Category: spinning

Backstrap Weaving – Seasons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the finished cloth…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Backstrap Weaving – Bye-bye Traddy

And so continues the journey of my Ashford Traditional spinning wheel….and I never once took a photo of it 🙁 I got it in the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas) back in the 90s and had it in my home in southern Chile. I wished I’d asked how it had made its way to the Falklands in the first place…directly from the manufacturer in New Zealand or perhaps via the UK or perhaps by some other more exotic and convoluted route?

Whie living in Chile and before I got the wheel, I had brought some alpaca back from my first trip to Peru to spin with a drop spindle that I’d also bought there. My inexperience meant that I made a mess of it and so, discouraged, I put spinning aside for a while!

Later, I turned to sheep. There were sheep galore down there in Patagonia and I was given a fleece. So, I got experience washing and carding it and my first project was knitting! I can hardy believe it as I can barely knit. But I designed a pattern, based on the shape of a cotton vest that I owned, and fumbled my way through knitting the front of a vest using wool that I had spun on the spindle.

By this time, I’d acquired the Traddy and I wove the back panel using my first wheel-spun yarn which I dyed brown in a balanced plain weave on my Navajo-style vertical loom…without a reed. I probably didn’t even know that reeds existed back then (you can just get a glimpse of the brown back on the far right in the photo above). Spinning yarn that worked well for this knitting and weaving was a complete fluke. I really had very little idea about what I was doing. The vest is edged with a triple cross-knit-looping stitch that I’d learned both from my sling-braiding teacher in Peru and one of my weaving teachers in Bolivia. And I also used a band I’d woven as an edging.

I used left-over scraps of that wheel-spun wool along with some of the wool I used for my Navajo-style weaving in natural dye experiments in Chile. They were wrapped around rolls of paper and coiled into what you see here which I used as the lid for a basket.

And that was all the action the poor Traddy got to see in my hands. I brought it up to Bolivia with me and it gathered dust in a corner for a while before I eventually dismantled it (my cat was finding it way too interesting) and it sat in the closet while I continued to spin on drop spindles. Now it’s gone to the Brazilian owners of my local yarn store. Maybe it will make a trip to Brazil one day.

Bye-bye Traddy. Enjoy your world travels. The rest of this post on spinning includes some sections that I’ve posted before and so you may find some parts familiar.

I am a “cheap spindler” in much the same way as I am a cheap drunk…it doesn’t take much to make me happy! Don’t waste the good wine on me. I do not have a refined palate. So, it is little wonder that I am content to use my humble Cusco drop spindle when I get the urge to spin. I just don’t have a refined palate for spinning tools.

The Cusco spindle was the second one I ever got, the first being from San Pedro de Atacama in northern Chile. The Cusco one that I got in 1996, being more robust, became my constant travel companion. It was practical. Although I have collected many more spindles on my weaving safaris since then, this Cusco one is the one I always use while the others hang on the wall behind the sofa as souvenirs of places I have been and people I have met.

The spindle I got in Cusco in 1996.
Some of the whorls from the spindles on the wall fell down behind the sofa only to be retrieved later when a friend helped me move it. Here are three that I found there among the cat toys. It’s so interesting seeing the various styles of whorl.

The very first spinning that I did for weaving on my backstrap loom was with some extremely dry, brittle, and filthy llama fiber that I had bought from a farmer while wandering about the back roads of Uyuni in the Bolivian highlands. I cleaned and prepared it. The dust and dirt would have me wheezing and my skin would crawl and eyes run every time I opened the bags to get more. It made for good spinning training. I gave the fiber a tremendous amount of twist because at that time I believed that this was the only way hand-spun yarn could possibly stand up to the abrasion of warp-faced weaving. I have since learned that this is not so. That kind of yarn produces durable, hard wearing cloth and in a tight warp-faced weave can make a garment highly water-resistant. Of course, that isn’t always the kind of cloth I want.

