The Inner Chaos…..I’m only talking about the chaos within my weaving tool bags and my weaving journal…nothing introspective….well maybe just a little bit. I am pretty jumbled up below the surface when it comes to my thoughts about my eventual move back to Australia. Now that I’ve let the cat out of the bag, I’m constantly being asked “when?”. I don’t know. There are so many complexities to be sorted out at this end!
But enough of that. Let’s talk about weaving and tool bags. I showed you the little box bag that I made recently in which I can carry basic sewing supplies. I love how it opens up to give me a clear view of its contents. My large tool bag often has me digging around in the dark and getting stabbed by needles until I eventually give up and tip out the contents. I don’t help matters by tossing in all kinds of random odds and ends that I pick up from the floor when I sit down to weave….the used cable tie that I am determined to pick open and re-use, the rubber band that broke and that I’ve tied into a knot, the little chunk of eraser that really is too small to be of any more use.
I love this little box purse. The project also gave me a chance to practice my hand-sewing skills.
The long zippered tool bag was a bonus that I could make with left over fabric. It holds several of my small swords and the smaller of my pick-up sticks.
A variety of things that I use to pick up threads to create patterns…hair sticks, shawl pins, chopsticks, a dpn and a stick from my teacher in Guatemala. The shorter ones fit in the zippered bag.
Just a few of my smaller swords. These were all made for me from Australian woods found in the state of NSW (my home state).
But what about the longer tools that don’t fit in the zippered bag? Well, of course, they need another bag of their own, another box-like purse, except longer. And then what about the poor old large tool bag that has served me so well all these years?
The old faithful tool bag that has been everywhere with me, looking bright and sparkly, fresh off the loom in 2010, and the way it looks today.
It won’t be abandoned. I finally decided to invest in a good pair of fabric scissors and a pair of pinking shears. They now live in this bag all on their own. I’ve been told that I really should learn how to do French seams rather than rely on the pinking shears and I’ll get to that one day.
And so I got down to planning a larger box-like purse. I decided to use the champagne-colored cotton thread from Guatemala. I had epi information on it from past projects. I just needed to dye some of it brown and decide on a pattern for it in supplementary weft.
One of the journal covers that I wove using this thread.
Some years ago, I took paisley figures and arranged them in order to create a pattern of my own. It was a lot of drawing, sampling and modifying…a lot of work before I could start weaving. I used it once in a silk scarf project and that was the end of that for several years. I decided that it needed to be used again.
I fished the large paper pattern out of the folder. Luckily it was still legible. My pencil patterns often get really worn and smudged during the course of a project. Sometimes I even throw them away! I think, well, that was a lot of work…I’ll never weave that again! Now I always photograph them when they are freshly drawn.
All the sketching and ideas go into my weaving book. At that early stage its all fairly neat and orderly. It’s when the time comes for number crunching that it all goes to hell…the chaos within the pages begins. I would love to be one of those people who can consistently write neatly, sketch beautifully and create art within the pages of their journals. I do keep detailed notes but they are a mess! I often need to return to them and then I might have to spend quite a bit of time deciphering just how I got from A to B. If you want to see an absolutely amazing journals (dedicated to travel), take a look at jose_naranja on Instagram…unbelievably beautiful.
Weaving cloth covers for my notebooks has made note-making so pleasurable. I just wish the insides were as pretty as the outside.
These ones are still blank.
My current notebook.
I made a little video that takes you inside…..
I’m glad that many years ago when I was making books to document all that I had learned from my various indigenous teachers, I was patient enough to write out everything neatly, make precise drawings and diagrams, illustrate with photos, as well as glue in woven samples. Some even have miniature looms complete with heddles to illustrate the warping set-up. Each of the eight books I made had some kind of weaving on its cover.
The first one, bottom left, was started back in 1996 when I was still living in southern Chile.
Here’s a glimpse of the inside of a couple. These have already gone to live in Australia…
The last project in my little video is the start of the long version of the box-like purse. Here it is on the loom….
After weaving the main paisley motif which sits on the curved flap of the purse, I just wove a very simple version for what will be the base…
And here it is finished. Lessons learned when I made the first box-like purse served me well. I am really pleased with it.
I posed it next to another pouch that I wove with the same thread some years ago. The color has changed quite a lot over the years but it’s not really apparent in this photo. It has lost its golden hue on that old pouch.
It lacks the cuteness of the smaller one, though.
So now I need a bag in which to carry around all the individual tool purses…lol. Actually, my next project idea is to make a fabric case in which to store all my pattern charts. They’re currently stuffed inside a plastic box folder. The elastic straps that hold the cover in place have perished. I wonder if I could design some kind of concertina inner so that each technique has its own section. The fabric would be the outside cover. I’ve started planning the cover using the mill-spun singles wool. There’s some dyeing and sampling to do first as I’d like to use the three-color reversible pebble weave structure and need to see if the singles yarn will stand up to it.
