Ah, the Australian summer….while my weaving friends in North America and Europe post pictures of snow drifts and talk about extremely low temperatures…swathed in sweaters and blankets with snow falling outside in the -25 degree cold….the Australian cricketers are out in the field in their whites under the summer sun winning back the Ashes and I get to enjoy a little lakeside barefoot weaving…. I stole a little time to warp and weave a band down on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin in Australia’s capital city, Canberra. Behind me, athletes were competing in a half-Ironman event in which my nephew won the amateur section and placed 6th overall. Having finished in just over four hours, he took a cooling dip in the lake while I wove and the other 1600 or so competitors continued to strain and sweat in the summer sun running along the lakeshore. They must have hated seeing me there as they ran on by. I was weaving a wool tubular band on which to hang the little button baubles I recently learned to make . I think I will turn them into a Christmas tree decoration and leave them behind on my brother’s tree as a memento of my visit.
Here they are nestled amongst some gum tree bark.In keeping with the Australian theme, I decided to try a two-color version inspired by the native Australian flower, the scarlet banksia. The banksia has the same ridged appearance as my wee baubles. I had red wool but no white so, yellow would have to do.Use your imagination and you might see a resemblance in the two-color bauble in the center 😉I will add these little guys to my repertoire of finishing techniques for woven pouches. Smaller versions of these will make cute dangling pom poms.
After the race and back at our Canberra trailer park, we stepped out for a walk and found these guys happily grazing just meters from our door….there’s a mumma with her joey crammed into her pouch…white cockatoos screeched by in the soft evening light and kookaburras “laughed” unseen in the distance.
Of course, it was only at the end of our three-day stay that I discovered two amazing exhibits that were on in Canberra…darn! Well, you can’t have everything.Now I am back in Sydney and I need to get to work and weave a cell phone pouch for my sister-in-law. I hope she doesn’t read my blog as it is supposed to be a surprise. I can just scrape together enough wool left over from my travel stash to make this work.
I have used this wool before for very narrow band projects and loved how well it worked straight off the skein without having to respin it. I wasn’t sure, however, how it would stand up to a wider warp so, here is my chance to test it. Would it be too sticky for warp-faced weaving? Would it be too weak and break with the abrasion from the heddles and the scraping of the beater?
Here’s the simple pebble weave pattern taking shape. So far, so good! There is no sign of weakness and the sheds open quite easily. This is enough for today…Deb will be home from work soon and I am doing this in secret.
Back in 2008, I wove a pebble weave bag for her and was surprised to return to see it still going strong. It is her favorite travel bag and has been to Dubai, Egypt, Turkey, Spain, India and Switzerland with her. Next year it will go to China where my nephew will represent Australia in the World Long Distance Triathlon Championship. Look out for him! I wish I could go too. I would love to take the train from Beijing to Lhasa.I also got to see some hangings that I had made for family members some years ago on previous visits…The one on the left is an embedded double weave piece with typical bird motifs of Potosi, Bolivia and the other one has pebble weave Guaraní patterns of lowland Bolivia in the center and a highland design on the edges. I had made that for my mum. It has inspired me to start planning a double weave piece for my red, black and white wall hanging series but first I want to weave a triathlon banner for my nephew’s bedroom wall.
And now for some more inspiration….
A new Facebook friend of mine from India sent me a picture of this piece of textile which he tells me was woven on a backstrap loom.
It looks like twining or soumak in the middle of a piece of warp-faced weaving.It is part of women’s costume from the ADI tribe of Arunachal Pradesh in northeast India. And this makes me keen to get into the soumak book that I recently bought and experiment with embedded designs like these. I have tried embedded twining in Bedouin design work that I have done, as in the example below.
Julia has been “intermesh-ing’ and inspiring the Ravelry group members with her beautiful projects. As always her pieces are beautifully finished.
The piece on the left has both Mexican and Japanese influenced patterns which work so beautifully together. The piece on the right has a motif that I recognize from Bhutanese weaving. Julia has adapted it to the intermesh technique. It is a very elongated and slightly different version of one that I chose to weave with supplementary weft some time ago.
I learned the intermesh structure from the weavers in Peru who taught me Andean Pebble Weave. They used it to weave single-color borders for their pebble weave patterns.
It was only when I had spent time with my Guaraní teacher much later, that I discovered that the two-color patterning technique that she called moisy was actually the same intermesh structure woven with two colors.
At left you can see the first piece I wove after this discovery with Angela, my Guarani weaving teacher. It is a fun technique and realtively fast as it uses two sets of string heddles…every second weft pass is a free ride!, that is, no pick-up is required.
Now, I have an exquisite piece of wood working, precision, balance and engineering to show you. My friend Barbara was given the gift of a new spinning wheel and stool to celebrate the completion of her Master Weaver certificate. This was created by Tom Golding…anyone who is into spindles must know this name and must have drooled over his fine pieces of work at some point! Tom’s wife and sons all had their hands in the finished product.
I will leave you with one of my friend, Annie MacHale’s latest creations. I never get tired of looking at the straps that Annie produces on her inkle loom. She never weaves two the same and has the knack of creating just the right custom pieces for her clients.
This one one is stunning!
Let’s see if I can make it back to Bolivia before the next blog post. As much as I hate to leave, all good things must come to end and there are wall hangings to be woven, a long list of things to research, patterns to be charted and books to be read. Keep your fingers crossed for me that I make it back home without too many interruptions. Goodness knows where I will be spending Christmas Day!
Show and Tell and tell and tell…get the word out, spread the obsession. It is exciting to be all the way over here in Australia and run across this…
The Center for Traditonal Textiles in Cusco (CTTC) reaches across the world, showing and telling, promoting and sustaining the work of weavers on simple looms in remote communities of highland Peru. This piece was bought from founder Nilda Callañaupa herself when she visited Bothwell, Tasmania in 2007. One of the people who came to weave with me a few weeks ago here in Sydney had been to Peru and came with bags and pieces still on the loom with those distinctive Chinchero patterns woven with handspun naturally dyed yarn. One of the other ladies immediately picked up her smartphone and started searching for the site from which she could buy these items. Show and Tell…spread the word!
