Category: weft twining

Backstrap weaving – Staying on Track

I have been trying to resist the urge to warp up for an al’ouerjan project and join in on the fun in the Ravelry group. You may remember that a couple of weeks ago, after having posted the warping tutorial for these traditional Bedouin patterns, Tracy suggested a weekend warp-along. Now we are seeing the increasingly large and impressive results of all that warping practice. Take a look at the bag strap that Tracy made at left.

But…I am staying on track which means that I am sticking to my chamanto-style leaf-patterned wall hanging (although I couldn’t resist throwing in a bit of weft twining). I finished the first pebble weave hanging in this set with weft twining and so I decided that, apart from the common color scheme, the weft twining would be another theme that would tie all my planned wall hangings together.

While I sit and pass the shuttle, strum the warps, beat and coax the sheds open I think about what will be next in this series. I have no problem whatsoever in coming up with ideas…the problem is that I want to weave them all at once!

I stand back and look at this piece and I still can’t get used to it.

It’s not quite like anything I have done before but I have to say that I am having fun with it especially adding in that twined section with the motif within. I had to stop for a bit to chart those smaller leaves on their vine, sample them etc…It took a while to get them right.

I think that all my planned red, black and white pieces will look pretty nice when hung all together. The question is….where? Although I have been doing some major cleaning out, I still haven’t managed to uncover any significant amount of wall space.

Next on the clean up list is my dear old Ashford traditional wheel. Yes, I have a spinning wheel…who knew? It has been sitting there so long unnoticed, dusty and in desperate need of oil…poor thing. It was born in New Zealand and made its way all the way over to the Falkland Islands before finding its way into my home in southern Chile. I left a lot of stuff behind in Chile but the spinning wheel came up to Bolivia where it has sat in the corner for almost 14 years…shameful! I won’t take a picture of it now in its pitiful state. I will clean it up and get it back into shape. I have room to use it now!

I only had it for four months before leaving Chile and just got into using it and being able to turn out something consistent. I did, however, spin enough yarn to construct a vest, knitting the natural colored front and weaving the dyed brown back. The edging has been worked in cross knit looping.

This, too, sits neglected here in this hot steamy climate. It is a souvenir at least of the Patagonian sheep.

But, back to the al’ouerjan and let’s see what else the Ravelers have been up to…

So, there’s the strap that I showed you earlier on the gorgeous bag that Tracy made. She will line the bag  to protect the warp floats on the inside. She used an additional weft to secure the floats on the strap. You can see details about how that is done here. One of Tracy’s other warp-along products is the pillow cover which includes some tapestry-style twining in  the lower left hand corner and a striking and beautifully executed joining stitch.

Aunt Janet’s piece above left is in her own handspun wool. She has three sets of al’ouerjan patterning and that blue looks amazing.

Traudi so loved Tracy’s piece that she got into the act too using brown instead of black which looks fantastic. She twined along the bottom of the piece too. We are seeing more and more twining in this group…cool. Here is the tutorial for basic weft twining.

Jennifer did some charting and planning for the shajarah patterns before warping a wide piece that also includes an al’ouerjan design.

The charting paper with ovals which is useful for double weave, warp substitution and supplementary weft patterns can be found here. A tutorial for weaving these kinds of warp substitution patterns is here.

So, January has gotten off to a great start in the Ravelry group! Pantoffels has been wrangling with what she calles an ancient inkle loom and still managed to make this pretty needle pouch with plain pebble weave patterning.

And then she got a new inkle loom under the Christmas tree and will now try the pebble weave patterns in my book Andean Pebble Weave.

While I have been weaving my “leaf” piece based on the Chilean ponch known as a chamanto, I have been getting out other pictures of ponchos that I have to study the design layout that weavers use on these large pieces.

I own one poncho which I bought in Calcha, Bolivia many years ago. It is made from very fine handspun wool which has been colored with natural dyestuffs. It is patterned with simple stripes, some very narrow and simple ikat bands as well as several very narrow strips of pebble weave.

It has been woven as two panels with four selvedges each and a woven band has been sewn around the four edges with an added fringe. Don’t you love that decorative stitch that has been used to join the panels?

There is definitely an art to stripes. You can see the clever placement of fine white stripes to break up some of the richer colors.

 An extremely fine and simply patterned manta from Chile. It is always interesting to see how the colors and stripes are distributed. As is typical, a broad band has been woven and sewn to the four edges of the piece and there is no fringe.

The typical poncho of Tarabuco and the smaller version known as unku can be seen above.

At a handcraft fair in Tarabuco I saw weavers making the long poncho panels. My friend, Anna, showed me the unku on the right that she had bought in Tarabuco when she came to visit me.

I spotted this gentleman in his much more subdued woolen poncho in a small plaza in Sucre. He was performing an offering to Pacha Mama in the early morning. How wonderfully simple and light the poncho looks although I am sure it is extremely warm and virtually waterproof.

And then you have the incredibly intricately patterned calf-length ponchos woven and worn by the men of Chahuaytire in the Cusco area of Peru.