Three-color reversible pebble weave in my own handspun plied wool.
The mill-spun singles have worked well for me in plain weave. You can see that the heddles didn’t get clogged with fluff. I have yet to see how it behaves in a denser structure of warp floats.I want to dye some of it a darker grey and some black for the three-color project.
If the singles yarn isn’t up to the task, perhaps I’ll use the plied wool yarn and cochineal that I got in the market on my birthday.
So, in conclusion, the inner chaos of my large tool bag has been sorted. While I accept that the inner chaos of my weaving notebooks will never be, perhaps my chaotically-arranged pattern charts will get categorized according to structure inside a new case with handwoven cover.
I just wanted to quickly show what I made with the fabric I was weaving in my last post.
Supplementary-weft motifs in red silk on cotton.
Bear in mind that I am not much of a sewer and that my thrills from sewing successes, therefore, come cheaply. I do love stitching by hand, though.
I really liked a box-like purse that Handymum had shown in a video tutorial. She doesn’t speak at all in these videos and explains everything with hand gestures and occasional text in English. When I can also mute the music, it becomes my favorite way to watch these kinds of videos. They play at high speed and so I need to watch them several times to be able to catch everything. I save only the very simplest ones while I improve my skills. I’m not going to risk my handwoven cloth on something that is beyond my skill level.
YET, if I’d really respected my lack of experience and sewn a sample with fabric I have floating around, I would have avoided a silly mistake I made.
The unusual layout of the pattern is due to the nature of the box-like purse I planned to sew. The plainblue that flanks the pattern would be the sides of the “box”.
I managed to get a second product, a slim zippered tool case, from the extra bit of warp I had put on the loom. Iswitched to a different patternfor thatbased on warp-float snake designs that are woven here in the lowlands of Bolivia.
Guaraní weavers here create snake patterns in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. (They call it kara kara pepo) There are so many versions of it, both simple and complex. This is my modified version of one of them. I love how it looks in supplementary-weft in my latest project.
The sides and front of the box shape collapse inward so that when closed, the purse lies quite flat. I thought this design was really cute. What I love is that you can unclip the flap, open it up and clearly see everything laid out inside instead of having to dig around inside a zippered pouch. I occasionally have to tip out all the contents of some of my larger tool pouches in order to find something.
I dyed a piece of the fabric on which the pieces sit here light blue to use as the lining.I’ve put basic sewing supplies in there…a tin of pins, a wooden needle case, snips, a stitch ripper and some dark thread.
This was the first time I had sewn in the lining before sewing up the piece and the first time I sewed everything before flipping the whole thing right-side-out. I told you about my cheap thrills, right? I was so pleased with myself! As for the mistake, I sewed too close to the thick interfacing. In her video, Handymum sews on the lines she has drawn onto the lining and you can’t see how close she is to the interfacing on the other side. Rather than draw lines, I flipped my piece over and sewed around the interfacing instead, but much too close considering the thickness of the interfacing (I used two layers). I’m all for ripping things out and doing them over but it was too late. I’d already snipped the curve of the top, cut the points off the outer corners and cut into the inner ones. And so, the seams are really strained and stretched over the interfacing and some of my (black!) stitching shows as a result.
I have some of the same Guatemalan cotton in a color called champagne and I might have another go at this sewing pattern but in a longer version using fabric woven from that thread.
Like the indigo cotton, the champagne-colored cotton from Guatemala is slightly finer than 20/2. I love weaving with this stuff.
I’m sad to see my supply of that indigo-dyed Guatemalan cotton getting low although stash-busting is my goal after all. I just know that I’ll probably never get to replace it. It’s special because of the way it has faded after all these years. I love the way it weaves up with all its variations of shades of blue. I still have loads of the champagne color, though. I’m assuming that it was also dyed with natural substances but it doesn’t seem to have faded. I’ll know for sure when I compare the thread on the inside of the cakes to the outside layers of thread.
As for the next project, it will be yet another bag, hopefully. Not another, you say?! But I like to think that I’m thinking a bit out of the box with this one. I have this crazy idea of making a long bag in which to carry my backstrap loom that doubles as a backstrap.
When I was house-sitting last year, I took my loom with work-in-progress to my new digs in a large cotton tote bag……
…..only to find that I had forgotten to bring a backstrap. It turned out that the tote bag in which I had carried it made a fairly decent emergency backstrap. From this came the idea.
I’m using Guatemalan cotton again except this is somewhat heavier stuff, also from Mayan Hands, that my friend Kate gave me. I dyed the black and it accompanies cochineal-dyed purplish-red (dyed in Guatemala) and natural white. I’m back to one of my old faithful color combinations.