From the CTTC’s Facebook page
One of the greatest Show and Tell events in my world of weaving was held last month in Cusco. The CTTC hosted its second Tinkuy de Tejedores, a gathering of weavers from across the Americas and even from as far away as Asia.
I couldn’t go this time but have heard a few reports from friends.
Dorinda, who works with weavers in Cochabamba, Bolivia went with one of my weaving teachers, Maxima. Maxima took workshops and learned three new figures in a backstrap weaving class as well as the ñawi awapa edging. It was something she had been wanting to learn for years. Her sister knew how to do it but I guess she hasn’t been nearby to teach it to Maxima. Finally, the curiosity has been satisfied and I look forward to seeing Maxima put it to use.
Maxima and a group of Bolivian weavers at Tinkuy 2010
Dorinda’s PAZA website is currently down but she tells me that she has four blog posts prepared with details of the trip ready to go up once the problem is fixed.
Who doesn’t like Show and Tell? In the guild meetings that I have attended so far in the US and Australia, this has always been my favorite part. I am a member of several online weaving groups and we do our share of show and tell on a daily basis. Some of the larger groups, like Warped Weavers on Ravelry, can have dozens of projects presented in a single day. There is always something to learn. But, of course there is nothing like being able to actually handle the fabrics and yarns and listen to the weavers and spinners’ enthusiastic descriptions and explanations.
I spent a nice Saturday in the lower Blue Mountains last Saturday at the home of weaver Helen (author of the electronic newsletter, Weavers Forum). Helen has a nice group of about fifteen mountain weavers and spinners who regularly meet at her home for fiber talk, lots of laughter, occasional workshops and, of course, show and tell. That’s yet another reason for me to consider settling in the mountains should I ever come back to Australia to live permanently….the aromas and colors of the bush, the bird song, the cicadas, the coolness,….and a lovely community of weavers!
Lorette brought along a backstrap loom that she and a few friends had put together some years ago with its unfinished project. Just when I am taking home tools for knotted pile weaving and wondering if I am mad to be thinking about doing it on a backstrap loom, along comes Lorette with her Show and Tell. She showed me that yes, it is do-able and that she was able to produce nice firm and well beaten rows of cut pile. I wonder if she has found the inspiration to finish this project now.
I was happy to receive the most beautiful gift from Helen as I left after a fun day spent with her weaving friends…
My camera has somewhat softened the pretty tones of green in this scarf but I hope that it gives you an idea of its wonderful flowing liquid silkiness. This was made by Helen in an advancing twill structure. This was Show and Tell and I got to keep it! It is just the kind of light weight scarf that I can really use. Beautiful!
Yesterday I went out to Dace’s home. Dace had invited me to her home for a morning of dyeing.
The Mission: take home cotton yarn that had been dyed with native Australian plants.
I would like to weave something that represents my trip and this seemed like a good way to start. Fortunately, I had taught myself from an experience many years ago that cotton and wool take color very differently. I had been wooed by the sight of the most amazing shade of orange that Dace had achieved when dyeing wool with leaves from a certain kind of eucalyptus (see left). I knew not to expect anything like this kind of intensity from cotton.
Two of the ladies at the gathering at Helen’s house advised me to mordant my thread with diluted soy milk which I did. Dace’s home filled with the gorgeous aroma of eucalyptus as the pots boiled on the stove. It drove her husband and cat away for the day! You can see the tree from which Dace took leaves and bark below right. She told me that it is one of the “box” varieties of eucalypt.
As the pots, one with bark and the other with leaves boiled away, we did a lot of Show and Tell. Dace showed me some yarn that she dyed with the same variety of eucalypt…
Again, that gorgeous orange! And again I reminded myself that I was not expect anything like that result. Still, I couldn’t help hoping…
This was another fascinating piece of Show and Tell. Dace had taken the NSW guild’s summer school class lat January on buttons and produced all these over the course of four days. I was especially interested in the ball-like buttons upper left which so resembled the little coil stitch pom-poms that Bolivian weavers sometimes have dangling form their ch’uspas, coca leaf bags. Dace gave me enough information to be able to come home and make one…fun! The Bolivian pom poms can be made in multiple colors whereas these ball-like buttons cannot.
There you can see my button (made with wool) nestled between my dyed skeins. The skens on the left came from the leaf pot and the other from the bark. Okay, so they are not the most brilliant tones in the world but…mission accomplished. I have cotton dyed with native Australian plant material. And I will take home the happy smells of the Austraian bush which have not faded after rinsing. Dace told me to use vinegar with the rinse but I didn’t, not wanting to lose the eucalyptus smell.
Those buttons! I am on a road trip to Canberra tomorrow to watch my nephew compete in a triathlon. Guess what I’ll be doing in the car and probably during the race!
Dace is Latvian and, while talking about both our backgrounds, she came out with some Latvian bands that she had bought on a trip to her homeland in 2011. These are all woven with supplemental warps (and now I realize that we are probably not looking at the “good” face of the one on the left).
I love the simple border on the third band from the left…so simple and so very effective.
Dace showed me pictures of Latvian mittens and I loved this one with its hook design…a hook and its reflection…so like a classic Andean weaving motif which I am sure that many of you will recognize.
Speaking of Latvian bands, I made contact online with Sanita who very recently started a blog on Latvian band weaving. She is slowly constructing it and it promises to be very informative. So far, she has included pictures of bands with pick-up patterns using supplemental warps as well as (and this make me very excited) those which have used what I call the Andean Pebble Weave structure.
Sanita confirmed the stucture by sending me charts of some of the patterns. I think I am edging a little closer to finding an answer to my questions about the use of this structure in the belts of the Russian Old Believers.
Well, I am off to make some more button/pom poms and can’t wait to have some dangling from my next woven pouch. I miss my loom and my big weaving…this is the next best thing until I get back to Bolivia.
Speaking of pom poms, I will leave you with one last picture. I uncovered a relic from my past while going through boxes of “stuff” here in Australia. This is possibly the only surviving piece from the little knitting machine endeavor I had in my early 20s. I used to make hats and headbands by the dozens for skiers. It seems like I might have been trying to use up odds and ends of left over colors in this one! The thing that I like is the little South American-like bird motif that I chose to include. I have no idea about the origin of that motif but I think it is fun to see that many many years before South America and weaving became a part of my life, I had a definite interest in these kinds of patterns.