The natural colors of the llama I spun. I was always amazed at how nice it looked when woven. Warp-faced structures are very forgiving in that way.
When I was given a large bag of spearmint leaves by a friend, I decided to use it it to dye some of the llama yarn. One batch gave me a nice neutral taupe color. The second lot my friend gave me produced green. I also had some cochineal for red.
I was able to buy a lovely fine commercial yarn in Chile that was a blend of alpaca and wool and came in earthy colors. I would use my drop spindle to add extra twist as, again, I’d thought that yarn for warp-faced weaving simply must have that tightly spun characteristic. The green in this band I wove with this yarn is actually cotton.
The first time I was given prepared alpaca to spin by my friend Janet, I decided that I simply couldn’t put all that heavy amount of twist into that beautiful fiber. With a bit of extra care in the way I handled it on my backstrap loom, it made lovely warp. The yarn was quite balanced and didn’t kink up on itself.
You can see that this alpaca yarn that I spun lies flat and relaxed when not under tension.
You can see how my teacher Maxima’s handspun wool yarn behaves when not under tension. All the energy from the twist causes the warp lying on the ground to tightly spiral. The yarn will produce hard-wearing cloth.

After that experience with the alpaca, I never added extra twist to industrially-spun yarn again. Of course I had to choose yarn that had certain characteristics. I used the soft Knit Picks Palette straight out of the cake for this next piece. It was actually just a stash-busting exercise to use up odds and ends and I wasn’t convinced that it would work for warp-faced weaving in string heddles. It did with a little extra care. I wove this piece with four-selvedges and only had to be very careful when needle-weaving the end so as not to split the loose ply with the needle.

I really enjoy reading the online group forums about spinners and their spindles. The participants’ love and enthusiasm for their tools is wonderful….I totally get it but I just don’t share it. Some of the spindles they show are beautiful pieces of craftsmanship and I love seeing them. But when it comes down to it, I just want to get the job done. If you like your tools to be uniquely hand-carved pieces of art, take a look at Allen Berry’s work on Instagram (allenrberry). All his fiber tools are amazing.

It seems that when it comes to spinning I am totally product oriented which is kind of strange as it is quite the opposite when I weave.  I just want to get this stuff done so I can go weave with it. In weaving I am all about enjoying the process. I probably would not have been willing to devote any great amount of time to spinning if not for the pandemic. The combination of needing to keep my hands busy during Zoom sessions as well as a dwindling stash had me happily spinning up all the wool I could find in my closet.

Weaving a small tubular band as a test for my handspun wool yarn to see if a) it would be suitable for my warp-faced weaving and b) if there was enough contrast between the three colors for use in a three-color pebble project.

It was strange that after all these years this would be my first time weaving on my backstrap loom with my own drop-spindle-spun sheep wool. Was I nervous about it? Yes!

The warp for a three-color pebble project with my handspun “pandemic” wool in purple, pale yellow and a rust.

And then I took on a new adventure…spinning cotton. As with my favored Cusco spindle for wool, I have taken the takli that Elizabeth gave me in Australia as my one and only tool for cotton. It is all I feel the need for right now. It makes for quiet, comfortable, and fuss-free Zoom spinning.

My first lot of Sea Island cotton and the gifted takli spindle. I was pleased with this first attempt but hadn’t known at the time that Sea Island cotton has a longer staple length than other varieties and is therefore easier to spin.

My collection of spindles that I have gathered in my travels includes a few that are used for cotton. Here are two from Guatemala and one that I bought from my Guaraní teacher here in Santa Cruz. The whorl on that one is a piece cut from the sole of a sandal.

Two spindles from Guatemala flank the Guaraní one.

I couldn’t believe my luck when one of the local museums here offered a workshop given by two Guaraní ladies on spinning cotton. We didn’t get to keep the spindles but the whorls on the ones we used were also made from pieces of rubber sole.

Workshop spindle.
I love the way we are all so focused on our teacher’s demonstration. As it turned out, she is left-handed and we were all righties. She got us all started one by one turning the spindle in one direction and we then proceeded to unspin what she had started for us!

I came up with some unconventional ways of my own for handling the spinning and processing, like using this wooden mortar as the support for the takli. I like that I can grip its neck between my knees while I’m seated to spin. It works really well and the sound of the metal spindle tip against the wood is quieter than when I used to use a ceramic dish.

Moving on here to Upland cotton.

And I found these mesh pencil cups useful as a way to hold my singles under tension when they were being boiled to set the twist.