I’ve tossed around various ideas for the structure and pattern and I think that I’ve finally (almost!) settled on rep weave to give me good sturdy fabric with complementary-warp pick-up patterns. I do try to learn something new with each project. I have in fact woven rep once before and so its not entirely new, hence the “almost” in parentheses. I keep thinking that I need to add a twist to this somehow. If not, creating the strange backstrap/tote bag may have to be the new part of this project.
The only rep weave piece I’ve woven so far.
It makes a nice placemat for my tray table so that things don’t slide around.
In the two new projects that I’ve shown in this post, the thread has come from Guatemala. The finer stuff was bought from Mayan Hands at a conference many years ago in Bellingham. The heavier thread, also from Mayan Hands, was given to me Kate.
Kate working with her Guatemalan loom and warp when I visited in California.
I wove this scarf using fine cotton thread from Guatemala that was given to me by Betty. She had bought it in the 1980s!
I used patterning techniques that I’d learned in Guatemala to decorate it.
I went to Guatemala myself in 2008, met my teacher Lidia and also brought back some cotton of the kind that you see here on the swift.Lidia took me shopping to get the best prices!
I haven’t done a whole lot with it because the quantities were quite small. I’d bought it with the idea of using it as supplementary weft rather than as warp. But here’s one thing I ‘ve used it for….
Fabric for a book cover. There wasn’t enough of any one color and so I had to step outside my color boxand combine two.
So, that’s another stash that I’d like to get into. And, on that same trip I bought a ball of handspun cotton singles from a spinner. The ball sat in the closet for close to ten years and then I got to use pretty much all of it for this sheer scarf project….
I love this white-on-white supplementary weft technique.
I haven’t been to Guatemala since 2008 but every now and then someone puts a Guatemalan warp in my hands and I get to take a trip down Guatemalan-weaving Memory Lane….(and it seems that this post is also turning into one!)
I hope to make another trip to Australia in October and I’m thinking that maybe I could make a little side-trip to Guatemala from Miami on the way back when I’ll be virtually empty-handed. Who knows?
As for now, I need to go and figure out what to use for the thick weft in my rep piece, if in fact rep is my final decision for this project. See you next time.
I was thinking the other day about my eventual move to Australia and what my “weaving studio” might look like in my home over there. I will be starting up there with a totally clean slate…no furniture or other household items, not even a cup and a spoon! Ideally, I would leave the space pretty much empty…open, bright and uncluttered…the kind of weaving space that I would not be embarrassed to have people come and visit. However, I’m pretty sure that it will eventually end up in the same kind of state of cluttered creative chaos in which I function quite happily here!
There’s cotton cloth on the loom for a book cover, lots of charts for the floral and hummingbird patterns and goodness-knows what else.
Pick a day, any day, and you’ll find my space looking like this…except for the between-project moments when I pick stuff up to vacuum clean.
Here are some very different studio spaces that I find inspiring and delightful…
Part of Gonit Porat’s weaving space in her studio in Israel. The rigid heddle loom has a student’s work in progress using patterns in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. I can almost smell that outdoor scene.
Judith Beckett’s basement studio in England. I just adore this picture. There’s so much to look at and raise a smile and the cats perfectly complete the picture.
Cats and fiber. This is one of my teacher’s weaving spaces here in Bolivia. If only I could keep mine as simple as this!
Who knows what my space will end up being. It’s nice to sit here and dream about it.
So, what’s on the loom? I’ve picked through my stash and brought out some indigo-dyed cotton thread that I bought from Mayan Hands at a conference maybe eight years or so ago. I’ve used it in other projects and I found that there was enough left for a little something else. I decided I’d follow one of Handymum’s little purse sewing tutorials.
Cloth for a book cover that I wove with the Mayan Hands indigo-dyed thread several years ago.
Even though the cakes of thread have sat on a shelf away from windows for years, the color has faded. My warp shows the unevenness in the blue color and I love it.
The light blue is UKI 20/2 thread that I dyed. The heddles are also 20/2. The Mayan Hands thread is slightly finer.
This warp is only 9 1/2 inches wide but has 926 ends. So, I followed all the steps that I outlined in my last post for wide warps….warping in small sections and placing each one on beams that were waiting on the floor. I followed my own advice and wound the whole warp in one session. It was interesting to note the difference in tension between the section of light blue 20/2 thread and the other indigo sections. The section of 20/2 was looser. Just the fact that the 20/2 is slightly heavier than the indigo thread seemed to have made that difference. Fortunately, I have some ridiculously fine 0.7mm double point knitting needles and I coiled all the 20/2 threads around one and parked it at the far end of the warp. It did the trick perfectly to even out the tension across the warp. Who on earth uses these 0.7mm dpns to knit? I bought them years ago to use to create third selvedges on super fine warps. I also installed a coil rod across the entire warp so that my cotton cloth wouldn’t take on that corrugated look.