A report from Down Under with some news and novelties….
My brother has been keeping this piece of knotted pile weaving for me for many years. How it came into his hands is a long story which I have told on this blog before. All we need to know is that there is a weaver out there somewhere in Sydney who created this piece of amazingly dense cut pile weaving and I wish I knew who it was. On top of the piece you can see the tools which are used for this weaving technique. I got them some time ago from a gentleman in South Australia who was studying the cut pile technique with an Afghani weaver. Through him I was able to buy the tools from his teacher. They have been on quite a journey….from Afghanistan to Australia and now on to Bolivia.
Some other “stuff”that backstrap weavers may find interesting…I discovered that Japanese chopsticks make pretty good pick-up sticks for lifting warps when doing weft inlay as well as for hooking the supplementary weft and pulling it through the shed as my teacher, Lydia, is doing below.
Fr Kyriakos, who lives here in Australia, cut and beautifully finished some forked sticks for me so I can take back some pieces of Australia to use in my backstrap weaving. Forked sticks are sometimes used by weavers in Peru, as seen at left, as an aid to opening the hedddle shed. The weaver is twisting the forked stick (which acts to tighten the upper layer of threads), leaning forward to relax tension on the lower layer of threads and lifting the heddles.
I have been hunting for just the right forked stick! The implement on the right in the picture above is actually a pair of wooden tongs that I found in a knick knack shop in Vermont. Lausanne gave it to me as a gift. It seemed like a good useful souvenir and will serve well as my tanka (Quechua for fork) when I weave the ñawi awapa tubular band.
It seems that a good forked stick is not that easy to come by even for the Andean weavers….
This weaver told me that she had broken her tanka while weaving her ñawi awapa and, rather than hunt for another, had simply bandaged it up.
The other little novelty seen above is releasable cable ties. I have recenly taken to using cable ties to lash my warp to the loom bar and the fact that the ties can now be easy to release and, therefore, reuse is great news.
As usual, when I am traveling, textiles from near and far just seem to fall into my lap. Kind folks bring these things along to guild meetings and other gatherings and thus give me the opportunity to examine and enjoy them.
This is the second time in recent months that a piece like this has come my way…gorgeous light cotton open weave with motifs created with supplementary weft ….from Guatemala. This is just like the little sample piece that I bought on its loom at the Santa Fe market. It was even more impressive in this larger version.Panels of this cloth are sewn together to make huipiles (blouses). Weavers in the community from which this fabric came, embroider the edges of the neckline and sleeves.
The thread on the loom was sized and was quite stiff. It was lovely to be able to feel the softness of the cloth in the finished huipil and see how much the open airy weave had closed after washing.
So, here I am in Australia looking at Guatemalan weaving. But, I also got to look at backstrap woven fabric from one of Australia’s near neighbors….Timor Leste, East Timor. Kelcie came to weave with me at home and brought along just a few of the textiles that she bought on a tour she recently took on the island of East Timor.
Picture from the Wikipedia page on “Tais”
The pieces were all warp-faced and were either ikat or patterned with warp floats on one face.
The Alola Foundation, in the capital city of Dili, was estabished to help improve the lives of women and childern in Timor Leste and marketing products made from handwoven cloth is just one of their activities.
Traditional cloth that is used for men and women’s clothing is known as tais. Take a look at the Wikipedia page on Tais to read more about the use and significance of this cloth in Timorese culture.
This piece depicts a crocodile in ikat, the creature on which the creation legend of the island is based.
Kelcie’s collection included several long narrow pieces, like the one below with yellow warp float patterns, known as selandang which are worn around the neck.
The ETWA Foundation website has pagesthat cover the weaving processes starting with the preparation and spinning of the cotton, the futus (ikat process), warping and weaving.
This book, which was produced by Alola and UNESCO to accompany an exhibit of textiles woven with the futus technique, is available as a free download here.
The folks at the Handweavers and Spinners Guild of NSW have been wonderful.
This has been my first visit to Australia since trying to become a full-time weaver and my first contact with the guild.
I was invited to a gathering of spinners the day after I arrived in Sydney and I took myself along before jet lag could set in. It was a dreary rainy day in Sydney and I thought that no one was going to show up as I sat alone in the church hall. What I hadn’t found was the clear sign that indicated that all the fibery folk were atually upstairs happily carding, spinning, chatting, drinking mimosas! showing-and-telling and celebrating the last meeting of the year.
There I met Dace and I had the sudden idea of weaving something to commemorate my Australian visit. I asked her if there was any fabric or material or weave structure that would be considered classically Australian. It was hard to come up with something. And then Dace had the idea of dyeing some of my yarn with native Australian trees, instead. Brilliant idea! And so I will be off to Dace’s place for a dyeing session next week.
Next came a small gathering of weavers at home. Space would only allow four.. We spent two days playing with the ways that weavers in Peru and Bolivia set up their looms to weave complementary-warp pick-up patterns. You can see Jen at left using the two-finger method.
The pool table was a great piece of furniture for anchoring the warps. You need very large clamps. That table was not going anywhere!
Taking a break to chart some patterns and look at books and Kelcie’s Timorese textiles…..
Our get-together was followed by the monthly (and end-of-year) guild meeting at which I showed some slides. It was a wonderful, warm and jovial audience full of Christmas cheer for the coming holidays. I was delighted to meet so many people who had never encountered South American weaving and who then expressed so much enthusiasm for it.
In the mail box….
Fr Kyriakos (who just happened to have joined Kelcie as a student in one of Kay Faulkner’s classes…it’s a small world in this big country,of Australia!) sent me pictures of the Andean Pebble Weave band that he is weaving using a pattern inspired by a piece I showed here some time ago woven by Julia.
Lausanne in Vermont showed me what she is working on. She’s having a little trouble with sticky sheds as she is using respun tapestry wool. Working the two sets of heddles used in the Andean Pebble Weave takes practice. I sawed my way through my warps while trying to perfect the moves in my lessons back in 1996. My teachers performed them so quickly and without any explanation. It was difficult to identify the individual movements that needed to be combined into one smooth operation.
After the guild meeting last Saturday, I couldn’t help noticing with a smile the contrast in my Saturday and Sunday activities.