From Argentina and Chile we have the Mapuche makuñ with its ikat patterning technique executed in such a way that there is virtually no blurring of the design. The popularization of the poncho, from what I have read, is generally attributed to the Mapuche who wove them for their own use as well as for barter. On the right you see the chamanto of the Chilean huaso, with its leaf, fruit and floral motifs, which are said to have both indigenous and Spanish roots.

I have  a few pictures from Ecuador too…scans of old prints…

This is the “jijon” poncho which is factory-made in Quito and worn by those men who can afford one in Otavalo. You can see it being worn with its grey plaid face showing by the gentlemen on the left and with its darker face outward on the right. These men were wearing their ponchos to the market on a regular day. Apparently there is a much more costly blue double-faced poncho which is woven on the backstrap loom made-to-order. The ownership of one of these special ponchos indicates wealth and high social status.

On Sunday, which was both market day and church day in Cañar, a very social time around the main square and surrounding streets, I saw quite a few ikat-patterned ponchos being worn.

And finally there’s Juan below, (my pebble weave student!) with his mother and neighbor. Juan put on his  narrow, black fringe-less poncho and felt hat especially for this picture. On another visit during a festival all the men were wearing their ponchos for the occasion.

You can see the backstrap looms on which I was teaching Juan and Natalia pebble weave tied to the pole. In exchange Anita introduced me to her cousin on my next visit and he taught me to weave the typical supplementary warp patterned belts of Salasaca.

Okay, so I promised you some double weave edge samples this week, right? I am sorry, I didn’t get those done. I was busy trying to stay on track and not get “dis-track-ted” by all the goings-on in the Ravelry group. I want to finish my leafy hanging. but I must say that I have a bowl of tencel calling to me wanting to be made into a scarf…

That blue ball is indigo-dyed Japanese silk…a fabulously thoughtful gift brought to me from Japan by one of my old teaching colleagues here.

Hopefully I will get the leaf piece off the loom this week, plan and warp the next hanging, play a little with my tencel, get the Ashford Traddy up and running and do those double weave samples for the tutorial too….phew!

Oh, and I have started a new page for RESOURCES. You will see the tab for that on the header and I am slowly extracting all the links to interesting sites, articles and products that I have linked to in my 105 posts so far. This is quite a job but I hope to add two or three links to the page every week. I hope you find it useful.

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Backstrap Weaving – Two Faces to Every Story

One of the most exciting things for me about finishing a pebble weave piece is looking at the other side. Sure, I do take a peek at it when I first start the piece but I try not to do so again until I have the finished fabric off the loom. Nine times out of ten, I am astonished that I like the other side better but I think that just comes from having gotten so used to seeing the “right” side.

So here is the Starry Night piece off the loom so you can see both faces…

Which side do you like better?

I decided to finish it with some very simple twining rather than twine a motif as originally planned as I felt it would look too cluttered.

I am still deciding on whether to edge it with tubular bands and I am not sure what to do with the fringe.

I do like the look of a full fringe and, as it will be a wall hanging, it shouldn’t cause problems but then, I like braids too.

Maybe I should let it sit for a while and see what it says to me!
I have spent most of the time after taking this off the loom charting and sampling motifs for the next chamanto-inspired piece.

I have been looking at examples online and trying to figure out scale in my charting.

As I have mentioned in other blog posts, chamantos are ponchos woven in one particular region of Chile which have come to be part of the national costume of the huaso, the Chilean cowboy.

One description I read online says that it a “summary” of indigenous and Spanish textile influences. I also discovered when researching these some time ago that they are also worn occasionally by Texan cowboys. Take a look here. 😉

That was at an APEC conference in 2004. Imagine all those participants each with their uniquely patterned poncho. How I would love to see each and every one up close. I have seen a few of the motifs repeated from one chamanto to the next. There are certain flower and leaf designs that turn up quite a lot but each weaver creates her own unique piece in her choice of colors and layout.

I hope to use my adaptation of one of the grape leaf patterns in my next wall hanging and so I have been charting and weaving, correcting, charting and weaving and using two of my handy sampling tools…my black Sharpie and white correction pen.

With these I can make adjustments on the cloth before changing my chart and trying again.

I know that the Chilean weavers use much finer thread than I do as I am not able to get as much detail  as they do in motifs of the same size.

I also know about the thread they use as I got to see one of the ponchos, which was woven without pick-up patterns, at the exhibit of Chilean crafts in Washington DC recently.

The striped warp-faced ponchos are called mantas.

So, that is my next project. I have made my calculations…my goodness, what a job that was. My head just wasn’t functioning well the day I got the calculator out and I made a fine mess of it but fortunately caught all the blunders before I got the warp off the stakes.

Prepare for another onslaught of red, white and black…

I warped my piece in three sections. Here is the first one completed and about to be taken off the warping stakes.

Above you can see the first section placed on the loom bar and wire that I use in place of a header cord. And then you can see the three sections on the floor on the loom. What I do next is transfer the cross on all three sections to one long pair of cross sticks and lash the wire to a loom bar.