I took the time to make sure that each of the 926 ends was sitting where it should be before I started weaving so that I could create a neat third selvedge.
My unconventional way of starting with an umbrella rib lashed to the cloth beam with cable ties in order to create a third selvedge.
The layout of the pattern is a little strange but I’ve planned it that way to suit Handymum’s purse design.
I love the way the indigo-blue cloth looks with its uneven coloring.
I’m going to need to cut into this cloth to make the purse. It’s going to be tough cutting into that lovely blue stuff. I’m using five strands of 120/2 silk for the supplementary weft. These are motifs that I designed a little while back. I have put on more warp than I need and so I’ll just keep weaving and use another pattern on the last bit. I’m sure that I’ll be able to use it for something. I wrote a very basic tutorial on this style of patterning with supplementary weft many years ago. You can find it here.
A little further along.
I’ll finish by showing you a beautiful double weave band that Jan Low wove and has kindly allowed me to share….
She wove it using the instructions and patterns in my book Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms. The book includes tutorials on how to design and chart your own patterns and Jan has created some of her own for this band. If you’ve already tried some form of pick-up patterning and know that you like this slower kind of weaving, you might enjoy adding warp-faced double weave to your repertoire of techniques. This book is one of eight of mine available as PDFs or as spiral-bound books (shipped from the U.S.A) at Taproot Video.
My relationship with Time seems to be changing. I know that I am not the only one who got lost during these last two strange years, overcome by the feeling that time was speeding by… weeks and months merging into a hazy uneventful blob. Even now I struggle to separate 2020 from 2021. But I just recently realized that the passage of time is slowing down for me and starting to resemble something like normal, something recognizable from the pre-pandemic days. The calendar map that I have always carried in my mind’s eye is starting to reappear.
I resist the urge to go back and try to account, in terms of productivity, for the 24 months that have passed since we first went into lock-down here in Bolivia. Today marks the anniversary of the confirmation of the first known Covid case here. That any of us achieved anything meaningful at all is cause for celebration. And now I am talking as if it is all over. Of course, I know it isn’t, but there is definitely a change in my state of mind.
Three-panel wall hanging: Textile Trails
On the theme of Time, I am reminded of a question that I am very often asked when I show my woven work….. “How long did it take to weave that?”
I am trying very hard to think back to a time before I started weaving to see if perhaps I would have asked this question myself to a craftsperson and what might have motivated me to do so. Would it be because I was thinking of trying to make the object myself and needed to see if the time involved was worth my effort? Or perhaps I would want to know if the asking price for the object reflected the amount of time that had gone into creating it.
In any case, I find it a very difficult question to answer. How long does it take?…As long as it takes! I honestly don’t keep track. I don’t sell my work and so I need not consider time in order to fairly price an item. I am not weaving to a deadline. There is usually no exhibit for which the work has to be completed…the three pieces above were an exception as I had woven them for an exhibit at the ANWG conference in 2015. I would probably have to go back to my blog posts if I wanted to give an accurate answer in terms of the number of weeks on which I worked on a project. However, I would be at a complete loss when it came to the total number of hours.
I met a craftsperson some years ago and witnessed his response to the question…
“How long did it take to make that?”
His response:
A l i f e t i m e
I can only imagine that he very rightly considers that a lifetime of his accumulated knowledge, experience, skill and inspiration went into this and every piece that he has completed. I love his response.
So, I am willing to pour as much time and effort as is required into every piece I weave. There have been a couple of times, though, when I just wanted to get the thing done! One such time was when I had volunteered to weave six lanyards for a conference. The long piece of half-inch band with its small repeated motif did not excite me at all when the time came to weave it. I installed eleven sets of string heddles to move it along. I didn’t have to do any pick-up and that rather unique experience suddenly made the project very interesting as I came up with ways to remember which heddle came next in the sequence.
What I don’t like, is making silly mistakes and wasting time. Okay, I will admit that a mistake is always a learning experience and valuable for that reason but sometimes you just turn around and do the same old thing again!
A circular warp for a cotton scarf
Like the time I was using a coil rod for the first time on a circular warp many years ago. The coil rod (sometimes called rolling stick) is the uppermost stick in this cotton circular warp and I was using it because it seemed like an important part of a circular warp set-up. At the time, I didn’t fully understand its purpose. One of my aims for using it in this project was to figure that out. While trying to move the rod as weaving progressed, I mishandled and broke the coil rod. I did it once…I learned something. I did it a second time…I cursed…but then I learned some more. The third time I broke it, it got flung to other side of the room and I continued without it. It was then that I started understanding its purpose because it was very much aware that it was a different experience weaving without it. And so I was happy to sit patiently and install it once again.