On Saturday it was all about Girls and Their Toys:
An interested group gathers around the table after Show and Tell time to get a closer look at the novelty yarn that had been presented. (Of course there are several male members of the guild…they are just not visible in this particular shot).
And on Sunday it was a day with Boys and Their Toys: (of course, there was also a female present, namely, ME.
For those who are familar with Sydney, my brother took me on a ride with his vintage motorcycle club up to the mountains…Mt Victoria and the Bell’s Line of Road. It is such a beauiful area and could well be where I would choose to live should I ever come back to Australia for good.
Yes, we are on the correct side of the road. It’s Australia, remember?
And this is where we were heading…
The colors in this bush scene look almost like the early fall in the US that I saw recently but, sadly, all those orangey-red tones that you see there are burnt bush from the recent fires that ravaged the area. Those cliff faces and bushland are some of my favorite parts of Sydney. Who needs the beach?!
This Saturday I will be heading back to the mountains for a small weavers’ gathering in the home of Helen Halpin, this time by train. I have been receiving Helen’s monthly news letter of weaving and other fiber events in Australia, Weavers Forum, for some years now and was pleased to have been able to finally meet her at the guild meeting last Saturday. I certainly won’t let four years slip by before I am back in Sydney again.
HOME! While I am settling into my visit to my “other home” here in Australia, I would like to share with you three cool websites I found while on my US trip.
1. PROJECT GUTENBERG: Perhaps I am one of only a few people who knew nothing about the Project Gutenberg site and its thousands of free e-books. It seems that everyone I excitedly tell about it discovered it a long time ago. I ran across it while looking for a used copy of Silas Marner to buy. There it was free to enjoy as part of the Gutenberg Project.
As is The Wind in the Willows andthat was meaningful to me because…
On my final night in the US I spent time with a weaver friend who had a copy of The Wind in the Willows from which she has been reading aloud each evening. I was reminded of the part about HOME that had touched me deeply even as an eight-year old child reading the book for the first time. It seemed so appropriate to re-read that part as my US trip ended and my thoughts turned to the home in Australia that I hadn’t seen for four years (a collection of people, memories and experiences rather than a structure) and the one I had left twenty years ago to venture to South America. I faced the trip with very mixed emotions as my mother, my “anchor”, had died in September.
I wanted a copy of the book so I could sit quietly on my own and read the passages about home. And then Ruth wrote to me later to tell me that The Wind in the Willows too could be enjoyed for free via the Gutenberg Project site.
I’ll quote the part about home here. All you travelers out there will surely have felt like this at some point.
From “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame:
Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way! Why, it must be quite close by him at that moment, his old home that he had hurriedly forsaken and never sought again, that day when he first found the river! And now it was sending out its scouts and its messengers to capture him and bring him in. Since his escape on that bright morning he had hardly given it a thought, so absorbed had he been in his new life, in all its pleasures, its surprises, its fresh and captivating experiences. Now, with a rush of old memories, how clearly it stood up before him, in the darkness! Shabby indeed, and small and poorly furnished, and yet his, the home he had made for himself, the home he had been so happy to get back to after his day’s work. And the home had been happy with him, too, evidently, and was missing him, and wanted him back, and was telling him so, through his nose, sorrowfully, reproachfully, but with no bitterness or anger; only with plaintive reminder that it was there, and wanted him.
The call was clear, the summons was plain. He must obey it instantly, and go.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………..
The weary Mole………soon had his head on his pillow, in great joy and contentment. But ere he closed his eyes he let them wander round his old room, mellow in the glow of the firelight that played or rested on familiar and friendly things which had long been unconsciously a part of him, and now smilingly received him back, without rancour…..
…….He saw clearly how plain and simple— how narrow, even— it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one’s existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to; this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.
On to the next cool website….2.THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM of ART’S PUBLICATIONS PAGE…..Many thanks to Kathleen for telling me about this site which has five decades of Met publications on art history, available to read, download, and/or search for free!!! Kathleen had downloaded and was enjoying a book on African textiles. There are hundreds of titles.
Images byInstituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara, ILCA, La Paz Bolivia
The Weaving Communities of Practice website is the result of a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council . The project focuses on textiles, culture and identity in the Andes.
I was happy to see that Elvira Espejo, pictured at left, worked on this project as the ILCA’s Textile Expert. I got to meet Elvira at the Encuentro de Tejedores de las Americas in Cusco last year where she was presenting the books she wrote with British anthropologist Denise Arnold: Ciencia de Tejer en los Andes:estructuras y tecnicas de faz de urdimbreand Ciencia de las Mujeres: Experiencias en la cadena textile desde los ayllus de Challapata.
Amongst other things, the site contains video segments of various aspects of backstrap weaving which accompany information about the stages of learning for young weavers-in-training in the Quechua and Aymara cultures. I have only just begun exploring the site and have barely scratched the surface. It is an amazing resource and there we have it at our finger tips,
Image by ILCA La Paz, Bolivia
From the site’s front page…..
The project is based at the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS) and the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at Birkbeck, University of London, with the Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara (ILCA), in La Paz, Bolivia, in partnership with museums in the UK, Bolivia, Peru and Chile.
The principal feature of this website is a database of Andean textiles. There is also a detailed guide to processes of textile manufacture, including images and video clips of techniques, instruments and structures; a glossary of textile-related terms in English, Spanish and Andean languages; an introduction to textile heritage; and bibliography.
And so the sun sank on my final days in Santa Cruz, California. It was time to follow those birds west across the Pacific Ocean to Australia. Time to think back on the six weeks that had passed and “all its pleasures, its surprises, its fresh and captivating experiences” many of which I have already reported here on this blog.
One such captivating experience…Annie and I got to visit with Joy Totah Hilden, author of Bedouin Weaving of Saudi Arabia and its Neighbours, in her home in California.
It was a thrill to be able to meet Joy and sit on the sofa amongst the richly patterned pillows and beneath that enormous woven tent divider listening to her stories.
Then we got to touch and examine the textiles that I had been admiring online on her website and in her book…textiles that had inspired me on several occasions to weave pieces of my own (at left) using the traditional Bedouin colors and patterning techniques.
