traditional backstrap weaving – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – I Made a Thing

First of all, I have to tell you just how wonderful it was to hear from so many people behind the scenes about the bonus video clips I talked about in my last post. Those who had bought my tubular band book on Patternfish needed to contact me to gain access to the video gifts. And contact me you did! I have to apologize for not having sent each and every one of you a personal reply…it got a bit overwhelming! But it served as a reminder that there are many many eyes out there reading my posts….yes, actually reading all my ramblings and not just scrolling down through the pictures (although, there’s nothing wrong with that!). I do try to provide a lot of eye candy for those who stop by and don’t have the time to read everything.. All this is to say, thank you. It made me feel good.

You’ll see that the title of this post is I Made a Thing. I did… but this thing I made is not THE thing that I am planning for my hummingbird motifs. That idea is still developing in my head, But, yes, I made A thing. However, there was still some sampling to do as I had come up with another idea for my little birds.

Two posts ago I showed you a new version woven with supplementary weft rather than in double weave in which I used the idea of embellishing the hummers with curls and swirls. The sample above is in 30/2 silk with silk supplementary weft. I used this idea one more time in some green cotton thread that I had brought back from Guatemala in 2008. I think the cotton might be something like 30/2 in size and I am pretty sure that it isn’t mercerized.

In the example on the left, I created the outline and the swirls within the hummingbird shapes with teal supplementary weft. On the right, I filled in the negative space around the swirls with white supplementary weft. That means that the swirls are revealed in the exposed green ground cloth. It’s a different look. I love both versions! I may have to combine both in that distant “real” project”.

An advantage of the using the supplementary-weft technique is the simplicity of the loom set-up. I like to use four sets of string heddles when I weave with fine warp material in warp-faced double weave. I need only use the most basic set-up of all when I use this supplementary-weft technique.

I am using five strands of very fine silk as the supplementary weft and played around with the idea of using strands of different colors. I abandoned the first attempt at the bottom…too pale…and liked the darker version at the top. Dwindling stash has me using color combinations that I might not have normally considered. I do like the green and orange-y red tones together. A weaver friend told me that green goes with everything because, after all, Nature has combined it with every imaginable color of flower. True!

I love how my backstrap loom allows me to set-up a short sample warp like the one above. I could probably squeeze a couple more inches out of that warp if I remove the coil rod and replace the pencils with finer sticks. I can even drop back to just one stick or even to no stick at all…using a shed loop instead to contain the threads in that half of the warp.

So, while I ponder that “real” project to which I keep referring, I decided to use all that I had learned so far and weave a cover for a book. This is the Thing that I made. I found a book in a size I like in a local store. It has blank, thick lovely pages that have lots of texture. It was a chance to use the cotton thread from Guatemala that has been sitting here since 2008. I had brought it back with plans to use it as supplementary weft rather than as warp. I didn’t have enough green and so I decided to get even more comfortable with orange and use orange as both warp and weft. What I am calling orange in the warp is more of a coral color really.

I love the look of all those crisp white heddles against the green. I normally weave my book covers with the selvedges running along the horizontal edges of the book. Because I wanted my hummingbirds to be be the right way up rather than sideways, I planned this piece to have the selvedges aligned with the vertical sides of the book. I crossed my fingers in the hope that my one short and narrow sample in this thread would give me reliable information in terms of ends per inch. I wanted the cloth to sit right at the vertical edges. I didn’t want to turn it over all four edges and create all that bulk at the corners.

I also decided that I wouldn’t wet-finish the cloth. I know....Shocking! I figured that it’s a nice tight warp-faced weave that doesn’t require further tightening in the water. I simply was not going to deal with accounting for shrinkage. The cotton has a rough rustic feel that I like. Wet finishing would have softened it I am sure, but I am happy with the rustic feel.

Completely removing the cover from the book was easy and made the process so much simpler. This way, I didn’t have to cut the cloth and tuck a tab into the spine. Contact cement has become my friend since I learned to work with it. This isn’t the first book I have ever completely covered with my woven cloth…number 11, in fact, and I have learned some do’s and don’t’s along the way.

And here it is finished. I managed to get the little flower positioned on the spine right where I had wanted it to be .I apologize that I have been lazy lately just snapping all my photos with my tiny ipod, some of them as you can probably tell, late at night . I still haven’t bought myself a new tripod for the “good” camera.

Naturally, questions arise about technique tutorials when I show these projects on social media. I did write a very basic tutorial on this supplementary-weft technique many years ago which you can find right here on my blog. I admit that the tutorial makes me cringe just a little as the base warp that I used in the blue example all those years ago was so terribly corrugated! Nevertheless, the tutorial will give you a good idea of how this works and I know that many people have successfully used it.