And now I am ready for heddle making. While tidying up the other day I came across this ball of very fine nylon that weaver Deb McClintock gave me a long time ago when I met her at the MD Sheep and Wool Festival. From what I remember, she brought this from Laos and gave it to me as I was interested at the time in having a bamboo reed made and this is the thread that the reed makers in Laos use to space the bamboo slivers.

Well, I didn’t get the reed made as I managed to buy two beauties and so I am thinking of trying this as heddle string. You might already know that I hate nylon for heddle string although all my Guatemalan weaving teachers use it happily. It’s just that I haven’t tried any as fine as this and would like to see how it goes. I hope it works as there are a heck of a lot of heddles to make!

So, there I was planning and planning, but, you know what?…a bit of spontaneity is good too! And that is what hit us thanks to Tracy in the Ravelry Backstrap Weaving Group last weekend following my blog post with the tutorial for warping the traditional Bedouin al’ouerjan patterns.

Tracy suggested a warp-along for the weekend and a few people jumped in with enthusiasm while others watched-along and cheered. Some people chose to use the seven-square warp above right for which I gave instructions in the tutorial while others warped wide pieces with several strips of al’ouerjan patterns in different widths.

Some used their handspun wool, Tracy used handspun wool that she bought in the Souk in Doha, while others used crochet or perle cotton. We had both traditional and non-traditional color combinations, Some didn’t quite get it straight away but soldiered on and were able to declare success by the end of the weekend. It was fun.

Janet used her handspun. I love the way the grey looks against the red and white. Renate Petra chose the three-square warp and wove what I call the triangle design. She admits that the design would show better if she had chosen colors with higher contrast but the design is there and she has done a great job.

Above left is Tracy’s piece made from handspun wool she bought in the market and on the right is another piece she warped using perle cotton that she happened upon. What a contrast! Tracy has difficulty tracking down suitable yarn in Doha and so is constantly coming up with these surprise finds.

Jennifer really went to town warping up three projects, the first with three strips of al’ouerjan pattern, and partly weaving two of the warps.

I think Traudi was the last to jump in but she finished her band and even did some weft twining along the ends.

And then Tracy added some twining to the mix….

Maybe some day we will be making things like these….

Look at the beautiful al’ouerjan patterns in this chair seat fabric.

Ansam518 has allowed me to show these pictures from her blog post about a visit to an Open House event at the Beit Al Sadu, home of the Al Sadu Weaving Cooperative Society in Kuwait. Their Honorary President says that “We aim to promote and to celebrate Kuwait’s cultural and textile heritage. To tell the story of the land. To speak the languages of the arts … of the soul … ”

It was Alaa from the Ravelry group, who has been to visit this place, who gave us the link to another blogger’s repost of this report which led me to Ansam518’s original post which is packed with pictures. She shows us images from the gorgeous building itself which houses the cooperative to the displays of textiles, dye sources, books and crafts. Take a look at the stunning meeting room. I think I need to toss out all my furniture and put cushions on the floor (well, I pretty much live down on the floor as it is anyway!)

It looks like there will be more black, red and white on the horizon. Jennifer has just showed us her loaded spindles with yarn waiting to be warped for her next project (once she gets her three warp-along pieces done, I suppose).

You may remember my showing you how one of the features of the warp substitution technique, by which the al’ouerjan patterns are created, is the creation of long warp floats  on the back of the textile.

We may find them bothersome but obviously the Bedouin people don’t.

You may also remember that Tracy showed us an Omani textile, which was made for sale in a textile cooperative, on which the weaver had used a clever way to secure the floats.

Having seen all this, Phil from the Ravelry group posted a picture of a textile that was collected on a trip to Indonesia. This textile forms part of the greater collection of his and the late Dennis Penley’s now owned by C.Philip Willett.

You can see the front and back of a warp-faced textile patterned with supplementary warp floats. Now, I would have been there forever scratching my head trying to figure out how they managed those color changes if I had only seen the front of the textile. At first, I thought I was looking at supplementary weft floats as the image had been posted side on which didn’t make the color changes difficult to understand.

There are two faces to every story, right?

And then Janet took a look at both front and back, figured out that the picture should be turned around, and that we were looking at warp floats which were all woven in off-white and then colored orange and blue after the weaving was completed. The long floats on the back are secured by a red weft in much the same way, I would imagine, as the Omani weavers in the cooperative are securing the floats on their pieces. Of course Phil already knew all this and was teasing us by not telling!

Dyeing the warps after the weaving? This had never occurred to me. At first I was rather disillusioned by what I perceived as “cheating”. But, then again, all sorts of embellishment can be added to a piece of fabric once it is off the loom…embroidery, stamping, beadwork, painting, resist dye patterns to name just a few so why is this any different?

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To finish, here are a few odds and ends…pictures from the groups and my other online weaving acquaintances, interesting links etc…

Tracy and Pam shared pictures of their backstrap weaving set ups.

It is always helpful to show these kinds of pictures to give people ideas of what they can do in their homes.

Tracy gets down on the floor while Pam sits up on her sofa. She sits cross-legged (jealous!).

