap Weaving – A New Year and New Ideas

A New Year and New Ideas…. but let’s look at the end of the old one first. There were projects to finish before diving into the new ones and a couple that got carried over into the new year.

There were the little journals that needed to be covered with my silk fabric and lined with the pretty paper that John had given me over a year ago.

It was fantastic seeing this project finally come to its end. It must be almost two years since I was first given the gorgeous collection of little naturally-dyed silk skeins that I used to weave these pieces of fabric. Now I just have to make myself use the little books. I don’t want them sitting on the shelf as ornaments.

Here’s what the insides of the covers look like with the decorative paper that I was given. I really am very pleased with the way the books turned out.

The next project that needed finishing was Marilyn’s tool bag. I had been wondering what to do with the finished fabric and had only come up with the idea of a tool bag. Marilyn read my last blog post and assured me in her comment that she would be more than happy to have one.

It has been ages since I sewed in a zipper. I sew by hand and I was not looking forward to the trial-and-error process that is usually a part of my efforts to sew anything. Luckily, I got the zip positioned correctly first go. And then I sewed a patterned tubular band, a nawi awapa, to the edges and flap of the bag. I managed to find colors that would match the bag and went ahead with the edging even though I would rather have used thread that was a wee bit heavier.

So, there’s Marilyn’s bag holding a nice assortment of tools. I am sure that she will have plenty of tools with which to fill her new pouch.

The little balls of thread that you see next to bag are the ones that I plan to use in the Weave-Along (WAL) that we are running in the Ravelry Backstrap Weaving Group starting this Saturday January 6th. It is a ”Cuff and Bracelet” weave-along which people can join at any time. I expect it will run until the end of the month. You can never tell just how many people will participate and how long there will be interest.

Some people have already started making the cuffs from bands they wove some time ago. It’s just a matter of getting the right findings…clasps and jump rings, ribbon crimps etc or buttons, snaps and braids…deciding on a structure (plain weave is also very much encouraged!) winding a short warp, dressing it and weaving.

Hopefully, many bands will be made giving participants a chance to really get comfortable with the warping and heddle-making process. I hope that my Basic Warping for Backstrap Looms video, which wasn’t around for the last WAL, will be useful for new participants.

We had some amazing plain weave contributions to the last Weave-Along we ran back in 2015 (gasp!…really? Was it that long ago?) where we wove bands that were made into key fobs.

Here are Julia T’s fruit-inspired patterns in plain weave. We had all kinds of structures represented in that Weave-Along but I particularly enjoyed the creativity that went into layout of the plain weave ones.

Any kind of loom can be used in the WAL. Julie is using a Gilmore MiniWave loom. Others will use backstrap looms and I am sure we will have a few people using inkle looms. Who knows who might drop by and what equipment they will use?

There have already been some interesting ideas thrown out there, such as this one from Katherine: starting and ending a band as a tube and then inserting the tubes into barrel clasps to connect the two ends. It would be better suited to a bracelet rather than a cuff and I can’t wait to try it!

Here’s a band with pick-up patterning that Julie made a short time ago and has turned into a cuff.

I love Claire’s braided loop and the earthy look of this cuff…

Wendy has shown us the yarn that she plans to use. She is interested in further exploring the use of variegated thread. Those jewel colors will look fabulous with the black in pebble weave. She also found ribbon crimps that are just the right size for an Andean Pebble Weave band that she recently wove.

As for me, I plan to use the thread pictured next to Marilyn’s bag to start with. There I have some Valdani cotton (on the left) and some DMC #12 on the right. I have fond memories of buying that Valdani cotton while at the Seattle Folk Life Festival with Marilyn a couple of years ago and I was out and about with Ruth and Lise when I got the DMC at Lacis in the Bay area.

Julie continues her exploration of complementary-warp pick-up on her MiniWave loom and has just woven one of my favorite patterns from my second book, the one I like to call the Rolling River…

One of my favorite parts of making jewelry from my woven bands is this…

I found these plastic containers at my local supermarket. I am such a sucker for containers with small compartments into which I can put all my bits and pieces all neat and tidy! Unfortunately the tools that I use to open the jump rings don’t fit. I love poking around in the one that holds all the buttons and pendants.

As for my large silk project….that one has spilled over into the new year and hasn’t moved very far since. I did wind most of the silk from the skeins into balls. I love that I am still using some of the silk I bought in London back in 2012 along with the silk I bought this year from Redfish. Ball-winding was a nice mindless activity to do while enjoying my faster internet and listening to podcasts. Getting this faster and more stable internet has been kind of life-changing!