A wonderful resource for supplementary-weft techniques that I have come across in the last few months is the website of Guatemalan-based Mari Gray’s Kakaw Designs. Mari writes on her site that Kakaw means cacao and goes on to explain that Kakaw Designs supports “traditions as deep as the root of the cacao tree”. Apart from selling clothing, accessories and even footwear made from Guatemalan textiles that she and her partners have specially designed, she runs tours, offers courses and sells kits for weavers who would like to try their hand at operating a backstrap loom.

One of several pre-warped and pre-heddled loom styles offered by Kakaw Designs.

You can order fully warped and set-up backstrap looms, like the one above, with everything you need to weave brocade (supplementary-weft) patterns using the techniques employed by weavers in San Antonio Aguas Calientes. The kit can be supplemented by classes via Zoom given by Guatemalan weaver Doña Lidia in English. There are classes on basic backstrap loom operation and plain warp-faced weaving as well beginner and intermediate-level brocading classes. For more advanced weavers, they even offer a class in the double-faced supplementary-weft technique. Other offerings include tamale and tortilla-making classes.

A piece that I photographed of a Quetzal bird woven in the double-faced technique while in San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Guatemala in 2008.

This simple bee motif is the first I learned to weave in the double-faced structure with my teacher in Guatemala.

Single and double-faced styles that I studied and wove in the same area in which instructor Doña Lidia is located in Guatemala.

This piece shows the nature of single-faced supplementary-weft patterning.

Instructions are also available via PDF with accompanying video clips for those in time zones that don’t fit well with the scheduled Zoom classes or for those who are not able to attend the live classes for any other reason. Take a look at the Experiences page on the Kakaw Designs website for more details. If any of you have taken any of these classes with Kakaw Designs, please do let me know. Perhaps you would be willing to share pictures.

Doña Lidia being filmed for one of her weaving classes.

From the archives….here’s me practicing all I learned in Guatemala back in 2008. I learned so much that expanded my knowledge of supplementary-weft techniques far beyond what I had learned here in South America. Guatemala is so much about weaving with supplementary weft. and there are so many different styles. Once you learn more about it, you will understand how Guatemalan textiles can be so wonderfully colorful.

In this picture I was weaving the cloth that would become the front and back covers of the journal in which I recorded all the instructions. Even back then I was enjoying creating woven covers for my books. I finished the piece that I had started with my teacher in Guatemala (inset) and used that on the lid of a backstrap loom tool box.

Ah…my weaving space looks so neat and tidy in that picture! I wasn’t living alone back then. Here’s what it looks like now. You can see my book cover cloth on the loom and the rest is all the accompanying creative chaos.

I’ll finish by showing you a picture that Kathy sent me of her warp-faced double weave project. She used some rather soft cotton that she happened to have in her stash and was surprised that it behaved so well. Warp-faced double weave is a dense structure and can be hard on softer yarn so that’s something about which you should be careful when choosing thread for this technique. Crochet cotton with its high twist works very well when you are learning. With experience you could ty branching out to using less hardy materials. Kathy has used motifs from my Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms book but she is a backstrap-loom gal at heart and prefers to weave double weave that way. She is using just two basic sheds as I teach in my inkle loom book.

Warp-faced Double Weave is wonderfully versatile in the range of images that it allows you create…from whimsical birds, butterflies and bunnies to delicate leaf and floral patterns, to the bold angular shapes of Mapuche-style motifs or the more intricate Al Sadu-style patterns of the Bedouin. It’s one of my favorite structures for creating images and lettering.

See you next time!

Backstrap Weaving – It isn’t all in the Wrist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the warp I created for the second band…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until next time….

Backstrap Weaving – Percolating

Ikat! I have been giving myself time to allow the abundance of images and information that I keep finding on ikat to slowly filter so that I can focus on the next project. Without this filtering, there is the tendency to want to try everything in the one project. Another thing that is driving that tendency is the fact that my supply of natural-color 60/2 silk is coming to an end. I had used much more than originally planned in the last ikat project. This project was supposed to be a “sample” which for me is typically pretty small. The project turned into something else all together and will end up hanging on a wall.

Here it is after having been pressed good and hard. That always brings out the sheen of the silk but it has been hard to capture it in a photo.

In a way I am being forced to stop and ponder and allow the ideas to percolate because I was surprised to find that the suppliers of alum that I have always used here in Santa Cruz suddenly don’t carry it any more. I had been planning to dye my next ikat project with cochineal and was depending on being able to find alum. I have yet to find a substitute for alum as the mordant. That brought the plans for the next project to a halt.