Tracy made some adjustments by adding an extension to her far loom bar as she said that she was tired of banging her head on the table as she neared the end of her warp.

Pam was fed up with the card table always toppling over and so has wood pieces wedged between it and the sofa.

And here is super flexible Karla weaving in Chinchero where she was working as a volunteer for the CTTC.

She looks perfectly at home there, doesn’t she?

Some finished projects…

Another super guitar strap by Annie MacHale. Pam made a bunch of keyfobs from a pebble weave band she wove using four-shafts on her table loom. I like the hardware. Those tabs just clamp onto the ends and the rings are added…one little bit less sewing to do and less band used up in what would normally be fed through the ring and sewn down.

Ben has not only been braiding but has been making entire Peruvian-style slings. Here is one of his latest ones….

It looks to me like the Margarita braid but don’t take my word on it…there are so many variations to these braids and I would hate to give you the wrong information. I will have to ask Ben about that.

Some great links!….

This one comes to you via Kaz Madigan who writes the curiousweaver blog.

This link is for a free download of David K Barker’s 2nd Volume of Textile Designs of Bhutan. I have the first volume which I don’t think exists as a download but which can still be purchased as a hard copy.

The file is 73MB and even I with my erratic internet connection was able to get it quite quickly and with no interruptions…lucky!

And on the subject of Bhutan, this is a link to a blog which I recently found and which I think is sure to  develop into an incredible textile resource. I have been trying to contact the author, Wendy Garrity, but I guess that she is out of internet contact and can only get online now and then to add to and update her information. I would love to talk with her and know more about her life.
And finally, a little information about my book, Andean Pebble Weave.

The download is available as usual from Patternfish.com with the version in German here.

 

And then there is the follow up book that I am working on!

So, I will leave you now with all the very best wishes for the holidays with this Mexican weaving showing a nativity scene (courtesy of Karen Elwell aka Teyacapan.) It is blue indigo-dyed cotton with silk figures and is from the coastal Mixtec community of Pinotepa de Don Luis, Oaxaca

Backstrap Weaving – To Float or not to Float

An inkle loom? I bet you didn’t expect to see that here! I have been playing with my Ashford inklette this week…but more about that later!

I have this star motif memorized now! You would think so after having woven seventeen of them and then another seventeen of the mirrored version.

I am really enjoying weaving this wide piece.

I love using the big swords and hearing the clacking sound they make as I insert one to hold the picked-up warps while withdrawing the other. I like the feel of the chunky polished wood and I like the look of all those string heddles neatly lined up across the warp.

The wideness of the warp which is very close to my body width makes me feel even more that I am part of the loom itself and I like that the opening of the sheds feels more natural now and less of a workout.

I guess that I am just over halfway now…at least with the weaving part. I am thinking of finishing it with weft twining and trying to work a similar star pattern into the twining. And then I wouldn’t mind adding a tubular woven band to the edges.

So, this may not be truly finished for some time.

In any case, I am already charting my design for the next piece in this wide red, black and white set and am taking inspiration from the chamantos which are ponchos worn by the huasos of central Chile.

An online friend who lives in Chile has allowed me to use the picture she took of a chamantera at work at her loom.

I am excited about this next project as I have not woven designs like these before and can’t wait to see how they turn out. Of course there will be a good deal of sampling beforehand.

And I can’t help but think ahead to the next pieces after that!

We will be starting a new weave-along in the Ravelry group in January. One of the themes that I have suggested so far is ikat so I will try to incorporate some of that in one of the pieces in this set.

Again, much sampling will be done before I try ikat in one of these large pieces. I have only done three or four ikat experiments so far so, naturally, there is still A LOT to be learned .

I guess I have been a fan of this bold color scheme for some time. Here’s another pebble piece I made some time ago with these colors.

It certainly keeps appearing in my life…the Montagnard weavers use a lot of black which beautifully sets off the red and white twined designs that adorn the edges of their pieces.

Many of the Bedouin pieces I have seen online and in books make a lot of use of these three colors. My online friend Tracy, who lives in Doha Qatar, is constantly sharing  pictures of Bedouin textiles she sees with us on Ravelry . The ones below, which Tracy photographed, are from Oman, (on the left) and Syria.


I remember back in 1993 or 1994 when I first went to live in Chile, before I could learn Navajo weaving or make my first trip to Peru, I knocked together a wooden frame, hammered in some nails and made some small tapestries using a cardboard rigid heddle, (it wasn’t very rigid!) cotton warp and acrylic weft yarn.

I had no resources at the time and all I knew was that I wanted to weave something “ethnic” and so the cover of the Split Enz CD with its Maori designs was my inspiration!

I made a small tapestry pillow cover using the motifs. I so wish I still had those early weavings. Many things got left behind when I moved up to Bolivia.

Only last month I was in the library of the Textile Museum in DC and found a book with charts of a lot of twined Maori pieces including ones with very similar designs to those on that old CD cover. I expect I will be making something with those one of these days.

There are a lot of curves in those Maori motifs and that is one thing I learned from twining letters…it is not too difficult to make figures with curves.