The original plan was to weave a longer and wider 60/2 silk version of this piece….

This short piece became one of the journal covers. I wanted to weave a scarf using this same idea but with the main color theme being blue rather than purple. I had the leaf chart already drawn up and was good to go. I had a double weave sample in 60/2 silk from which to take my measurements. It was just a matter of figuring out how to arrange the colors and then going ahead and winding the warp.

However, a new year rolled over and I suddenly felt the need to create something new.

I do consider my leaf motif to be one of my ”signature” patterns but I have woven it a good number of times already. There’s no real challenge there. Putting together a nice combination of colors would have been the real challenge but I wanted something more.

So, I won’t be winding this warp until I have come up with the new motif.

I love the haphazardly floating leaves and wanted to weave something that had that same sort of feel.

Feathers? No…too much like leaves. Sea shells? Pretty shapes but not at all ”floaty”.

And then I remembered a brief discussion in one of the online groups recently about weaving paisley motifs.

Paisley motifs have always seemed to me to have lots of movement…twisting and turning their way across the cloth. I had played around with that idea some years ago. I had wanted to weave paisley shapes using supplementary weft but had found it quite difficult to come up with a pattern in which the weft-floats weren’t too long.

You can see one of my solutions in the red band above… to break up the long weft-floats into smaller ones in some sort of consistent manner. I didn’t make a paisley shape but I did weave something approaching that. I wasn’t one hundred per cent happy with the result. I then apparently got distracted and moved on to something else!

The good news is that I plan to weave the motifs in this latest silk project in double weave, not with supplementary weft, and so I do not need to consider either warp or weft-float length. Ah, the freedom! So, I imagine I will be armed with pencil and eraser for some time figuring out how to chart a paisley motif. And it seems that just one paisley motif is not enough! I’ll need various sizes and alignments. My goodness, some of the examples that I have seen online are busy! Not that I am contemplating anything like this for this current project, but the next picture will show you what I mean by ”busy”.

And now for the charting….

Step One: Figure out how large I want my motif to be and then, using my silk width sample, figure out how many warp ends I will need for the motif.

My notes on this double weave 60/2 silk lanyard helped me plan the number of warp ends I would need for my paisley motif.

Step Two: Create a chart with the right number of cells.

Step Three: Draw the outline of the shape, cut it out and transfer the shape to the chart .

That is where I am at so far. You can see my cut-out shape below. The large chart I made is not in the picture but you can see the chart of staggered oval cells that I use for these kinds of motifs. You can download this kind of charting paper from my blog on this page.

I think it will be fun figuring out how I want to fill the shape. There are so many options that I have seen in the paisley images online. And then I will need to decide just how open or busy I want to overall pattern to be. Then, of course, I will need to weave a sample to check proportions. So, it might be some time before all that lovely silk makes it onto my backstrap loom bars. That will give me more time to think about the color arrangement, my ideas for which change from day to day!

By the way, I go through all the steps I typically follow to create a double weave motif in a tutorial I wrote some time ago.

Between all that action, I shall continue to put together my new complementary-warp pattern book. The charts are nicely taking shape and I am slowly photographing the samples. There’ll be some filming going on too plus I’ll be weaving bands for the Cuffs and Bracelets Weave-Along and soaking up all the inspiration there. I hope you will join us!

Backstrap Weaving – Starting Small

I am back in Bolivia and as much as I wish I could throw all the lovely silk I bought at the ANWG conference in Canada earlier this year onto my backstrap loom and weave something large and lovely, I realize that I am simply not in the best state to do so. Why?… Jet lag. I’ll say it again….there is something about flying from west to east through all those time zones that makes the jet lag particularly brutal. I have been at home six days now and still struggle to stay awake long enough to be able to finish a meal!

So, I decided it would be wise to start with something small. Better still, I decided to finish off some projects rather than start something new.

I have been thinking about the lovely cloth that my weaving teacher and friends in the central Bolivian highlands make ever since I wrote my last blog post. In that post I told you all about the unsold pieces that Dorinda had taken with her to the USA after having attended the Tinkuy in Cusco. What a response! Many pieces were sold. Dorinda was thrilled and can’t wait to get back to Bolivia to tell the ladies. THANK YOU SO MUCH everyone who bought the long fajas and yoga mat straps. Julia showed all of us in the Ravelry group the three lovely pieces she bought…

Those are all natural dye colors. I hope that everyone who bought pieces will enjoy hanging them on their walls or maybe cutting them up to make bags or pouches. Don’t feel bad about cutting them up. That is exactly what the weavers themselves in the co-op do with these pieces. I know that Julia is thinking about using one of her pieces to sew a case for a charka that she is having built. Julia sews beautifully and constructs gorgeous bags. I have shown the bags and other items that she has made with her backstrap woven cloth on this blog many times and I can’t wait to see what she constructs with this cloth.