(Note that I am talking about circular warps here. I do, however, continue to use the coil rod on both circular and single-plane warps if I am doing plain weave with cotton or silk (materials that have little to no stretch). I have written a lot about this tool in blog posts over the years. If you are interested in learning more, you could start here.)
Maybe this is something that we don’t consider when we ask the craftsperson how long it took to complete the project. Do we want them to include the time used to fix “oopsies”? After all, the fixing of the oopsies adds to that lifetime of experience about which my craftsman friend was speaking.
The first six inches of this warp were woven and unwoven twice before I found just the right weight of material for the supplemental patterning weft.
While the amount of time needed to weave a piece is not important to me, I am always interested in learning about techniques that weavers have developed to help make the whole process more efficient, like the use of multiple string heddles and pattern storage sticks, for example. However, there is one thing that I have always been a bit stubborn about and that is the use of sizing.
In weaving, sizing is a substance that is used to coat warp threads that are hairy or “sticky”, or have other characteristics that make it difficult to achieve clean sheds. Basically, it smooths the threads. I resist using it purely because of the “ick” factor. That is, I hate to think of the mess of dunking my warp into a bath of starchy goo and I don’t think I would enjoy the feel of the stiffened coated threads as I weave. Keep in mind that my hands are usually in almost constant contact with the threads as I weave pick-up patterns. Of course, it all washes off in the end and you are left with the original softness of the yarn but yech, I just don’t like the sound of it. I prefer to stay away from the sizing and just adjust my loom-operating methods instead.
Adapting my methods to the materials in use: I was able to weave with Knit Picks Palette….a soft, loosely-plied wool and create a four-selvedged piece.
My approach when working with sticky materials is to adapt the way I operate the loom…take a lot of care when opening sheds by working the threads in sections, using my finger tips to help release the grip a thread may have on its neighbors. I advance the warp more often so that sticks and heddles are not sitting on and abrading any one section for too long, causing it to shed and pill. Yes, it does slow things down but, as I said, I am not in any hurry. I suspect that using a sized warp on a floor loom is a different experience in that the weaver isn’t necessarily handling the warp threads during the weaving part of the process.
Another way to avoid using sizing might be to add extra twist to commercial wool yarn to make it smoother. My weaving teachers here create relatively smooth hand-spun yarn by using a high amount of twist. They also add twist to the synthetic thread that they buy in the market. This kind of yarn creates a certain kind of cloth. The thing is that I don’t always want that kind of cloth.
Two wool lap-size blankets that I wove using Mora yarn. It’s worsted spun which helps somewhat with the stickiness issue. I didn’t add any extra twist.
My latest project has been with mill-spun wool singles….sticky stuff. I could get a tiny heddle shed which I would then proceed to open further with my fingers. I didn’t want to use sizing. I didn’t want to ply it or add extra twist. I love the way it feels. The supplementary weft is my own plied hand-spun wool.
From the 27-inch warp I got 21 1/2 inches of cloth and my string heddles came up remarkably clean.
I always love the way the back of these supplementary-weft patterned pieces look.
There was a small amount of curl in the cloth at its opposing corners. Folding it to make a pouch for my phone and edging it with a patterned tubular band took care of that.
The fresh warp in the above photo was for a small closure tab. I used my plied hand-spun for that. I used a dense structure of three-span floats (intermesh) to produce a sturdy band…hence the two sets of string heddles.
The finished pouch.
I wet-finished the small piece on the right under the sword. The warp threads shifted slightly closer together, I took measurements, but I didn’t notice any real difference in the feel of the cloth. I didn’t wet-finish the pouch piece as I was a little concerned about color run in the supplementary weft. I had bought that roving already colored. As the supplementary weft is tightly wedged between the two layers of warp in several places, I don’t think that even a color-catcher cloth would stop the color from bleeding onto the grey wool. If wet-finishing had made a significant difference to the way the cloth felt, I may have reconsidered.
I hope that I get a chance to show this, the first of many projects in the mill-spun wool singles, to the farming couple whose sheep provided the fleece. My original plan had been to use this yarn for a shoulder bag project. I would dye the yarn to match the three-color strap that I had already woven…
I used my plied hand-spun wool for this strap. I don’t feel that I was heavy-handed in the amount of twist I used. The strap lies perfectly flat and the yarn was beautiful to weave with.
However, now that I have seen the cloth that this yarn produces, I can’t bring myself to dye it. I love all the subtle color variations from this blend of natural white and black. I’ll be using it as is perhaps for a pillow cover and will add color with supplementary weft instead.
So, I will turn once again to my Mora yarn for the bag project. I over-dyed a pale green color that I didn’t particularly like to get a dark blue that is close to the strap color. It will be mostly plain blue and with a very narrow strip of three-color pattern in the center. I have used Mora for a bag project before and know that it performs well on the loom as well as with use.