That’s another reason to love the warp substitution technique whether it be the single layer or the double-weave version…with enough threads to work with, you can produce all kinds of shapes.

I have been sampling for a future double-weave project and trying to get the scale sorted out for the #10 crochet cotton that I want to use. For example, I have been trying to figure the ratio of warps to weft shots to make a square, sampling to see how the thickness of a two-warp vertical line compares to that of a single weft-shot horizontal line among other considerations.

Again…I am just loving the backstrap loom and the way it enables me to make small samples.

At left you can see the Abba Yohanni motif that I wove some time ago. The original card-woven motif on the curtain in the cave church in Ethiopia is pretty much square whereas you can see that mine is elongated.

Can you tell that I didn’t sample before I wove this motif into the wall hanging?

The solution was pretty easy after all. All that was needed was to weave only one row for the horizontal lines instead of two and that was enough to change it into a more square-ish figure.

Below is the improved Abba Yohanni motif now looking more like it should. The diamonds in the four corners are my own invention.

Figures that comprise pure horizontals and verticals are fairly easy to chart and I have been finding other interesting knot-like designs with these features online.

It’s the curves that are troublesome!…trying to get the horizontals and verticals to behave in such a way that they give the illusion of a curve. Even getting the right angle for diagonals can be challenging. It seems that the vast majority of Celtic knot designs in my books include these pesky curves.

Fortunately I really like messing around with these kinds of things.

I went through all this when I did tapestry weaving in Chile and was trying to figure out how to make just the right angles for diagonals so that I could weave the design on a Mexican piece that I had seen in Joanne Hall’s book.

The resulting piece is at left. I would have used red for the background, to have my favored red, black and white combo,  except that my Wild and Woolly yarn order to Chile somehow got messed up and that pinky color arrived instead of the Ganado Red that I had wanted.

So, I have been sampling…only one sample done so far and still a long way to go to get the desired result but I expect I have learned enough from this to get it pretty close to right next time.

Yes, I love double weave…those clean crisp designs on the solid color backgrounds on both faces. It is, after all, just two layers of plain warp-faced weaving with substituted warps. It is easy to chart and I find it one of the easiest patterning techniques to “read” as I weave.

I have had a lot of fun using it for African and South American inspired motifs….

…as well as designs from Mexico (again from Joanne Hall’s book).

Supplementary weft inlay motifs like the ones from Bhutan on the bag I made above right can be easily woven in double weave. They conveniently use exactly the same charting system (although the reverse is not always true, that is, not all double weave designs will translate well into inlay as the floats in the inlay technique need to be kept short).

I have been able to take elements of motifs woven in other techniques like the simple warp float patterns I wove on the placemats above and weave them into matching mug rugs in double weave.

Cell phone pouches are nice double weave projects. The designs on the one on the right, which are based on Guarani motifs, are quite curvy.

Here are a couple of projects made by my online weaving friends Traudi and Sharon.

Traudi charted and wove the designs on her green and yellow mug rugs. Sharon created a series of butterfly motifs for double weave projects. This is just one of four that she showed me.

And how did Traudi reach this point? She started off with the warp substitution technique. Below you can see a band that she made using the Bedouin shajarah motifs charted here as well as the Bolivian flowers charted on the double weave page. She also created designs of her own.

I think that the word “double” in double weave for some people may immediately bring forth ideas of something complex and difficult. In warp-faced weaving, it isn’t!

You are basically doing plain weave with two sheds as you would normally, except that you are using doubled threads, one in each of two colors.

To create patterns, you simply drop one of the two threads…the color that you don’t want to have appear in your pattern. The solid color borders will also be warped with doubled threads as shown above.

You only need to drop warps to create the shed for the upper layer. After doing a special maneuver, the pattern shed for the lower layer forms automatically. Only one weft is needed to weave first the upper layer and then the lower.

This technique’s “little brother” is the simple warp substitution technique which Traudi used to weave her band. The same kind of warp is used except that the solid color borders are not warped with doubled threads.

As in double weave, the pattern shed is created by simply dropping the warps that are not needed to form the design. The warps that are dropped simply hang below.

While I recommend the simple warp substitution technique as a good warm-up before moving on to double weave, it is those discarded warps that form long floats on the back of the textile that most people don’t like.

I guess that’s the price you pay to have a smooth “float-less” front face on the band.

You can see at left how long and awkward the floats can be.

If you read my post last week, you will remember that Tracy showed us a beautiful textile from Oman which has been woven with the simple warp substitution technique. I showed it earlier in this post but it is worth seeing again don’t you think?…

Both the bands of patterning on this piece have been woven with the warp substitution technique. The Bedouin call the style of patterning in the center band shajarah and the checked pattern al’ouerjan. You can see some close-up examples that I wove below. The al’ouerjan pattern is a partial warp substitution design in that only the red and white sections are warped as doubled threads. The blacks are all single warps.

My samples would have unsightly floats on the back if Tracy had not shown us the back of the Omani textile which showed how the weavers use a second fine weft to secure the floats. This is the first time that Tracy has seen this in use and she suspects that designers in the cooperative store that sells these weavings are encouraging the weavers to use this second weft to make the textiles more attractive. The technique is not used in traditional Bedouin pieces.