My own projects with this cloth tend to be a lot more basic. My sewing skills are very limited. I like to make small pouches similar to the ch’uspas that the ladies use to carry their coca leaves.

This is one of the bands that I had bought from Dorinda to use when I teach tubular bands and sewn embellishments to my weaving friends. I cut it into pieces so that each of my friends could have a piece with which to practice and perhaps later turn into something useful, like a pouch. While holding the beautiful cloth in my hands and breathing in that special aroma of the highlands it is hard to imagine the amount of work that went into its creation.

(The following series of pictures of Maxima and my Bolivian weaving friends are from the PAZA Bolivia blog and were taken by Dorinda Dutcher who works with the ladies.)

From shearing the sheep or purchasing skins and then washing them in the river…

…to preparing the clean fiber and spinning it…

…to gathering plants for dyeing and watching the pots as the skeins of singles take up the rich colors of the countryside… (if you are curious about the intense yellow color in this picture, read the PAZA Bolivia blog post on the ”magical dye pot”)

…to plying and then warping the looms, dressing the warp and eventually weaving…

For a long long time I have been demonstrating decorative stitching on a piece that I had cut from the long band pictured way above. I have created the stitches and then cut them out, created them again and cut them out again as I demonstrated the method over and over to my weaving friends. I decided that it was time to ”retire” this particular piece of cloth, that is, make it into something more than a demonstration piece and allow it to sit in peace on the table as a sample when I am not using it. So, I sewed it into a pouch and decorated it with stitches and bands that are typically used by weavers in Bolivia.

I like using Cascade 220 yarn and KnitPicks Palette as they have colors that very closely resemble the natural dye colors of the Bolivian highlands.

Here’s the finished pouch. I used ”coil stitches” along the bottom, wove and sewed a tubular band along the sides, decorated the top edges with cross-knit looping and wove a pebble weave band for the strap. It is just the right size for carrying my small purse when I travel.

Here’s a closer look at the tubular band with its ñawi pattern and the cross-knit looping. I wove the tubular band and the strap with KnitPicks Palette yarn. It is much finer than the Cascade yarn and the handspun that was used for the pouch itself and makes a a very neat tubular edging. See how perfectly the colors match? I used the Cascade yarn for the coil stitches and the cross knit looping .

And here’s a closer look at the coil stitches. I love those chunky coils!

With that project under my belt, I turned to something else that I could finish off. I really won’t trust myself to the critical task of warping with my 60/2 silk until I feel that my feet are completely back on the ground again…and they are not quite there yet!

However, I did find something silky to get into. It must be a couple of years ago now that I was offered a whole bunch of tiny naturally dyed skeins of silk from a guild member’s estate by friends in Grass Valley. When you are a backstrap weaver, amounts like these are not too small!

What fun I had rolling the skeins into balls while thinking of ways to combine the colors. There was cochineal, logwood, madder, indigo….

I didn’t want to risk wasting any of it and so I chose some colors and first wove a small sample as a width gauge. That sample has since become a wrist cuff. After that, I was free to plan some bigger things combining the reds and berry colors, then the purples and golds, the browns and tans and finally the greens and sandy colors.

First came ”leaves among the berries”using gold-color supplementary weft…

…followed by ”leaves on the snow” in double weave…

I designed a creeper pattern with leaves for the green piece…

…and finished with my own original pebble weave leaf pattern on the browns…

And, the pieces have sat since then waiting to become something.

I had the idea to use them to cover notebooks or journals but what were the chances of finding books of exactly the right dimensions to fit all four pieces?

Well, as luck would have it, I know a gentleman who makes books and who has a whole studio devoted to it in his home. On my first visit to his studio, I hadn’t taken the pieces of fabric but was thrilled when he offered me off-cuts of beautiful pieces of decorated paper that I could use inside the covers of the books. I had to try and imagine which bits of paper would best suit my woven pieces.

A year later, I visited him again and remembered to bring the fabric. He agreed to cut some books specially for my project. By scratching around in the stores here in Bolivia, I had found two suitable books and the project was at a standstill until could find two more. Each of the four pieces of cloth is a different width as I had just thrown together random amounts of the various colors until I liked what I saw.