It was fun seeing how the colored cottons deepened in tone when they were boiled.

The color called Mahogany in the center after being boiled. The pre-boil color is below to the right.

And of course, there is the horizontally-held spindle for cotton spinning that is used by my teachers in coastal Ecuador.

The cotton is draped on a wooden stand called the “rueca” for spinning. It has a notch cut into its top which grabs the cotton and allows the spinner to draw out the fibers under tension. A small basket is woven from plantain fiber underneath on which the spindle sits when not in use. This is a miniature version of the rueca which I made with my teachers’ help so that I could take an example back with me to Bolivia. I need to place something in the little basket to weigh it down because it is so small and light. The typical spindle can be seen at right with its wooden whorl. More often now you will see people using yo-yo halves and metal wheels as whorls.

Here are some tiny whorls from coastal Ecuador that the family had found while ploughing their fields. There were close to forty of them sitting in a bowl on a shelf, just like that.

My very first experience with spinning cotton had been in coastal Ecuador where I got to work almost from scratch, de-seeding, teasing apart, and fluffing up the cotton. It was difficult spinning it on the horizontally-held spindles compared to what I do now with the takli. Unfortunately, I didn’t spend much time on it while there, being much more interested in the weaving part of the process. My teachers already had plenty of spun singles that they doubled for warp so that I could learn how they weave their double-pocket saddle bags and hammocks. We would pass time in the evenings on cotton preparation.

My first attempts with the horizontally-held spindle in Ecuador with my teacher Trini and her mother Luz (rip).

I put in a little practice when I got back home but the loom soon called me away…

My cat got to the point eventually where she paid no attention to my fiber-y pursuits.

I may have never gone back to cotton if not for the pandemic. The loom was always pulling me one way yet my stash of gifted sliver in the closet was growing. Thank you to all those, especially Betty, who were so kind with their gifts when I was visiting in the States.

I have woven with my singles thread. It was an even freakier experience than the first time weaving with my handspun llama yarn all those years ago.I was surprised to see how well it tolerated the string heddles and the close sett on my backstrap loom.

I love the look of all these handspun cotton singles lined up on my backstrap loom.

I’ve used it in plain weave for ikat pieces as well as for pieces decorated with pick-up patterns that I’ve used in small purse and wallet projects.

Wallet project with pick-up patterning in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave.

Right now I’m spinning some more brown sliver that I just uncovered in the closet. I’ve yet to use the brown in a project.

Ikat projects in my handspun cotton singles. The lower one uses some of the natural green cotton in both its boiled and not-boiled versions. Most of what you see there is the not-boiled green.

No doubt when I return to Australia I’ll have lots of access to sheep fleeces and will wonder about my Traddy and how it’s being used on this side of the world. I won’t be buying another wheel though, and will slowly work my way through, as is my habit, with my drop spindle. I won’t be displaying my other spindles on the wall either and that might lead me to picking up one of the others for a spin and giving the Cusco one a rest.

See you all next time…

Backstrap Weaving – One Step at a Time

Stage One of the eventual move back to Australia is complete. I got back last week and have been struggling with the usual jet lag ever since. There are so many time zones to cross between Australia and Bolivia. Going forward in time on the way over there is really not that bad. It’s the return journey when you gain back the time you lost that really knocks me about.

I took a whole bunch of my weaving books over to Australia as this first part of my move. I can’t sell them here and don’t know anyone who would be interested in them. I know that once I am resettled in Australia I will be so grateful for the effort I made to carry them all that way. I also did some business and laid the ground work for the eventual move but I still don’t see it happening until well into 2024.

I spent most of the time with my brother and sister-in-law on the mid north coast of NSW. It was novel being there in the summer, something that I hadn’t done since 2014. There was a lot of pool and beach time, barbecues and picnics. I brought back a tan and a stronger Australian accent according to an English-speaking friend of mine here.

While breakfasting by the pool, I did a repair job on this bag that I wove for my sister-in-law back in 2006. It’s been around the world with her and is still in pretty good shape.