Fabric for a bag with built-in pocket woven with Mora wool.
If you are curious about the Mora yarn, here it is. It’s 20/2 worsted spun and I know that both Vavstuga and Eugene Textile Center carry it in the USA.
One skein of Mora goes a long way. It gives me material to work with for dyeing with cochineal for other projects. It’s taken two years but I finally got some alum. Just before the pandemic I had been out and about looking everywhere for the “precious” stuff…precious only because I suddenly could not find it anywhere. The usual pharmaceutical supply stores weren’t carrying it any more. The little hardware stalls in the market (there are dozens of them) didn’t have it. I tried the Mennonite market because I know that they can and pickle but they told me to go to the pharmaceutical places. The little McCormick jars of alum are not available here either. I am guessing that the Mennonite folk have a massive supply of it at home and are possibly not yet aware of it no longer being available. My friend Dorinda sent me some from Cochabamba a couple of weeks ago.
I have used cochineal in the past to dye my hand spun llama yarn. With an alum mordant I get the crimson color you see in this image.
The stones you see are a mineral that goes by the Quechua name millu. Dorinda sent it along as a bonus. It is not something that is required for dyeing with cochineal but she thought that I might enjoy experimenting with it. In the co-op, they use it to darken colors. It is also sold as a home remedy and it is in those stalls that it is found in the street markets. Now that I know what it is, I will most likely be able to find some here in Santa Cruz although I suspect that the amount Dorinda sent me will go a long way. Maybe I will also dye some silk with cochineal for an ikat project.
These are all time-consuming processes. I am not concerned about the amount of time it takes. If you have ever tried ikat, you will know what I mean by time-consuming. Slow processes are just perfect for someone who is working with dwindling stash!
When I told a friend of mine about having finally got hold of some alum via Cochabamba, he took on the challenge of hunting it down in Santa Cruz and came up with this in a very upmarket store of natural vegan-friendly cosmetics. One large chunk came contained in a cloth bag inside a fancy carry bag as if it were something terribly precious…and yes, the price was precious. The accompanying card shows someone applying it to their armpits. So I guess supplies, at least here in Santa Cruz, have been entirely diverted to the cosmetics industry.
Another “slow” project is my learning to spin cotton on a takli spindle. Version One didn’t have enough twist. Version Two had…you guessed it… what I suspected was too much twist. Version Three, which is in progress, is bound to have some other problem. And on it goes. I love the little takli spindle! And Joan Ruane’s video class on it has been so good. I’ll never forget the time I was with Joan at the Mannings. I had set up a backstrap loom and she had wanted to see what that was all about. I was doing pick-up and her reaction was “Oh my god, it’s slower than tapestry!” This from a woman who spins her own cotton for weaving! She made me laugh. I guess we all have our own feelings about Time.
As for Version Two with it’s crazy amount of twist, I decided to see if it was possible to set the twist on my singles (because that’s how I want to eventually use this thread…as singles) and did some reading about that. I have Stephanie Gaustad’s book on cotton, flax and hemp and there are also online resources about simmering and immersion. The trickiest part was having to immerse the thread under tension. My solution for that is a bit wacky. It worked for these small samples.
The thread went into the pot tightly wound around these metal mesh pencil caddies. I do want to use this thread as singles so that I can once again try to weave something approximating the sheer cotton cloth that is woven in the Alta Verapaz region of Guatemala. I want the thread to be finer than the hand-spun that I used last time in this piece…
Woven with hand-spun cotton singles that I had bought in Guatemala.
And this is where that icky topic of sizing comes back into it. I will probably give in and size the thread. I wove the above piece using a bamboo reed to maintain sett. The weavers in Alta Verapaz don’t use one and I am curious to know if the stiffening of the thread from the sizing is one of the factors that enables them to maintain the sett without the aid of the reed. I stress ONE of the factors because, of course, their supremely high level of skill gathered from years and years of work is going to be the main contributing factor. In videos, I have been able to hear the sound of their picking stick on the threads. The weavers are in the habit of slowly scraping the pick along the warp threads from selvedge to selvedge right at the weaving line as if, I am guessing, to encourage the threads to remain separated and not drift into warp dominant positions. That sound is not one that I would expect to hear from naked hand-spun cotton. The sizing that is used gives the threads a coating that produces that sound. Perhaps I will need to use sound as my guide when I try this myself.
All time-consuming stuff. But I am not here to just consume time. Hopefully, I will be using it to continue learning. When I recently explained to someone my plans for my own hand-spun cotton, they asked how long it would take before I would be ready to start the weaving. I sensibly replied….years.