So here is how it is done…very simple!!

I decided to put this on my Ashford inklette, just for something different. Here is the draft…(the split squares show where two threads are wound together as one. The borders are not included).

(I am sure that inkle weavers are familiar with this style of draft. Winding a circular warp on the inkle loom or for a backstrap loom with this pattern is very straightforward. I will create a new page on this blog for next week showing how to wind this for a non-circular, or single-plane warp, for the backstrap loom using both two and four stakes.)

…and I used non traditional colors.

Above you can see the cross. Note that the yellow and blue threads have been warped together as one thread.

Above left you can see one of the sheds opened. From each pair of yellow and blue warps, one warp must be dropped and one kept to form the pattern shed. Then the weft is passed as shown above right.

Then I reopened the original shed and passed a second fine weft (I used some tatting thread which is about sewing thread weight). You can see on the back how this fine thread secures the warp floats. Compare it to the following samples where the floats have not been secured…

And what about the shajarah style of patterning where all the warps are substituted? This is how it would look front and back as the Bedouin traditionally weave it…

And here it is using the system on the Omani co-op textile where the floats have been secured.

While the extra weft serves to secure the floats, it doesn’t really create a pretty second face. However, I think that it makes enough difference to enable you to use this patterning technique and create a very much more practical piece even though you would probably still prefer to have the back hidden from view.  So, although you may not want to use it for a guitar strap, you may find it works well for a bag or cell phone pouch. You won’t have to worry about things getting caught on the floats. Bear in mind that the resulting band is fairly thick as you are, after all, using doubled threads.

I hope that I have inspired you to try this technique. (See the tutorials for simple warp substitution and double weave). Give the simple warp substitution a try and maybe you will be tempted to go on to double weave so you can have two pretty float-less faces.

I am in the process of charting more beautiful designs from my friend Pam’s gorgeous rug from Uzbekistan to add to the warp substitution and double weave pages. They will go up soon.

Backstrap Weaving – “You look, you know”

“You look, you know”…..These are the four little words that my teacher Ngach, with her limited English, would say to me over and over as we sat twirling the weft threads on their bobbins and twining the border of her woven blanket panel.

And she was right…there was no need for explanation. Mind you, I had already been making my own experiments in twining based on the Maori method and even charted and twined some Montagnard designs before this class so it wasn’t too hard then to pick up Nagch’s bobbin-twirling method.

And so I looked and listened to the clacking sound of the bobbins smacking together as they carried the wefts, twining their way across the multitude of fine warp ends. Ngach would stop and count the number of warp ends now and then when she lost her place in the pattern and slowly I learned what to do…how to hold the warp ends under the right amount of tension, how to twirl the bobbins well so they didn’t become hopelessly entangled on the back side of the cloth and how to snap the warp ends and nudge the twined wefts up snugly against the cloth.

I am currently on one of my safaris, which involves weaving with lots of my online friends, and it is always interesting to me to experience the different ways that people react to backstrap weaving.

Backstrap weaving with the group in Santa Cruz California.
Bands from the Santa Cruz weaving days

As an English teacher I have always been aware of different learning styles but, unfortunately, in the structured environment of the institute in which I taught, I was always racing against the clock trying to cover a seemingly impossible amount of material before the next exam. More often than not I had to limit myself to catering to the learning style shared by the majority.

Joan following a pattern chart.

Now I have more freedom to do my own thing, and develop my  way of showing people about backstrap weaving in a way that hopefully addresses a variety of learning styles.

Some people like to be shown a series of steps uncluttered by explanation and discover the logic in what they are doing for themselves as they weave, others find it impossible to absorb steps without straight away knowing the “why” behind each one.

Some people need to use charts while others find them a hindrance…a confusing mass of squares or ovals that in no way relate to what they see on the cloth and they do very well just “winging it”.

There are those who like their instructions to be backed up in writing while others have more success just listening to them. And there are yet others who like to watch in silence and do it…”you look, you know”.

But, hopefully, the end result is the same…some woven  bands to show at the end of a day but, more importantly, a satisfying experience with new skills learned, mistakes made leading to self-taught lessons, the development of the ability to analyse and trouble-shoot and the creation of the desire to explore further.

Kristi used a pillow case as an improvised backstrap to weave her own backstrap using the warp float technique. Jayne continued with some pebble weave bands after our get together. She wove a series of what we were calling “eyes” on the band on the right and then invented a wove a pair of eyeglasses just for fun.

After weaving with friends in Massachusetts, I headed off to Pennsylvania..my second visit there with Ron and Carol. I was excited as snow had been forecast for Saturday, the first day of my visit. While I am no stranger to snow, I hadn’t really seen lots of the stuff since 1992 and we got enough of it to make me very happy!

I know that for most of you in the north eastern US states this was an ugly, wet, slushy, heavy and unwelcome weather event and I apologize for my enthusiasm here!