While I was over there, the latest issue of Tiny Studio Creative Life digital magazine was published with my article on ikat. The theme of the issue is Timey Wimey (it sounded odd to me at first but then I discovered that this is a quote from Doctor Who). The invitation was to consider topics on how tools and techniques have evolved over time, or perhaps something about putting a new spin on ancient practices. I described my various experiments with the ancient technique of ikat on my backstrap loom and the way I have given it my own unique twist in some of my more recent projects. Suzy always does such a nice job of laying out the text and images. I give her a lot of images to work with which I am sure makes it very challenging.

I took my new cotton spinning tool bag and enjoyed a lot of laid back family time spinning my stash of upland cotton and catching up.We hadn’t seen each other since September 2019.

Spinning kept me sane while on the road…I had a 22-hour layover in Los Angeles on the way home and was grateful for something to do while sitting in the airport. The ball of thread grew and grew!

My brother’s cars were in the workshop and so we had outings on the motorcycle and sidecar. That’s a unique way to see the countryside…watch out for crossing koalas.

I got to see at last some things that I’d had sent to my brother’s place in Australia for safe-keeping until I could come and claim them.

A book sent to me by Yingyu Hung in Taiwan on the style of backstrap loom used by one of the ethnic groups in her country. On the left is material used by some groups in Indonesia to wrap their ikat warps. I was curious about it and Sue Richardson kindly organized to have that sent to me so that I could try it.

My spinning tool bag doubled as a handbag when I was out and about. It went exploring with me when I was with my weaving friend Emerald in Sydney at the tail end of the visit.

Weaving with Emerald in Sydney many years ago. We met via his blog and have woven together on almost every one of my visits to Australia since then.

She lives just a stone’s throw away from the harbor and we walked our legs off one day touring the harbor and surrounds. It’s weird feeling like a tourist in the city in which you grew up. So much has changed!

Some things never change, though….the Sydney Opera House and the majestic Moreton Bay Figs atop Observatory Hill.

Airport-sitting time also leads to lots of screen scrolling. I watched a video of weavers from the Apurimac region of Peru and was astonished to see sash weavers using reeds on backstrap looms. I have never seen reeds in use like this here before and I hope that I can track down more information about that…..why have they chosen to use them, who makes them and what are they made from? Does their use pre-date the Conquest? Here is a screen shot that I took from the video which was posted to the Cconchaccota Progreso Grau Apurimac Facebook page.

I spent a week doing goodness-knows-what when I returned between bouts of nodding off due to the jet lag. Finally I was able to get my head together and plan a new project for Stage Two of the repatriation which is happening, believe it or not, next Monday. Aargh, I think I may be getting too old for this kind of thing. I’ll be back on flights to Sydney…on standby this time…trying to squeeze in just one more trip before high season prices kick in.

I decided to make a case for my passport…actually passports, in plural, because my residency sticker is in an old one and has to be carried on every trip…alongside vaccine and yellow fever certificates and ESTA document. I wanted a decent pouch to put all those bits and pieces in and hey, I am always happy for an excuse to weave.

I decided to use the mill-spun wool singles that I had bought a few years ago on a farm in California. The farmer had allowed my weaving friends and me to gather in his barn for a weekend of backstrap weaving and I was grateful.

Fond memories of gathering with my Petaluma friends in the farm co-op barn.

I really had no idea of what I would do with wool singles but it was nice to know that the wool had come from this farmer’s very own sheep. It’s a pretty blend of black and white.

I had taken the plunge and woven with it as singles some time ago when I created a slip case for my phone and was surprised at how well it performed in warp-faced weaving which can be quite hard on yarn.

I had used my handspun plied wool as the supplementary weft to create the pattern.

I was able to take the measurements from this project and use them to plan and create a wider and shorter piece of fabric for my passport pouch.

The warp for the passport pouch ready to receive its heddles. I fell asleep several times while making the heddles…jet lag is terrible! On the left is the felt airline freebie that I had been using which really isn’t big enough to hold everything I need any more.

I liked the pattern on the phone case so much that I re-designed it sideways to span the width of the warp. I again used my own handspun plied wool as the supplementary weft. So, that part of the Stage Two journey is done. Now I need to decide which treasured possessions will get taken over this time, the ones that I can live without here for the next year or so. There are actually still a lot more books but I just don’t feel like dealing with those right now.