Getting cochineal here in the lowlands is usually the tricky bit, not the alum. Cochineal is not used for dyeing here but is sold instead by the ladies in the street markets who carry home remedies. They tell me that it is to be taken as a remedy for susto which I can only understand to mean “fright” or perhaps that could be stretched to mean “anxiety”? Finding cochineal was even trickier this time. The massive street market that lies just two blocks from my home was recently “cleaned up”. All the vendors who normally wander the streets or sit on the sidewalk were ordered to move on. This must have included some of the home remedy vendors.

Asking the wrong vendor brought on a cranky almost offended response. It seems to me that this attitude is somehow part of the Highland-versus-Lowland vibe that is quite strong here in lowland Santa Cruz where certain things associated with the highlands, such as the chewing of coca leaves, are rejected as inferior and “indio”. It appeared that only the vendors from the highlands would have cochineal in their home remedy stalls. In any case, you can see that I was successful in finding someone from whom to buy the little dried beetles.

One down, one to go – alum. I was told that the Mennonites use alum when canning their produce so I will be off to the Mennonite market to see if I can find it there. I have not been to that market before and look forward to it. I am told that it is a market of farming implements and supplies for raising livestock etc.

With those two items in hand, I can start to make some experiments. I wonder what kind of red I will get? I will be happy with pretty much anything except pink. Here’s the color I got with cochineal on my hand spun llama fiber many years ago using an alum pre-mordant. I used it in small double weave, tubular band and complementary-warp pick-up projects.

My challenges for this next ikat project include using a natural dye and tying a much finer pattern. I was lucky to be shown a detailed image of a small section of an ikat textile from Indonesia in which I could actually count the warp threads. I could see that the weaver had tied around groups of six ends to create such a fine and detailed pattern. I could clearly see the three white warp threads in the woven cloth against the morinda-dyed background. WOW.

I know that the hand spun cotton that weaver was using is most likely thicker than the 60/2 silk I have been using. That makes it hard to make a comparison. In my last piece I tied around sections of fourteen ends in the pattern area and around twenty eight ends where I had created broad bands of resist. I would love to know generally how fine the hand spun cotton used in the Indonesian ikat pieces is in terms of wpi.

The other challenge is creating a new pattern to use with the finer tying. That hasn’t been easy….I have been looking around a lot for ideas and there’s just way too much input!

I have sketched out something very loosely based on leaves. Leaves have become one of my signature patterns and so I figured it would be appropriate to do something with stylized leaves. What I have drawn has ended up being so stylized that it may not be recognizable as leaves, but that’s okay. Whether I can transfer my sketch to the warp remains to be seen.

So far, I have worked with steps of fixed height and width to form the diagonal lines in the patterns, all carefully plotted and measured out. All the angles have been the same. The pattern I have sketched will involve a lot more free-form tying. Oh my goodness, what have I done?! I can often get very carried away creating these challenges right up until the moment I see the warp stretched out before me. Then some hasty adjustments are made. I remind myself every time I think I have become ridiculously over ambitious with this new pattern I have sketched that I did, after all, manage to tie a a couple of fairly nice circles some years ago. Let’s wait and see what happens.

The other benefit of taking time-out is that I have had much more time to spend on the book. I still can’t quite see the end in sight but I have made really good progress.

Now, I have something wonderful to show from a weaving friend, Emily Robison. I can’t remember exactly how Emily and I connected but she contacted me online and we were able to meet up on one of my trips away and weave double weave bands together. You can see her already weaving a pattern of her own creation at left.

I asked Emily if she would like to write a couple of paragraphs to share with you about her woven work and her experience learning to weave on a backstrap loom in Micronesia and I will leave the rest of the story for you in her own words….

To my knowledge, the type of weaving that I do is found only in the outer islands of Yap state, in the Federated States of Micronesia — migratory origins unknown. They are a collection of about 16 tiny inhabited low-lying coral islands (possibly all less than one square mile). The culture practiced in the outer islands is very distinct from the main island of Yap — the two cultures have languages of unrelated origins — but they are very intertwined. The islands practice a caste system, and the main island considers outer island people and culture to be either very low caste or other caste, meaning that a main islander wouldn’t go to the homes or eat the food of an outer islander, and main islanders do not weave lava lava.

Photo supplied by Emily Robison of her own non-traditional use of some of the patterning elements she learned with the weavers of the outer islands.