I was even still smiling, and so were the other weavers, when the power went off fifteen minutes before the end of our day together. I am a little weird like that…I know that the power cuts were very inconvenient for the hundreds of thousands of people who experienced them but I welcome these little ”adventures” which spice up my travels and it was all good fun to me.

Really we weren’t too badly off with lots of wood to make a fire in Ron and Carol’s living room, kersoene lamps placed about for warm light and dinners cooked in a motorhome with its own generator.

Sunday was gorgeously sunny….still no power but light streamed in through the windows of the room in which we wove. The sun also allowed me to take some pretty pictures in the morning and evening light.

Bundled up but happy (I was wearing five layers!), we were able to weave all day Sunday and yes, Judith was there both days in short sleeves and with bare feet taking my term “barefoot weaving” (which I coined to mean weaving with little or no tools) a little too literally. That’s Elene next to her. Roxanne and Joan came well dressed for the power outage the second day when we wove bands with patterns in simple warp floats.

Weaving, warping, shopping, weaving, browsing.

I spent the evenings ploughing through piles of Handwoven magazines warm and cosy in the motor home. Ron and Carol did their best to make things as comfortable as possible and I was really enjoying the unusual situation. As I said it was all a big adventure for me. That couldn’t believe that I was actually enjoying this!

While flicking through the pages of the weaving magazines I realized that there were quite a few years there where it was all about rep rep rep. I have never paid much attention to this structure but there it was again and again in the magazine pages and ideas started to come to mind. There was one rug the colors of which I really liked. It turned out that it had been woven by Tom Knisely and was right there in The Mannings….And how about the piece on the cover of the Jan/Feb 2011 issue…oh yes, that’s Tom’s too.

So, I am adding rep weave to the list of things to tackle when I get home.

The power came back on late on Monday night and I was off headed west the next morning. I was shocked to hear that many places were still without power. Pam in Massachusetts didn’t get hers on until Thursday while many others had to do without for even longer while I settled among the sea and sandscapes with my friend Annie in Santa Cruz California. We visited the frolicking seals at the wharf , hoardes of Monarch butterflies wintering over in groves of eucalyptus trees and humpback whales stopping off in the bay as they migrate along the coast.

 I visited with Annie, the “Queen of Sashes” aka ASpinnerWeaver on my trip to Santa Cruz last spring and she wove with me again. This time I got to stay with her for days…what a treat… tour Santa Cruz and its wild places and wildlife pictured above, chat with a group of local artisans with whom she meets monthly and talk and talk and talk about something that is near to both our hearts…band weaving.

Annie’s living room/studio has at least seven inkle looms parked in it.

She can grab one and sit and weave on it at any moment. Baskets of yarn and woven samples are here and there along with a fabulous collection of books on weaving around the world.

Sashes adorn her walls…her own pieces and those collected from around the world….many Guatemalan hair sashes and belts and she has now added a Bolivian double weave belt from Potosi that I brought to the collection.

Annie decided to wear something handwoven everyday during my visit. Here she is wearing a huipil from Guatemala while weaving her latest guitar strap.

Later that day she packaged up to mail one of the straps that had just sold on her Etsy site. Annie has such a wonderful sense of color and design and it is little wonder that her guitar straps are snapped up not long after they appear on her site. 

We wove for three days in Martha’s studio away in the woods with a lovely fire in the stove and smoke curling from the chimney to greet us each day.

 

On the third day, at Yonat’s urging, Martha brought out an amazing rug that she had woven which is a reproduction of a piece of fabric that was found wrapped around a mummy from the Anasazi culture dating back to approximately 1134 AD. The rug is woven in a diamond twill and she explained to us her path to successfully recreating the pattern and the method she used to record and chart the design.

Here Martha is standing in front of the design which she plotted on diamond graph paper.

And here is the rug. Yonat and Annie look on as Martha points out some of the details. What I liked was seeing Martha’s progress markers. She sewed a zig zag in red thread along one edge, each “zig” representing a day’s work…most often less than an inch… while white thread would mark the distance she had managed to weave in a week.

And yet again I got to take a look at her reproductions of Anasazi sandals. Thank goodness, as last spring when I had seen these it was all a bit over my head and a case of too-much-information. This time I saw them with new eyes and understood what was going on.

On the left you can see the weft-twined upper part of the sandal sole or the part that would be against the wearer’s foot.  A relief pattern is created on the underside by placing added extra twist to the twined wefts between warps in the positions where the pattern was to appear. This is going on my list of things to try too!

As for all of us, the backstrap weavers, we did our own simple weft twining and created some fun patterns with colors rather than texture. Here are some pictures of the gang including Martha and some of the weft twining, warp substitution and double weave pieces…

Above are Ingrid (Ingrid Crickmore the loop braider), Annie, Sawyer and Dorothy weaving. Below, Yonat chooses colors alongside Annie and Barbara while Anne and Dorothy warp.

Last spring when I was weaving with this group in Martha’s studio, Martha showed me a collection of woven wristlets and a loom with one in progress which was part of the collection of the late Anne Blinks.

The loom with wristlet in progress is from the Shipibo people of tropical lowland Peru and the completed wristlets are Anne Blinks’s reproductions.