While out and about wearing jeans in Australia, I suddenly became aware of just how worn and tired-looking my handwoven belt had become. I have been using this one belt exclusively since I wove it back in 2010. I wove a bunch of other belts at that time but this particular black-and-white became a favorite. I am actually pretty amazed at how well the rather soft cotton from which it is made has stood up all these years.

Belts that I wove years ago. The upper rolled up one became the favorite. The double weave one in the center will now take its place.

It has only taken me twelve years or so, but I finally walked the three blocks down to the sewing and fabric section of the market and got the holes punched in the double weave belt that I had woven but never completed all those years ago. The fact that I can walk a handful of blocks in either direction and find pretty much everything I need is something that I will certainly miss when I move back to Australia.

There you can see the double weave belt with its freshly punched holes, ready to use. The motifs were taken from Bedouin textiles that I had come across in my studies. I would check my understanding of the structures by weaving replicas of the motifs.. Even though the belt is in sturdy double weave, I still prefer to mount it on webbing for extra strength. I used a finer and “harder” thread for this belt than the thread I used for the old worn out one. I guess it will be with me for at least the next ten years or so. Somehow, I can’t see myself still wearing jeans ten years down the track, though!

The collection of metal “corners” in the photo are used I guess to protect the bottoms of handbags or perhaps the corners of leather wallets? I had seen them being used by a weaver who had covered books with hand woven cloth. The corners on the books that I’ve covered with cloth don’t need that kind of protection but I think that these metal corners nevertheless make a really interesting decorative finish on certain kinds of book covers. I spotted them in the stall while I was having the holes punched in the belt. Now that I have them, I have the urge to make more book covers. As if I need more books to lug to the other side of the world! Maybe that will be my first project when I get settled over there in Australia.

Oh my gosh, my head spins with all that needs doing before I can declare myself truly re-settled! High anxiety. One step at a time….

Backstrap Weaving – Breathing in, Breathing out.

Some place last week, I have completely forgotten where, I heard (or read) someone say that reading is like breathing in and writing is breathing out. That really appealed to me.

Because I have been house-sitting for the last couple of weeks and don’t have all my stuff around me, on top of the fact that the whole city was on strike for 36 days (the strike ended last Saturday), I had been feeling a little as if I were standing still and unable to be as productive as I would normally like to be. However, since hearing that thought on breathing, I’ve been thinking of these weeks as a period of breathing in…time to sit back in my enforced stillness and cruise the internet, soak up inspiration, make sketches and notes in my weaving book while figuring out if the projects I have in mind are actually technically doable, and deciding if my stash will stretch far enough to make them possible…. readying myself to eventually breathe out and create.

Just a handful of the sample bands in the bucket.

But of course I haven’t been completely idle. One thing I did during the strike was go back to my home on one of the permitted shopping mornings and bring back the bucket-load of woven samples that I have accumulated over the years. Most of the pieces are bands of motifs that I wove to photograph for my pattern books and double weave book. Some were width samples as I tested a new-to me yarn for a larger project while others were just fun experiments…those funny little “what-if” things that I get a sudden urge to explore now and then. Some have stories attached to them. I have felt an urgent need to downsize lately and I’ve been procrastinating about attacking the pile of woven samples. Taking those pieces out of my home to this unfamiliar place has somehow made the task of sorting and tossing things away easier.

I managed to whittle the bucket-load down to a more acceptable amount of bands. This is one of the samples that I decided to keep. Maybe it’s the horrendously hot and dry weather we have been having lately that has made me feel a particular attachment to this watery scene with its cooling blues.

Rivers and Ocean-themed band woven for my Complementary-warp Pattern Book.

I expect that I will make something out of this band one of these days. It might end up being the strap for a bag. It wouldn’t be the first time that a strap has inspired a bag project.

The bag project that grew from a simple strap. Every part is handwoven…even the lining.

During the strike I hadn’t been able to get the distilled water that I need to continue with my cochineal dyeing experiments on silk. I finish house-sitting on Thursday and I will get that organized on my return home. In the meantime, someone on Facebook suggested using bottled water…not as a substitute for distilled, but just to see if it made any difference. I thought, why not?