It’s been a while since I last heard the scritchy sound of hairy warp threads releasing their grip on each other as I open sheds on my backstrap loom. I am hearing it now because I have taken on the challenge of weaving with mill-spun wool singles that I bought from a farm while traveling in California. I don’t really know what I had in mind when I bought that yarn. I had just wanted to buy something as a souvenir of that part of my travels from the lovely people who had allowed my friends to gather and weave in their barn.
Because traveling to far off places to buy yarn like this is off the table at the moment, this is another case of my exploring my dwindling stash and enjoying the new challenges that this presents. My idea is to use this yarn to weave the body of a bag that will go with the strap I just finished. I used a three-color reversible Andean Pebble Weave structure for this strap and the wool yarn that I had been spinning and plying on a drop spindle during pandemic Zoom gatherings.
Despite the dark colors, I think it’s a happy garden scene of flowers and hummingbirds.
I did start off with the idea of creating an orderly, cohesive pattern layout but the temptation to play with the three colors and pop those hummingbirds wherever I wanted took over and I had a lot of fun doing just that.
One thing that I had wanted to do was use one color for the pebble spot that represents the hummingbird’s eye and another color for all the other pebble spots that sit within the figure’s body…but you know, I forgot to do that every single time! Well, almost every single time. I was determined to remember to do two things before I eventually finished the band…take a picture of myself at the loom working on it and get those colored eye spots in!
I once met a bird photographer that told me that it is really important to capture the little spot of white light in a bird’s eye in order not to have it appear lifeless. I have looked for it in every bird photo I have seen since. In the same way, I think the different colored eye spot on these last two hummers makes an enormous difference.
I didn’t hear any woolly scritchy sounds while working with this hand spun of mine. I had been concerned about how well it would stand up to this rather dense structure but realized after a while that I had completely forgotten all my concerns and was able to enjoy how friendly it was and how lovely it felt.
I remember the first time I wove with my hand spun. It was with some rather nasty dry and dusty llama fiber that I had bought from the animals’ owner up in the highlands. At the time, the scritchy tearing sounds were freaking me out and the yarn I had spun was anything but soft and lovely to handle. I had put a tremendous amount of twist into it so that it would stand up to warp-faced weaving. I don’t do that any more.
And now, there is a new experience…weaving with these mill-spun singles. This is a first for me. Yes, there’s some “scritchiness” but I am actually finding it pleasant…almost like the warp is whispering to me. That llama fiber had seemed to be screaming at me in that first-ever experience. I made adjustments to the way I was spinning it, it became friendlier, and I was able to enjoy weaving with it more. 🙂
This is my sample for the bag fabric that will follow. I wound a warp of 27″ length and 160 ends. The idea was to weave and allow it to settle into a consistent width so that I could then make calculations for the bag fabric. I most typically start off too narrow with new-to-me yarn and have to let the piece gradually widen and settle. Once I am happy with that, I put it aside and work on the real project. This time, however, I was enjoying working with this wool so much, I decided that this piece really needed to be something and I figured that my cell phone, which currently sits in a case, could do with a pouch. So, I unwove a good 3″ of fabric so that I could start over at the correct width. The fact that I was able to unweave the warp-faced cloth woven with wool singles yarn without losing my mind, tells me that this yarn and I are going to have a happy weaving relationship.
And I decided to use some of my plied hand spun as supplementary weft to weave in a pattern. This is some of the thicker “Zoom” hand spun that I first created and used to weave a wrist cuff before deciding to try and go finer. It is making a very nice supplementary weft. I am using the outlining technique of supplementary-weft patterning in which the weft does not travel from selvedge to selvedge. I can make my hand spun yarn go further that way. It is precious to me and I don’t want it to be just hidden away between the layers of warp as it travels to the selvedge. I can’t tell you how much fun I am having with this!
Wrist cuff with the initial run of hand spun.
A couple of observations: There had been a tendency for me to think that the action of the heddles against the wool would be the cause of most of the abrasion and subsequent pilling or shredding. Lately I have found that with good loom-operation technique, this isn’t so. There is actually a point of layer exchange that sits between the heddle and the shed rod where most of the abrasion is occurring for me. This exchange happens when the threads that lie on top of the shed rod are lifted and brought down through the heddles to the weaving line. (I keep my shed rod stationary and don’t slide it forward to the heddles as some backstrap weavers do which explains why the point of layer exchange on my particular warp is in that position.) That abrasion point is the one I need to watch and I notice that a little bit of fluff accumulates there. I am particularly gentle there and tend to spread the threads with my hands and lift them through that point in sections. It is also important to advance the warp as often as possible so that the abrasion point is constantly changing position.
I love the multiple tones in the warp and its rustic look. I had considered a hummingbird pattern but decided that this one better suits these natural earthy colors.