Camel adornments and all kinds of bags decorated the walls of her home. Many more treasures were carefully stored away and Joy was happy to unpack and bring many of them out one by one to show us.
Twining, weaving, braiding, wrapping, stitching…all sorts of bands and tassels and ineresting edgings….colors!!!….heaven! It was particularly interesting for me to be able to examine the pieces from Oman where the weavers cleverly use a second weft to tie down the long floats that are typically created by the warp substitution technique on the back side of the fabric. Having experimented with this with the guidance of images of Omani textiles that Tracy Hudson had provided, it was a wonderful opportunity to at last be able to examine the textiles themselves.
Happy with Annie MacHale and Joy Hilden surrounded by gorgeous textiles.
Moving on….Here are some of the books and publications that I picked up on this trip…
I had my issues of the Complex Weavers Journal all delivered at once so that I could take them back to Bolivia with me.
Bue Eye/Prayer Flags by Miryam-Chavah
After searching online many times over the last years for a reasonably-priced copy of the out-of-print Soumak Workbook, I finally found one and snapped it up. I have been admiring the creations of Julia Miryam-Chavah online, many of which have been done using the soumak technique. She has often named the Soumak Workbook as a resource and so, I am excited to have been able to get a copy.
I got the One Needle, One Thread book from Pam Nadjowski at Textile Treasures in Santa Fe NM when I was there in July but left it behind at my friend DY’s house by mistake. Now that I finally have it in my hands, I will be able to read about some of the wealth of braiding and embroidery techniques used in Chinese textiles that this book covers and maybe incorporate some in my work.
And, finally and surprisingly , I managed to get a copy of Faces of Tradition: Weaving Elders of the Andes by Nilda Callañaupa and Christine Franquemont. The book details interviews conducted with elders from various communities in the Cusco region of Peru. The importance and urgency of this project is underlined by the fact that some of the elders that were interviewed died before the book could be published. And before I could even open the book’s cover I was shocked and saddened to learn of the very recent death of Christine Franquemont in Cusco.
My last days in the US were spent in Santa Cruz, California with some weaving friends. Here are some of the ladies working on decorating their plain-weave bands with supplementary wefts….
This is my fifth visit to Martha’s studio and, as usual, we were dazzled by the interesting pieces in Martha’s collection that she would bring out to share with us….
This double-pocket saddle bag, made from what I am guessing is agave fiber, was collected somewhere in Latin America and given to Martha many years ago. It has an interesting combination of weaving, braiding and sprang work. The sprang and braid work has created a springy, stretchy and open area that would lie over the back of the pack animal. It contrasts with the stiff and rigid nature of the woven pockets. I have not seen anything like this in my travels in South America and I would love to know its place of origin.
I loved the simplicity of the discontinuous-warp piece that Janette brought to show with its combination of natural and dyed colors. The join where the two colors dovetail, seen on the right, was so incredibly smooth.
My final night in the US had me dozing in San Francisco airport beneath stunning woven tapestries which were designed by local artist Mark Adams. These had apparently been stored away for a couple of decades shortly after their creation in the early 80’s and are now on display behind glass. It was a peaceful place to spend the night before my early morning flight to Los Angeles and so unlike many other airports where I have spent the night slumped outside Dunkin’ Donuts!.
Meanwhile, news of backstrap woven projects arrived in my inbox…
Fr Kyriakos and Lausanne sent me pictures of their backstrap weaving pursuits. Fr Kyriakos has a pebble weave pattern in progress and he started his band with a nice bit of weft twining. Lausanne shows how she has set up a comfortable way to weave in her home while still giving attention to her furry companion.
Here is a silk ribbon with pebble weave patterns that Lausanne made for her husband.
Noreen Horak sent me a picture of bands she wove on her inkle loom using a variety of patterning techniques. The darkest one is a sampler of pebble weave patterns that are charted in my first book.
Rosemary Thomas shows that backstrap weaving isn’t only about warp-faced structures.
Joanne’s band is also a nice sampler of the various 4-rev designs that are charted in the Andean Pebble Weave book and shows her experiments with using two and three colors in her designs.
And to finish, I would like to tell you about my friend Wendy Garrity, a fellow Australian weaver. Here I am in Australia and so is she, but it isn’t really a chance to meet up as she is oh, so far far away over on the other side of the country, in Perth!
Wendy has put together a wonderful blog in which she writes about textiles she has encountered on her travels through Asia and particularly about her experience learning to weave in Bhutan.
That is how I found her. I was trying to reproduce Bhutanese patterns based on textiles that I had had the opportunity to examen. Wendy’s site provided some vital information that was missing and preventing me from getting started. Once I had found Wendy’s site, I just had to write and thank her and, with that, we started corresponding across the miles. She was in Bhutan and, later India and I was in Bolivia.
We got to meet in person at last when she came to South America and I taught her some Andean pick-up techniques in my home.
It was during that visit that we discovered that we both had plans to go to the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe NM….another chance for a fun meet-up and, even better, my friend Annie was there too.
From there, Wendy headed home to Perth. I wonder if she had those same feelings I experienced when she returned home after several years away.
Wendy is planning a trip to the US in the fall of 2015 and would like to share what she learned during her stay in Bhutan. She will be available for workshops and presentations at guilds and I asked her to write a little about what she has to offer for inclusion in this post. All the pictures that accompany the text are Wendy’s own work. These are the samplers that she wove with her weaving teachers in Bhutan.
Hi everyone, I am planning to visit north America in the fall of 2015, and would like to hear from guilds or groups interested in hosting a workshop in Bhutanese kushutara techniques, used to weave gorgeous brocaded festival dresses.
Kushutara means brocaded dress, and refers to cloth decorated with the intricate kushu techniques, involving discontinuous supplementary wefts.
Bhutanese refer to two types of kushu techniques: Thrima and Sapma. Both are woven by lifting selected threads with a pickup stick before inserting the supplementary weft threads in such a way that the stitches only show on the front of the fabric.
Thrima means “to coil” and involves twining the pattern threads around the warp threads. This produces a beautiful textured effect, with the pattern threads creating a raised surface. In fact, when the first Bhutanese textiles were examined by experts in the west, there was much debate over whether their designs had been produced by embroidery or were woven into the fabric!