The backstrap woven fabric called lava lava is used in certain patterns as the only form of outer island female dress — a type of wraparound skirt — and in other patterns it is used as part of the traditional male main island dress. It is also used in main islander funeral ceremonies. Therefore it’s an important trade item from the outer islands to the main islands, but main islanders consider it taboo to participate in any part of the manufacture.

Photo supplied by Emily Robison of her current work which she says is a reproduction of one of her teacher’s pieces except for the supplementary-weft pattern.

Traditionally, lava lavas were woven of banana and hibiscus bark fibers and naturally dyed in reds and blacks (maybe other colors, but I haven’t seen them), but this practice has shifted in favor of commercially available thread from China. This transition is less than 50 years old. The traditional fabrics weren’t warp-faced, I don’t think — at least the few I’ve seen weren’t — but today’s lava lavas are.

Silk is too expensive, wool too hot, and cotton doesn’t hold up to the production, so they exclusively used polyester (but I’ve heard rumors of people incorporating more cotton in the past 10 years). Their patterns are pretty distinct and uniform. People can use many colors (reds are off limits unless used as an accent color or on the edges), but the two types of patterns are the lava lavas with large fields of solid color and accents on the edges and in the middle. These are the ones that have a supplemental weft, and an example is the one that I am currently weaving. (Emily tells me that the supplementary-weft patterning technique shows pattern on both faces of the cloth. Here is a view of the back of the cloth of her current piece showing the black supplementary-weft pattern.)

Another example is the style with 6 or 7 contrasting stripes (I don’t know when one would be chosen over the other — 6 is more common) on a colorful background. The stripes are made of two complementary colors and some patterning.

The ones for men are just black and white, 6 or 7 striped.

Image of a Yapese man’s lava lava taken by Laverne from the website of worthpoint.com

Single-thread floats in the green section on the upper face of the cloth.

Much to the chagrin of my Yapese host family, I studied with outer islanders and wove in secret for about 18 months. It was a real taboo thing to do and it didn’t make me any friends… so I don’t know as much as I could have learned if I’d been living with an outer island family.

The patterns are made with two sticks that control the floats — one for the right face, and one for the reverse face. The warp is always continuous, and the tension rod loop, string heddles, and pattern floats are all created in the warping process.

(Note from Laverne: I just love that extra heddle peg sitting there so neatly like that. If you are curious about how heddles are made during the warping process, I can show you how my Montagnard (Vietnames hilltribe) backstrap weaving teachers do it. It’s probably not exactly the same way as the Yapese weavers do it but it will give you an idea for now. There’s a video showing how Ju Nie does it embedded in this blog post followed by a video I made slowing the process down so that you can more easily see how it works.)

Lava lavas must be long enough to cover a woman from upper hips to knees (it is taboo to show off any thigh). and so they are usually about 26 inches wide and 60 inches long. Once cut, the strings of the fringe are kept long to create a kind of modesty curtain between the legs. They’re worn by wrapping them in half around the body, and then pinching the two sides together at the right hip and folding the fringe inward to sit between the legs. They’re usually tied on with a belt, but some ladies just tuck them in.

You can follow Emily’s work via her Instagram account: @thewovenworld. She is hoping to create a website soon too.

To finish, I have a few things to show you from my online weaving friends….

Kathleen Frtiz recently received a Guatemalan backstrap loom and has taken off on her backstrap weaving adventure as if she had been born for it. This is only her third piece as far as I can tell. It is woven in fine cotton and she is pleased with how surprisingly pliant it is even before it has been wet finished. She used this piece to experiment with patterning with supplementary weft using the patterning sticks and techniques that I describe in this tutorial.

Nancy Ayton made sweet hanging ornaments from her Andean Pebble Weave bands. The deer head motif is her own creation. I love it when people start designing their own patterns. The owl and bird motif is from my Complementary-warp Pattern Book and the knot-work pattern is from More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns.

Nora Dereli is using her inkle loom to weave one of several knot-work patterns that are charted in More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns. This is a motif that Louise Ström weaves in one of the structures that are woven using tablets. I translated the motif to the Andean Pebble Weave structure.

Susan Bratt finished weaving a guitar strap on her backstrap loom using the Andean Pebble Weave structure. The pattern is from the Complementary-warp Pattern Book.

Wendy Garrity completed what she tells me is her first silk-on-silk wrist band using the supplementary-weft patterning technique known as sampa in Bhutan. The multi-color spots of color that appear between the floats of supplementary weft are so pretty. Wendy studied weaving on a backstrap loom and various traditional patterning techniques while living and working in Bhutan and leads textile tours there every year. Her website is Textile Trails.