Cochineal dye experiments on scoured 30/2 silk using hard tap water for some and bottled water for others.

The dusty pink upper right is the result of alum mordant on silk in bottled water with added cream of tartar. I really like it!

This is what the tap water and cream of tartar dye bath had looked like….so promising, right? However, a tap-water rinse sent it right back to purple again. Oh well. It was worth a try.

While on the topic of dye experiments, I can tell you that I just happened to come across the Long Thread Media podcasts again a couple of days ago. I have listened to these chats with fiber artists in the past but because I haven’t subscribed, I keep having to remind myself to go and check out the new episodes. I listened to the fairly recent one with natural dye expert Catherine Ellis the other day and was so happy to hear her speak about the time she had been teaching someplace in the north east and was unable to coax any red out of cochineal bugs. This was due to the hard water that they were using. She also mentioned that using distilled water had provided the solution to this problem. Hooray. It’s so nice to have this confirmed by such an authority. It squashes the thoughts I have every now and then that I am simply doing something very wrong and that it isn’t the fault of the water that I can’t produce red. And so, while I don’t have any nice dyed red silk to show you this time, hopefully in my next post there’ll be some lovely red tones to add to my collection of samples.

The other thing that I have been working on here is the case for my friend’s quena (flute). I showed you in my last post how I was weaving two bands at once in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave on my backstrap loom so that I could have two pieces each with a third selvedge.

The idea was to use the third selvedges at the mouth of the case and at the edge of the closure flap as you can see below….

That gave me two raw edges to take care of at the other end of the case. I joined the fringed endings of the two bands together with weft twining which sealed the raw edges. You can see that in the photo below. I’ll leave it up to my friend to decide how short he would like to cut the fringe. He does tend to like things on the wild and woolly side. All that’s left to do is add a large snap closure or a magnet closure, or even velcro tabs if that’s what he prefers. I have a tutorial on this kind of handy weft twining here on my blog.

I am so happy with the way the pattern on the flap lines up with that on the body of the case. The pattern is a modified version of one that I include in my More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns book.

I then got the idea of replacing the decorative bands on the flute itself with woven ones. The bands that are currently in place are made from colored nylon fishing line. There were three bands and I have managed to remove one of them so far. I think that woven bands in red and black would look much nicer.

So, if it’s fun to weave two bands at once on my backstrap loom….how much more fun would it be to weave three? That way I get three pieces each with its third selvedge to place around the flute. The selvedge will slightly overlap and cover the raw edge at the other end of each band. I am weaving these in much finer cotton than the thread I used for the case. This is the good ol’ Clea thread that I used to use for almost everything long before I started traveling a lot to the States to make my yarn purchases. It’s made in Brazil and I have a bin of its odds and ends from all those years ago. It’s a 2-ply crochet cotton which isn’t as highly mercerized as the crochet cottons I have come across in the States. When I eventually move back to Australia, I am sure that I will long for it. I prefer the flatness of 2-ply thread over the round-ness of 3-ply and the less polished feel of the Clea thread.

Three bands to encircle and decorate the quena in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. This is just one of the hundred patterns in my Complementary-warp Pattern Book.

And when the evening comes and its time for cat-sitting cuddle duty, I brush this little old lady and spin her fur for fun.

I have two takli spindles here with me. One is occupied with the natural brown cotton labeled as “cinnamon”. By the way, I did some boil tests with the cinnamon thread to see if the darkening of the brown color intensified the longer it was boiled. I started with the two extremes, boiling one lot for 40 minutes and the other lot for only 5. The difference is disappointingly barely noticeable and so that’s the end of that experiment! It was actually the label on the brown color called “coyote” that stated that a range of tones could be obtained by boiling the thread for different lengths of time. I haven’t started spinning the coyote yet and so I will perhaps try this experiment again when I have spun a decent amount of thread.

I’ll be back home by the time I write my next post. I’ll be breathing out some kind of mixture of everything I have been breathing in these last couple of weeks. See you then.

Backstrap Weaving – My Favorite Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sea Island cotton singles

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

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

I was so pleased with the colors!

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

This is now one of my favorite things!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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