I learnt to weave kushutara when I was living in Thimphu, Bhutan for a year teaching music. I was given a loom next to a master weaver in the local weaving centre, and for 8 months I went before and after school and on weekends to weave. Word spread, as it does in Bhutan, and I often used to find I had local weavers stopping in to see for themselves the spectacle of the foreigner who had learned to weave as well (if not as fast) as the Bhutanese.
In addition to weaving on a Bhutanese backstrap loom, I have adapted these techniques to western looms, so classes can include weavers more comfortable on rigid heddle or shaft looms. Participants would need to be familiar with their looms and comfortable with plainweave, but the work would also extend experienced weavers who may have experience with weft twining from other cultures such as Guatemala (Bhutanese twining is a related structure, but the techniques of execution differ).
Wendy can be contacted through her blog or through me on this blog. Who knows? I just might get myself over to Perth on this trip to see her.
I don’t have any Aussie pictures to post yet! Imagine…after weeks and weeks of fabulous weather in the US, the weather has not been kind so far here in Sydney. I will hopefully have plenty to show in the next post. See you soon.
I love that “big picture” feeling you get from the airplane window. It’s been a long time since I have been able to get a window seat on a coast to coast USA flight in daylight to enjoy the view. The picture below was taken somewhere between Dallas and San Francisco last week.
The view reminded me of the months in the early 90s when I would be sometimes rambling about on top of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains on a peak bagging trip or dropping by rope into the depths of the Utah canyons. From the air you feel so carefree floating over the ever changing landscape like a bird while trying to imagine the thousands of specks of people down there below like ants and what they might be up to.
In a similar way, I made myself step back and admire the big picture before zooming in on the details when Ute brought in a piece of Uzbek silk ikat cloth for me to examine and admire during a visit with her in Northampton.
I got to see the exhibit of Uzbek ikat robes at the Textile Museum in DC a few years ago. Of course, that was a strictly “hands off” affair. And even though I had the opportunity to touch similar fabric from Uzbekistan at the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe this year, the market simply had far too many interesting things to be able to stop and focus on any one item for any meaningful length of time.
Thanks to Ute, I had time alone with the cloth at left and could examine it to my heart’s content although I found it difficult to capture its true colors on camera.
Ikat fabric I saw at the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market
When I then zoomed in to get an ant’s persepective, I saw what I had named many times, in despair and frustration, during my own ikat experiments on my backstrap loom, the ” dreaded railroad tracks”…
I took extreme measures to keep my warp threads aligned on this piece…that was my goal at the time.
I am talking about those horizontal bars that show that the warp threads have shifted from the original positions into which they had been locked during the tying and dyeing process.
It was always so disheartening for me to be weaving and approaching with excitement the first wrapped area on my ikat warp, eagerly waiting to see how my carefully tied and dyed pattern would appear only to see first, the little specs and then the growing rows of lines of un-dyed thread appearing….those dreaded railway tracks. They told me that the threads had been displaced too much and that my design had been ruined.
But, walk away to the other side of the room and look again at the Uzbek cloth. What do you see? A beautiful pattern with the soft blurry outlines that give ikat its charm and character. Look at the big picture!
I will be trying ikat again when I get back to Bolivia and reminding myself to think like a bird and not an ant!
The same goes for one of my current favorite structures as woven by the Guarani weavers of the lowlands of Bolivia…intermesh.
Stand back and admire the crispness and clarity of the design woven by my teacher Angela.
Closer inspection of motifs on another piece show the feathering that characteristically appears along the edges of diagonal lines.
This has me adjusting and readjusting my pattern charts in an effort to reduce the feathering as much as possible which can sometimes distort the original shape I was striving to create.
Stop fussing and thinking like an ant! The GuaranÍ weavers, as far as I have seen, make no such (unnecessary) effort…they think like birds.
Speaking of intermesh, let me show you Julia’s latest creation in progress in this structure….
Julia tells us that the design comes from a book entitled Japanese Design Motifs. Designs like these with horizontal and vertical lines are ideal for learning this structure and are the kinds of motifs that I have provided with the tutorial in my second book. I used Bhutanese and Mexican patterns for inspiration. The horizontal lines have “saw-tooth” edges and the verticals are crisp and smooth plus the cloth is double-faced!
This trip is drawing to its close. I can look back over the last weeks of weaving with friends, new and old, from a bird’s eye and ant’s eye view and benefit greatly from both perspectives. The ant asks what details can be improved. The bird hovers above to see patterns appearing on bands and cloth, the weavers’ reactions – their smiles and frowns and “aha” moments, changes in their energy levels and receptiveness which their body positions often reveal….and listens to the fluctuating levels of concentrated silence and relaxed chatter.
Here’s a quick whiz through some of the days I spent weaving both east and west on this trip….
Backstrap weaving with ladies at Yale University…. They have a wonderful weaving room for free time weaving. It is full of floor, table and rigid heddle looms which meant standing room only. Many thanks to Barbara who took me to visit with these ladies. Here they are finding the cross in their warps so that they can make simple heddles.Massachusetts turned on its fall colors for me as we drove home each evening after some weaving in the glow of the setting sun. Here is a shot of what Lausanne in Vermont has dubbed “cinnamon hills”.
And winter was definitely in the air with frosty mornings. Only the brave sat outside for lunch! I was one of them for about 5 minutes.
The round table was a perfect set-up among Liz’s natural yarns and fibers, locally made scarves and shawls and crafts. It was a sweet space in which to weave.
RIght now Liz and her partner John are involved in the 500 Hats event which John came up with to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Dr Seuss book. You can read more about the project here…there are over 1600 hats so far in their living room.
Moving over to nearby Northampton….here are a couple of things that Chris worked on..
Here you can see her pick-up band finished and decorated with a triangular braid (which I now know how to do….yay!, thanks Chris) as well as her ñawi awapa piece on which she has just about finished twisting and binding the warp ends.
It was a second time weaving with these friends and we did some more pebble weave, made tubular bands and sewed them to pouches which we later dressed up with decorative stitching.
The mouth of a Bolivian woven pouch is decorated, after having been edged with a tubular band, with cross knit looping which is a sewn technique.The hands above belong to Lisa, on the left, seen here weaving a complementary-warp band alongside Mary-Lou. Lisa is wearing one of her own gorgeous deflected double weave scarves.