Gregory W and I wove double weave bands together and she came up with this lovely band with her own original design shortly after. Her guild had challenged members to use these colors in a project and this was Gregory’s contribution.

Marilyn Albright and I have never met but I feel that we are bound to one of these days in her movements between Alaska and Mexico. She has been experimenting with Bedouin al’ouerjan patterns using my tutorials here on this blog and adding her own twist to the traditional pattern .

And here’s one more from Priscilla Bradburn who wove this band after learning Andean Pebble Weave from my book Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms. She has taken flat-top S hooks, hearts, diamonds and other basic shapes and combined them in her own unique way to create a new pattern of her own. This and her creative use of color has produced a beautiful band!

Let’s hope my hunt for alum is successful otherwise it will be back to the synthetic dyes for me. I wonder what other interesting things I will see at the Mennonite farmers’ market.

Until next time…

Backstrap Weaving – Order and Disorder

It all started a few years ago when my weaving friend Bhakti gave me a loom with a circular warp that she had been using to study with a group of Karen backstrap weavers. Her teachers had created the warp and set it up for her. It seems that they used the sticks that they would normally use for their much wider projects. The coil rod, heddle sticks and shed rod were clumsily long for this narrow warp. Because I was traveling, the first thing I did was leave behind the large piece of long pvc pipe that they had been using as the shed rod. It was way too bulky to pack. I saved the space it had been occupying with a sturdy piece of cord.

I loved the simple backstrap made from a piece of plastic Thai rice sack. A halved stick of bamboo fills the seam at the two sides so that the strap doesn’t fold in on itself. The sword was also wonderful as was the forked dowel rod that had been neatly split in two. The unwoven warp, and later the cloth itself, get clamped between the two pieces of that split rod and then rolled with the help of another rod to hold the circular warp in place. This stops the warp from slipping around the two end beams as the weaver beats. It was too precious a piece to leave behind even though it was heavy and bulky. The simple temple, which consisted of a flat stick with pins taped to ends, was also a treasure.

In case you are not familiar with what I mean by a circular warp, compare the two warps in this next picture….

The warp with the blue and yellow pattern is circular. You start weaving at one point and continue around the circle until you arrive back at the place where you started. The entire warp slides and rotates around its two end beams every time you advance the warp. This means that the weaver always stays more or less seated at the same distance from the end of the warp throughout the project.

The other warp is the one that I more typically use…a single-plane warp. You start weaving at one end and finish at the other end. The cloth is rolled up as the weaving advances. The weaver, therefore, moves closer and closer to the end beam as the weaving advances.

I learned about the use of circular warps on backstrap looms with the Montagnard (Vietnamese hilltribe) backstrap weavers with whom I studied some years ago and have used this kind of warp a few times in my own work. It is particularly handy when I want to weave a piece that is too long to fit in my weaving space on a single-plane set-up, like the purple scarf project below….

Here’s another long warp that I set up in circular fashion as a demonstration piece…

Above, you can clearly see the circular nature of the warp my Montagnard teacher, Ju Nie, is using.

One thing I have struggled with a little when using a circular warp is getting the warp well clamped and fixed in position in order to start the weaving. My aim has always been to clamp the warp so that I can start weaving as close to all the knots (where I changed colors in the warp) as possible. This creates the smallest amount of loom waste. This has always involved a lot of fiddling and messing about, for me in my inexperience, with the threads slipping and sliding in their circle around the two end beams so that the knots eventually got very much misaligned. My warp that had come off the warping stakes in such good order would end up in complete disorder! Eventually I would get it clamped but there would be much more waste than I had anticipated because the knots had slipped so much out of alignment. Part of the problem is that I didn’t insert the coil rod while winding the warp. A coil rod in a circular warp has a very useful stabilizing effect even before you can actually start weaving.

I noticed that the Karen weavers set up their warp in a slightly different way which keeps the color changes in the warp perfectly aligned and in good order no matter how much messing about you do. They use two coil rods….one in the typical position beyond the shed rod and the other is positioned at the point in the warp where one would start weaving. This second one creates even more stability and locks everything at the color changes into position.

This is the way I would go about winding a warp if I wanted to replicate the set-up of the Karen warp I was given…

Of course, I can’t say that this is the way they did it themselves.

The two blackened circles are the two fixed stakes that hold the warp tension. Ca = the coil rod at the ”start” of the warp. Cb = the coil rod in its typical position beyond the shed rod. The stakes marked X hold the cross. I know that the Karen weavers use a hollow rod of large girth (H) to measure the length of the heddles that they create while they wind the warp. Later, a stick of much smaller girth is inserted in the tube. The tube is slid out from beneath the heddles and the thinner stick remains behind as the heddle rod.