But despite all that gentle handling, the warp does continue to whisper to me in its scritchy voice, possibly just as a reminder not to get cocky and careless when I open the sheds. This talk of sound playing a part in our weaving, reminded me of some thoughts I had posted way back in 2013 that I thought I would revisit and share with you.
Back then, something a weaver had posted on the Weavolution website had resonated with me. An Australian gentleman, Hakim, was learning to make cut pile knotted rugs with an Iranian teacher in Australia. He said that when he is at home working on his practice piece, he can tell that the tension of the warp threads is correct if they make the same sound when he handles them as they do when he is working on his learning piece with his teacher in class.
What a piece of priceless knowledge!
(At left you can see an example of a set of tools that Hakim was able to get for me from his teacher for the day when I try this technique. It’s on that long, long to-do list).
Hakim’s comment made me think about the different sounds that are connected with weaving on simple looms and how much I enjoy them.
I am not one for placing things in my ears and listening to music while busy with something else. I can’t stand that. I like to be in touch with the sounds around me. They form a very important part of my memories of places and experiences.
In my skiing days, I would wonder at people who skied with headphones on. I would never give up the pleasure of hearing the wind and the swish of the skis on the snow, or the sudden change of sound as snow turned to ice giving me time to react and adjust position. Back then, no one wore helmets. I am told that the helmets being worn now don’t affect the skiers ability to enjoy those sounds.
I learned to fly a glider when I was 19. There is nothing like the sound of an engine-less craft rushing through the air. There was so much with which to be occupied while learning (especially for someone like me who was so utterly un-coordinated at the time!) but I could always simply rely on my ears for certain information. For example, if the sound of the rushing air suddenly disappeared it was a sure sign that I had the nose up too high and that told me that I had better do something quickly before the glider stalled!
When we first went into pandemic lockdown here in Bolivia, I remember finding the sudden absence of sound really disturbing and almost frightening. Then I realized that what was missing were familiar sounds of human activity and that they had been replaced by much more pleasant ones…bird song and the sound of leaves being blown across the cobbles…sounds that normally were drowned out by the hum of city living.
As for sounds while weaving, I love using multiple big swords. I so enjoy the musical tok tok sound they make as they knock together in the sheds. And I love the chuckling chatter of all the sticks on the loose as they fall together when I release tension and roll up the warp at the end of the day. Below, you can see the sticks I used in a wall-hanging piece….many different kinds of wood making interesting sounds. It can become quite a collection.
Then there’s the plink plink sound as the tip of a delicate Guatemalan pick-up stick slides from one taut warp to the next as the weaver counts out threads for supplementary-weft inlay.
The dancing dangling bobbins used in weft twining go clackity clack as they twist and jiggle.
And they enable my teacher to create such beautiful work as this:
Examples of kteh work by my Montagnard weaving teachers.
I loved the opportunity to drag the llama bone tool across the strong highly-twisted wool threads that my teachers in Peru had prepared below…scritch, scritch, as I strummed to help separate the warps. Only warp threads with certain characteristics will tolerate this.
Listen to my teacher doing it…
If you stroll around a village of weavers in a certain part of the central highlands of Bolivia, you will know in which houses a weaver is at work by the LOUD THWACK!! THWACK!! of the llama bone hitting the sword as the wefts are slammed into place. That sound is one that is not really pleasant, at least not to my ears, when I am seated right next to my teacher. Here is one of my teachers in Candelaria at work at her loom:
When I stayed in the stilt-house home of my weaving teacher in Ecuador, I was often awoken at dawn by the muffled thump, thump and accompanying vibrations as Trini drew down her heavy beater while working at her vertical loom. This was combined with various house shaking and creaking sounds as the loom was connected to floor and ceiling beams…a part of the house itself. You can see that big sword/beater lying across Trini’s leg below and get an idea of the muscle that goes into operating this particular set-up.
The sound of threads in a warp-faced weaving rubbing past each other as a shed is opened can range from a soothing smooth swish to a seemingly painful tearing protest depending on the yarn being used and how it has been prepared.
When weaving with new backstrap weavers, we even learn to be amused by the constant clatter of swords jumping out of their sheds and hitting the floor. Each sword has its own musical tone…nowhere near as much fun on a rug! A cement floor like the one in this picture greatly enhances the melody.
By the way, I am in charge of picking up the fallen swords….gives me something to do. It is funny that as time goes by we have people weaving in silence. What happened to our musical accompaniment? Well, new weavers, without even realizing it, get a feel for the right amount of tension and the sweet spot in the warp where the sword will sit happily upright and not leap to the floor. Or…they just get rather good at catching the sword on its way down!
Maybe one of the nicest sounds for me is the fwip fwip fwip fwip in rapid succession as I pull my heddle string quickly but carefully (or else it will tangle miserably!) off its heddle stick. This means that the piece is finished.
And with that soft, happy sound in your head, I will leave you.