Barbara invited friends to her home in Connecticut and her fabulous weaving studio for another gathering where we all wove together….
Claudia and Susan decorate a warp-faced band with both single and double-faced patterning techniques.
And here in California yesterday, we gathered to practice setting up for wider projects. Some people in this group were weaving with me for their their third and fifth times while others were on their second time.
Picture by Ruth TempleCookie’s finished piece will be folded into a long narrow bag for a small backstrap loom that she was recently given.
So, we had a group with a variety of experience levels. I think that “experience level” is often most evident in the kind of warp a weaver can create in terms of evenness of tension. Here is where the “short and narrow” mantra comes into play.
Perfect your warping techniques winding short and narrow warps over and over again! SHORT, because you will weave off your project quickly and get another valuable chance to warp again soon. NARROW, because there are different tips and tricks yet to be learned for creating successful wide warps once winding narrow ones with consistent tension has become natural.
The idea was to go wider without necessarily going longer. You can see Ruth’s pretty warp above made from Tahki Cotton Classic onto which she is putting her first set of string heddles. The strip of orange and purple down the middle will be used to create a pattern in the Andean Pebble Weave structure.
She is going to weave the other plain parts using the “thick border” technique described in my first book. This will cause the plain parts to narrow and thicken to match the thickness of her pebble section. Therefore, her finished band will be a lot narrower than the warp appears in this picture. This might become her backstrap.
We needed to refresh some things that are necessary for creating wider pieces, such as putting the string heddles on a stick instead of tying them in a little bunch.
Picture by Ruth Temple. Kathy gets a refresher in heddle making for wider warpsKathy chose to make a backstrap using Plymouth Yarn Fantasy Naturale and a double- faced warp float pattern.Kathleen chose to use overtwisted wool that she got in a class with Jacquetta Nisbet many years ago. She has already made a beautiful backsrap with this wool and knows how it behaves. She wants to make a small pouch with a pebble weave motif and wrote to me about how this warp feels “alive” after having used cotton for some time. As you can see we were in a soothing environment in Betsey’s home surrounded by textiles that she has collected in her travels.Dorothy’s project in Tahki cotton classic is so beautifully arranged. It will have three strips of pebble weave pattern and the color combination is so gorgeous! I am wondering when she will have time for it as she is off to the Tinkuy in Peru this Friday!! We are all so excited for her. Goodness knows what kinds of inspiration she will bring back with her. By the way, Dorothy’s loom is made by Terri at Magical Moons. I hadn’t seen one of these before made by Terri. The loom bars are silky smooth….beautiful work!!
Betsey’s project was the narrowest but with by far the finest thread and I neglected to photograph it, unfortunately. She warped for a pebble weave pattern using the thick borders and her piece will do nicely as a cellphone pouch.
Somewhere in-between all that, Barbara took me to Shelburne Falls Ma to visit Vavstuga Weaving School. That’s a name that constantly comes up in the weaving groups on Ravelry and I was excited to finally be able to see it and meet the staff. I was surprised to find Cindy, one of my backstrap weaving friends, apprenticing there.
What a beautiful location right next to the Bridge of Flowers which even at this late time of year is full of color against its backdrop of cinnamon hills.
Color inspiration anyone? This was in the bridge garden…never seen anything like it!
Becky Ashenden along with her newest apprentice and other Vavstuga staff showed me around. As we chatted at the table, Becky pulled out one gorgeous textile after another to spread on the table.
Not that I know much about Scandinavian weaving, but the textiles were everything I expected and more…rep weave, white on white, linen, crisp and clean, simple, classic, impeccable!
Becky opened a door to a closet which housed hundreds of samples. More samples were draped over loom beams for further inspiration, instruction and guidance but, most importantly, gorgeous handwoven textiles were everywhere to be seen and touched and used in in the house and studio….not just sterile samples to be taken out and studied and then put away. They added warmth and comfort and a lovely sense of home and familiarity. This must be a lovely place in which to learn to weave!
This hanging adorned the wall of Vavstuga student dining room which overlooks the river. I had heard it all before in the online groups…everything at Vavstuga is handwoven. It was wonderful to see it all…. from curtains to hand towels and floor coverings and hangings.
And then there was the band weaving with the typical Scandinavian backstrap set-up…(look at the piece of fabric under the backstrap…that was one of my favorite pieces)
Becky wove that backstrap. Isn’t it gorgeous? She wove one end of the waist band as a tubular band in order to more easily hook on the clever wooden device that holds the warp . Look at that sweet rigid heddle and there is also a lovely wooden smooth shaped sword that completes the set-up. I guess that I just couldn’t hide the smile and delight I felt at seeing all this as, when Barbara and I were about to leave, I was given this mystery package….
No prizes for guessing what was inside!!
Some of the other textiles I met along the way….
Many thanks to Ruth who brought this along to share with me. It is warp-faced double weave cloth, although in many places the warps are quite spread and reveal the weft. A band has been cut into strips and sewn to make this bag. We don’t know its origin but I really appreciated the opportunity to look at it.
Ute always keeps me supplied with textile goodies to photograph and examine. Here is a beautiful presentation of some of her own tablet-woven bands…
And here is a bag from Tibet, owned by Ute, that was made by sewing pieces of a tablet-woven belt together….fabulous motifs for intermesh.
And here I am today in the home of inkle weaver, guitar strap and sash maker Annie. While she is at work I get to rummage through baskets of her colorful bands and sashes and samples….no two alike, so every visit brings forth something new!
Thank you to Kathleen who took me down to ground level to be an ant last weekend. Kathleen is a marine biologist and took me to the beach to go tide pooling…super fun!…While swathes of slumbering and interesting seaweed waited out lowtide above water, we peered into pools and found whole worlds of life and variety and movement and color and cleverness within.
And when we got home, Kathleen’s husband had made this…
I had remarked to Kathleen earlier that day that the vertical pieces of rebar sticking out of the top of the wall would make great warping stakes. It was too bad that they were soon to disappear within another row of blocks. I then told her about the woman in Peru who had warping stakes embedded in the wall of the hall of her house. She would stroll up and down the length of her hall creating her warps. And so, an idea was born.