I could see from examining the Ca coil rod in my Karen warp that the first and last ends of warp were tied directly to the rod. At a color change, the tail of the old color would be left on standby until it was later called into use again. The new color would be tied to the rod. It all looks a bit disorderly there in the picture below but, wow, what a difference it makes to getting the warp nicely clamped and positioned so that the start of the weaving can be as orderly as possible!

I placed a stiff cardboard strip in one of the sheds at the coil rod which gave me a nice straight and even base against which to beat and started weaving from there.

In the very first picture I showed of the warp you may have noticed that there were two shuttles. The warp had been set up for some continuous patterning with supplementary-weft. The green weft was used for the ground weave and the white weft was the supplemental patterning thread. The warp included two patterning rods that raised certain warp threads in order to form the simple repeating pattern. These were placed in the same way that my Guatemalan weaving teachers had shown me.

I wasn’t really in love with the pattern and I also didn’t care for the fact that the ground weave was more warp-dominant than warp-faced so, once I had decided that I was going to actually sit and weave this piece (about three years after having received it!), I removed the patterning sticks and un-wove the six inches or so of cloth that had been started.

I used a thick piece of dowel to replace the pvc shed rod that I had removed. And then I put sticks in the original cross to get an idea of how wide this warp would be if I wove it as warp-faced rather than warp-dominant.

I am in the habit of first weaving a sample with new-to-me yarn before taking on a major project like this so that I know exactly what width to expect. That wasn’t an option this time. By putting in cross sticks and gently sliding them back and forth along the warp until everything settles, I can then push the threads around and get a pretty good idea of the where these threads will want to sit in my hands when I am in the driver’s seat. It’s worth noting that ten different weavers could work on this warp and all create different widths of good warp-faced cloth. The threads will behave in different ways with different weavers at the loom according to how how much tension each places on the wrap, how they beat and how they handle the weft. Something that was a little unusual for me was the fact that the warp was made up of doubled threads.

The first thing I had to come to terms with was the lack of order in the green strips. I am a bit nutty when it comes to symmetry. The green strips were all different widths. Well, the fact is that I didn’t come to terms with it and I cut and pulled out ends so that the two outer strips matched. I then made the two inner ones match too. They were slightly wider than the two outer ones. One white stripe was missing a couple of ends but I decided I would live with that!

ABOVE: In “jammies” on a wintry day trying to decide what to do about those uneven green bits!

From order to disorder….I then decided that the little supplementary-weft patterns that I planned to use, needed to be scattered randomly along the length of the piece. I don’t do random very well and every time I try, I find myself unconsciously slipping back into a pattern. I pushed ahead trying to be as little controlled by a need for symmetry and orderly patterning as I could.

There was plenty of warp to work with and so I decided the first part would just be about seeing if I had set the width correctly. Then I would decide on the motifs I would use, the material for the supplementary weft and the colors. The warp didn’t come with enough weft material to weave the complete project and so I used some white thread I have in my stash. You can see the turns of the white weft along the edges. A bit later I discovered that I did in fact have some green in my stash that almost perfectly matched the warp color.

Below you can see the fun moment when the ”starting coil rod” rounds the far beam and starts heading towards you rather than away from you. You finally get to catch just a glimpse of what you have woven so far….

The warp is in good order which is more than can be said about the contents of my cupboard!

And getting closer….and then closer….

In the picture above left you can see that I am using a shed rod attached with rubber bands to a second stick. These two form the system that I call the ”twisty sticks” and twisting them is what helps me to open a nice clean heddle shed without having the scrape the heddles along the warp. This way of operating the loom is one I learned from a backstrap weaver in Peru and is just one of many methods that I have seen backstrap weavers use.

In the picture on the right, you can see the flat stick (it’s actually a shuttle that I am re-purposing) that I kept permanently positioned in the ”back” shed at the shed rod. I would pull it down towards the heddle and then tilt it on its side to raise and clear that shed through the heddles. Then I would leave it lying flat once again within the shed when it wasn’t in use.

Getting veeeeery close….The two coil rods and the shed rod (I am using a two-stick shed rod aka ”twisty sticks”) are now so close together that if I wish to continue, I’ll need to change the large shed rod to a much slimmer one, which is what I did. With that, I was able to squeeze in another couple of inches.

And, this is where I called it quits….

All sticks have been removed and you can see the unwoven warp that connects the start of the woven cloth to the end. What a mess that is!

And here is the cloth straight off the loom….