So, there are my two beautiful custom-made notebooks for my project! We chose paper with a grid of squares so that I could use the books for charting. I intend to fill them!

Then came the time to match the paper with the weavings, something which I hadn’t yet bothered to do. Without all four books ready to go, I had had no interest in the project. I am really pleased with the way the paper and cloth look together. I think I just got lucky and managed to choose well.

Then it was time to get out the glue and construct. I use contact cement. It works well with the fabric and does not penetrate and stain it. It is tricky stuff however, as once those two glued surfaces make contact there is very very little wiggle room for adjustment.

I turn the edge of the fabric to the inside of the cover and glue it in place. It looks pretty rough at this point. Once it is holding there nicely, I apply glue bit by bit to the front cover, the spine, the back cover, and then finally turn the edge to the inside of the back cover. I don’t let the glue completely dry. While it is still wet, and there is still room to maneuver, I wrap the cloth all the way round the book and then open and close the covers to make sure that I have stretched the fabric just the right amount. Then I peel it back, wait for the glue to dry and make the final contact…that’s the point of no return!

Then I cut the paper to fit the inside cover and glue it into place on top of the raw edge of the cloth…

Two down, two to go…

What’s next before I launch into the big project?

I am trying to think of what best to do with the piece of cloth I wove for Marilyn. You might remember this piece in pink and purple I called ”sunrise, sunset” which I wove using Marilyn’s 10/2 perle cotton.

All I am seeing right now is a tool bag but I don’t have the right colors of yarn to decorate it to my liking. Perhaps I should just give the fabric to Marilyn and see what she would like to do with it. Or maybe tomorrow I will wake up with a whole new idea. I’ll let it rest for now.

Oh, and the other thing I have been doing since I got home is charting…lots and lots of charting… for my next book of complementary-warp/pebble weave patterns. I am drawing out the spotted charts and then my friend Sharon will draw up the block charts for me. So, yes, I have been pretty busy and quite productive since I got back.

And, I upgraded my internet. It pays to keep checking with the providers every now and then (which I have neglected to do) as prices drop and I find that I can now afford the faster and more reliable service. No more having the signal cut off every 40 seconds which means I can even use Skype now…yippee! And I have an unlimited Megabyte allowance.

I celebrated by listening to the WeaveZine podcasts, Weavecast, that I have never been able to listen to before. Seeing as the second volume of Rodrick Owens’ book on Peruvian sling braids has just come out, I decided to listen to his podcast first. These podcasts are wonderful things that Syne Mitchell has created for us along with all the marvelous WeaveZine articles that she published.

Another thing I have been able to enjoy with my new internet service, without stops and splutters and various other interruptions, is a new free video on Sprang Braiding that expert Carol James has made available on Taproot Video. In this free video she teaches the basic technique using a method that does not require any kind of loom or frame. It’s awesome!

My friend Tracy, who took a sprang class with Carol earlier this year, made this cool pouch for me. The technique is very versatile. The vest that Carol is wearing above was made with sprang braiding and you should see the gloves, hats and other items she shows in the video…

Julie has been showing pictures of bands she has been making using her MiniWave loom. She is well and truly hooked on the complementary-warp pick-up technique and, after studying the ”picking cross” method in my latest book and weaving some of the patterns there, she is now gobbling up the larger and more complex projects in my second book….This particular pattern is very dear to me. It was the pattern on the very first piece of weaving I bought on my first trip to Peru. It was a mere scrap I found in a street market and all I felt I could afford at the time and I bought it before I had found my first weaving teachers. I puzzled over the pattern for quite some time trying to replicate it before I realized that weavers quite often combine more than one kind of arrangement of floats in a single piece. Julie’s piece is beautiful.

Now she is weaving another great favorite of mine that I like to call the ”Rolling River”. I love this picture with Julie’s two swords nicely holding the picking cross and her pretty pick-up stick, all made by Terri at Magical Moons.

I am hoping to get the big silk project going soon and I think I will be able to show it to you in the next blog post.

I’ll be announcing the ”Cuffs and Bracelets” Weave-along on Ravelry soon. I am hoping to get it started in the first week of January once all the festivities are well and truly over. The idea is to weave several short and narrow projects in plain weave or pick-up that can be made into bracelets by applying ribbon clamps and other jewelry findings. I’ll write more about that in the next blog post.

Christmas will be happening in the meantime. I hope you all have a happy one.