Those metal pieces of pipe will be locked into place when concrete is poured into the blocks. Then, dowel rods will be placed within the pipes…..a wall warping board. I am jealous! Next will come hooks in the wall to which Kathleen can attach her backstrap. Warm, sunny days outdoors weaving….lovely!
Jennifer Moore, DY Begay and I in Santa Fe in July
Tinkuy is next week!!! I am not going… what will keep me from pining is the fact that I will be over the ocean thinking like a bird on my way to Australia on the14th.
My weaving friends Dorothy and Karen are going. A few of my Argentinian Facebook friends will be there and Jennifer Moore, with whom I backstrap wove in Santa Fe this year, will be going to teach the Peruvian weavers balanced double-weave pick-up. Jennifer wrote to me this morning to tell me that we will be roomies at CNCH next year. There will be some stories to tell!!
I hope that if you go, you will send me stories, reports and pictures that I could share on this blog or links to your own sites that I can include here. Have a wonderful time all of you!!!
Dorinda from PAZA Bolivia (no link as the website is temporarily unavailable.) and my weaving teacher, Maxima, will be going again. Last I heard, Dorinda was also going to take one of the teenagers. Dorinda met her funding needs with many generous donations from a variety of sources. Look out for Dorinda and Maxima there. I wonder if Maxima will outspin the Peruvian ladies in the speed spinning competitions again this time!
Dorinda and Maxima were my roomies at Tinkuy 2010
Jasmin Pitt of Sustainable Bolivia was recently in Independencia with Dorinda and her weaver friends and made a documentary about the weavers. Here is Dorinda’s description from her PAZA newsletter:
Making a documentary with the weavers of Huancarani became reality last April after over a year of talking about the possibility. Thanks to Sustainable Bolivia’s artist in residence Jasmine Pitt, most of the footage was shot in Huancarani in a day. Jasmine directed, filmed, and edited the documentary. The women were ready with their thoughts, comments, and stories about the past, present, and future of their millennium long weaving tradition. More interviews were held in Independencia and Jasmine and Dorinda walked miles so Jasmine could capture the breathtaking landscape on film. The musical group Sacambaya generously granted permission for use of their music. It was a collective volunteer effort. Through Jasmine’s lens you will gain insight into the personalities and lives of the weavers and their concerns for the future of their weaving tradition.
I stole a little time to warp and weave a band down on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin in Australia’s capital city, Canberra. Behind me, athletes were competing in a half-Ironman event in which my nephew won the amateur section and placed 6th overall. Having finished in just over four hours, he took a cooling dip in the lake while I wove and the other 1600 or so competitors continued to strain and sweat in the summer sun running along the lakeshore. They must have hated seeing me there as they ran on by. I was weaving a wool tubular band on which to hang the little button baubles I recently learned to make . I think I will turn them into a Christmas tree decoration and leave them behind on my brother’s tree as a memento of my visit.
In keeping with the Australian theme, I decided to try a two-color version inspired by the native Australian flower, the scarlet banksia. The banksia has the same ridged appearance as my wee baubles. I had red wool but no white so, yellow would have to do. 
Use your imagination and you might see a resemblance in the two-color bauble in the center 😉 
I will add these little guys to my repertoire of finishing techniques for woven pouches. Smaller versions of these will make cute dangling pom poms.
After the race and back at our Canberra trailer park, we stepped out for a walk and found these guys happily grazing just meters from our door….there’s a mumma with her joey crammed into her pouch…white cockatoos screeched by in the soft evening light and kookaburras “laughed” unseen in the distance.
Of course, it was only at the end of our three-day stay that I discovered two amazing exhibits that were on in Canberra…darn! Well, you can’t have everything. 
Now I am back in Sydney and I need to get to work and weave a cell phone pouch for my sister-in-law. I hope she doesn’t read my blog as it is supposed to be a surprise. I can just scrape together enough wool left over from my travel stash to make this work.
I have used this wool before for very narrow band projects and loved how well it worked straight off the skein without having to respin it. I wasn’t sure, however, how it would stand up to a wider warp so, here is my chance to test it. Would it be too sticky for warp-faced weaving? Would it be too weak and break with the abrasion from the heddles and the scraping of the beater?
Here’s the simple pebble weave pattern taking shape. So far, so good! There is no sign of weakness and the sheds open quite easily. This is enough for today…Deb will be home from work soon and I am doing this in secret.
I also got to see some hangings that I had made for family members some years ago on previous visits… 
The one on the left is an embedded double weave piece with typical bird motifs of Potosi, Bolivia and the other one has pebble weave Guaraní patterns of lowland Bolivia in the center and a highland design on the edges. I had made that for my mum. It has inspired me to start planning a double weave piece for my red, black and white wall hanging series but first I want to weave a triathlon banner for my nephew’s bedroom wall.
It looks like twining or soumak in the middle of a piece of warp-faced weaving.It is part of women’s costume from the ADI tribe of Arunachal Pradesh in northeast India. And this makes me keen to get into the soumak book that I recently bought and experiment with embedded designs like these. I have tried embedded twining in Bedouin design work that I have done, as in the example below.
Julia has been “intermesh-ing’ and inspiring the Ravelry group members with her beautiful projects. As always her pieces are beautifully finished.
The piece on the left has both Mexican and Japanese influenced patterns which work so beautifully together. The piece on the right has a motif that I recognize from Bhutanese weaving. Julia has adapted it to the intermesh technique. It is a very elongated and slightly different version of one that I chose to weave with supplementary weft some time ago.
I learned the intermesh structure from the weavers in Peru who taught me Andean Pebble Weave. They used it to weave single-color borders for their pebble weave patterns.
I will leave you with one of my friend, Annie MacHale’s latest creations. I never get tired of looking at the straps that Annie produces on her inkle loom. She never weaves two the same and has the knack of creating just the right custom pieces for her clients.
Let’s see if I can make it back to Bolivia before the next blog post. As much as I hate to leave, all good things must come to end and there are wall hangings to be woven, a long list of things to research, patterns to be charted and books to be read. Keep your fingers crossed for me that I make it back home without too many interruptions. Goodness knows where I will be spending Christmas Day!