One idea I have is to lay pieces of the cloth side by side, joining them with decorative stitching, and make a bag of some sort. I will let the cloth lie around for a while and see what other ideas come along.

Here are the simple sticks that went into this project from top to bottom…

far beam,

forked split rod (these are the ones that came with the warp but I ended up using the pair below them which I had bought from another backstrap weaver from Burma. They are much lighter in weight.),

shuttle (I didn’t use the stick shuttle that came with the warp as I am not fond of that kind of shuttle),

sword/beater (this is an old favorite of mine from back in 1995. It was originally a very long shuttle for my Navajo loom which was cut down and beveled to become a simple sword…love it!),

shed rod,

heddle rod and second heddle -”protection” rod,

starter coil rod (Ca)….interesting how it ended up a bit bowed!,

coil rod (Cb),

second shed stick which together with the shed rod formed the ”twisty sticks”.

Oh, and there was a second rod (not pictured) that was used together with the split rod to roll and secure the near end of the warp. I didn’t feel any need for a temple.

One other thing worth mentioning is that I have a new appreciation for the way my Guatemalan weaving teachers taught me to enclose the warp threads in heddles. This is the same method that the Karen weavers use and is also used by Yan, who brought her Li-style backstrap loom to show me, and Ju Nie my Montagnard teacher. I’ll expand on this in another post after I have done some experiments.

In the meantime, I must write to Bhakti and show her what became of her wonderful gift!

Backstrap Weaving – The View from the Driver’s Seat

Twice during my recent trip away I got to sit in the ”driver’s seat” to experience what a weaver from another culture sees as they sit at their backstrap loom gazing down the length of their warp.

First, I got to spend the day with Yan Zhang, a woman from mainland China who went to study with backstrap weavers of the Li minority group who live on Hainan Island, China. She kindly brought her loom and warping frame and we, along with my good friend Deanna, talked about all things backstrappy for a good part of the day. You may remember Yan from a previous post of mine in which I embedded a beautiful video that she made of herself warping and weaving with her teacher on Hainan Island. I had also written about a loom and patterning process from Hainan Island when I crossed paths with Megan in this post. some time ago.

Unrolling the warp and feeling excited as the beautiful cloth and tools are revealed.

Soaking up everything Yan has to tell me about the process…and hoping that I might have a chance to try!

Here’s my view as I sit at Yan’s foot-tensioned loom with its circular warp. While I have woven many a time using my big toe to tension my warp, this was the first time I had had the opportunity to sit at one of these awesome foot-tensioned backstrap looms. Yan’s legs are shorter than mine which meant that we needed to unroll the woven cloth from the beam and adjust length. We didn’t take the time to get it quite right and, as a result, I didn’t have the full range of movement in my feet that was necessary to be able to operate the loom comfortably. Nevertheless I got to use the loom and throw some shots of weft and it was thrilling!

The pattern structure is what I call ”simple warp-floats”. Floats form the patterns on one face of the cloth but not on the other. The loom was set up to create all the pattern sheds with heddle rods and other sticks in place and so no pick-up was required. I loved having my feet be part of the loom. I loved the feeling of curling my toes around the beams. Of course it requires lots of practice to make just the right amount of tension adjustments with movements of the feet. Quite often, I moved my feet too much and had the far beam slide down off the balls of my feet.

Look at Yan’s feet flexed toward her so that she can relax tension enough on the warp to enable her to raise a heddled shed. She is adding the threads that are held on her pattern stick to the main heddled shed.

The tools that Yan used were all beautiful in their simplicity. She told us that some weavers on Hainan Island have introduced materials such as pvc pipe and I often see these also being used in the highlands here in Bolivia and Peru. Yan’s tools are all natural traditional materials.

Like backstrap weavers in many regions around the world, the shuttle is a simple stick. I love the shape the yarn takes as it is wound onto the shuttle and Yan showed us how the Li weavers create that. Look at that gorgeous sword on the floor! The heddle rods are doubled pieces of bamboo and weavers look long and hard to find bamboo that grows in such a way. Once found, these pieces very much cherished. They are formed when a thin off-shoot of bamboo grows parallel to a piece of larger girth. The larger piece holds the heddles while the thinner piece closes around them and secures them. Yan does not use a temple. When I asked her about that, she indicated that the coil rod is what is used to help maintain consistent width.

When we asked Yan about the thread she was using we all had a chuckle when she said it came from the craft chain store Joann! My Vietnamese weaving friends in the USA were never quite comfortable with the thread that they bought locally. Whenever a family member traveled back to Vietnam they were asked to bring back thread.

Yan showed us her handwoven skirt fabric and the way it is wrapped and pleated to fit the user.

Yan also learned how to spin cotton with her Li teachers and showed us a beautiful piece that she has woven using her own hand spun cotton. Here it is removed from the loom still in its uncut circle…

One of the other many fascinating things for me was the frame that Li weavers use to measure their warps. The loom can be set up anywhere and held between the body and the feet. In the same way, the warp can be measured anywhere on a simple hand-held device!

The particular warping path shown in my photo is what Yan calls ”four point” and creates the shortest possible warp. She showed me how to wind this shortest warp for what she says might be used to make a scarf. We separated the colors at the cross sticks in much the same way I was taught to do using my four warping stakes. The heddles are only made once the warp is off the frame and on the beams. However, the threads are turned in such a way as the warp is wound on the frame to allow the immediate insertion of the coil rod when the warp is removed. You can see the way the warp threads wrap around the upper right corner of the frame.

I shared some of my weaving with Yan and we compared warp-float techniques as well as the techniques used to create patterns using supplementary weft. She liked my wrist band with my leaf pattern in supplementary weft and I was happy that she accepted it as a gift. Here she is wearing it while warping.

She showed us some fabric that was woven by her teacher which is considered particularly precious because it is embedded with slivers of mica. You can see one sliver glinting in the light in the next picture. Follow that column down and you will clearly see the pieces of mica sitting under the red warp threads.

It was an absolute delight meeting and weaving with Yan. It was just a few months ago that I first saw her beautiful video on Youtube. I am grateful to my friend Deanna for opening up her home for this visit. Deanna is my backstrap weaving buddy and she of course was just as interested to meet Yan and spend the day with her.

A week or so later, I got to sit in the driver’s seat at another backstrap loom, this time from Guatemala. Susan had been to Guatemala and bought a loom with a couple of yards of cotton cloth already woven and wound onto its beam. She asked me to give her some tips on how to operate the loom so that she could finish off the weaving.

Single-layer warps are used in Guatemala rather than the circular ones that the Li weavers use. This one is made up of lively cotton stripes. Two colors have been used to create horizontal bars on one half of the warp. There is even some variegated thread in use on one edge. Variegated thread was also used to make the colorful heddles. Susan did not know for what this piece of cloth was intended but I think the sturdy cotton fabric could be made into tote bags.

Unlike the Li weavers, Guatemalan weavers use a simple temple which is made up of a length of bamboo with open ends that spans the width of the cloth and two small nails. The piece of bamboo sits below the fabric. The nails are pushed through the edges of the fabric from top to bottom and then turned into the open ends of the bamboo.

The loom came with a good ol’ hefty sword…not as smooth and polished with use as the sword Yan was using but it certainly does its job in propping open the sheds and beating the weft firmly into place. I used the two cross sticks that are typical in Guatemalan backstrap looms as ”twisty sticks” to help raise the heddle shed.

One thing I found particularly interesting was the way the weaver had settled the far end of her warp. This is the second time I have seen this. My Guatemalan teachers taught me to start out by weaving an inch or so at the far end of the loom before turning it around and starting from the other end. The inch of weaving at the far end locks the two layers of threads together around the far beam and also sets the width at the far end of the loom. I noticed that the weaver who was using the loom that Susan bought had simply placed a metal rod in the second cross, lodged it up against the far beam and firmly lashed it into place. This is a quicker and far less fiddly way of achieving the same result, although perhaps not quite as pretty!

Yes, I had a very nice time sitting in the driver’s seat of these two looms and am so grateful for these opportunities. I think both Yan and I show it in our faces…the joy of weaving on a backstrap loom! The wonder of “being the loom”!

Right now, I am happily weaving on a 180-inch-long narrow warp, creating the straps for my blue pocket bag. I bought the wool yarn I needed to finish the project while I was away. It’s just a plain blue strap in the sturdy intermesh structure and it is a nice way to get back into the loom with an easy task which gives me head space to plan out my next project while I weave. I will get to use my shoulder bag with its quirky pocket on my next trip away in late July.

Oh, and if you happen to subscribe to Spin Off magazine, the summer issue has an article by Devin Helman to which I was excited to be invited to contribute.

You will also see Sara Lamb’s contribution to Devin’s article, Honest Cloth, as well as words of spinning wisdom from Kristin Merritt whose work I often show here on my blog.

And…here’s the ten-month grey hair update.

DON’T FORGET: While Patternfish sales will cease on May 31st, you still have until June 30 to download and save your purchases to a safe place. I’ll be announcing the new home for my ebooks in my next post.