On my visit this fall I found a box in Martha’s studio with my name on it which contained some works-in-progress by the late Nora Rogers, a member of this guild who, among other things, wove with a backstrap loom and studied the structures of these kinds of little-known textiles and attempted to reproduce them.

One was a piece of sprang fabric, still on the loom, where Nora was studying the structure used to create the traditional Hopi wedding sash. Another appears to be Nora’s study of the Shipibo wristlets. I am certainly hoping that that is true. I need to look at these more carefully when I get home.

So, it was a whirlwind visit to the west coast, a chance to catch up with my springtime weaving friends and meet an online friend, Anne Dunham, who joined the group for the first time. We have already set the date for the next visit in spring next year!

Now I find myself back on the east coast in Maryland with friends.

And in the living room in Claudia’s home I see this….everywhere I go there’s twining!

This is the twined edge on a rug that one of Claudia’s sons who is in the Marine Corps had sent back to her from Afghanistan. And take a look at the rest of it…

So, I really need to do some soumak myself and see if this is the technique that has been used on this rug. The picture above left shows detail of the Afghan rug and, yes, I have taken pictures of the other side to take home and study.

The rug on the right is a silk one from Uzbekistan in my friend Pam’s collection which she tells me is soumak. The surface of this silk rug looks the same as that of the Afghan one. And I am still wondering about the technique used in the Bunong textiles that I saw when I was with the Montagnard weavers in North Carolina…

One of the Bunong ladies had this textile in her possession but had not woven it and did not know how it had been made. I aim to pin this down!…soumak, warp wrapping, weft twining or a combination of all of them?! Yet another thing to add to the list. 🙂

This is the last stop on my trip and I guess I will be back to steamy mango season in Santa Cruz Bolivia this time next week leaving the US as it moves into winter. But before I leave the DC area I will make a trip to the Textile Museum and see the current exhibit, Weaving Abstraction: Kuba Textiles and the Woven Art of Central Africa. And there is a rumor that Mapuche weavers are exhibiting at the National Museum of the American Indian and who knows what else I will find!

Backstrap Weaving – A Feast of Knotted Fringes

This is a week in which I have been insanely busy with very little time spent at the loom. My pre-trip preparation has kept me busy at the keyboard making arrangements, digging through the closet to find the warm clothes, dragging out backpacks and bags, warping projects and gathering sticks to take on the road.


I washed and pressed my finnweave piece and was pretty happy with the result (wet finishing always makes me nervous). I wove a simple strap and now need to decide how to put it together. I also warped up a bright striped piece for a tote bag project but simply couldn’t live with the color arrangement. I have to confess that I hadn’t put a lot of thought into how I arranged the stripes and that has now come off the loom.

And then came an email from Eladio in Mexico sending me a link to a video showing the rebozo weavers of Santa María del Río, San Luis Potosí knotting designs in the warp ends of their shawls….stunning!

At the Tinkuy de Tejedores, in Urubamba Peru last year, one of the presenters was a weaver from this very place…Luisa Govea, pictured at left, with some of her work, is known as one of the most highly skilled weavers of silk ikat rebozos using designs from the 17th , 18th and 19th centuries.

Carol Ventura has a web page with pictures from the backstrap weaving school in Santa Maria del Rio where many of these shawls are made.

This reminded me that I also have a lot of photos which my online weaving friend, Phil sent me of ikat shawls in the collection of the late Dennis Penley. These also have magnificent designs which are created by knotting the warp ends and sometimes even embroidering on top of the knot work. These shawls are from the towns and villages around Cuenca in Ecuador.

Whether the knotting technique used by the weavers in Mexico and Ecuador are the same or similar, I can’t tell you. All I can do is watch the video in wonder and enjoy the images that Phil has sent me and hope one day that I may find out more about them on a return trip to Ecuador or, even better, on a first trip to Mexico.

Here ‘s the video….

And now I can treat you to images of the designs on the fringes of ikat shawls of Gualaceo, Bulcay and other towns and villages around Cuenca in Ecuador….

Many thanks also go to Agaath who has allowed me to use her picture of a lady knotting the fringe on an ikat shawl in Ecuador…

We can imagine that she is knotting a design something like the one seen below…

Or perhaps she is just knotting a fine mesh without designs onto which she will later embroider figures like these:

And a closer look…

And then there are the fine elegant white fringes. This one includes the Ecuadorian Coat of Arms…

If you can’t quite make out the patterns there, here are a few pictures of some of the details…

More knotted fringes with their intricate designs….

I love the shaping on this next example…

Sometimes the designs incorporate words….

And here are details from various pieces….

And what about the ikat pieces themselves which are woven on backstrap looms like these? (another picture courtesy of Agaath)…

Here are some more pictures, taken by Phil, of pieces in the Dennis Penley collection….

And these….wow!!

So, that’s it from me for this week. I wonder if any of you tried the weft twining that I showed in my instructional videos last week. I found a picture in my file of Montagnard weavings of some of the basic weft twining I showed in the videos…single rows of alternating colors and chevrons created by working four threads at once…simple but effective.

These stacked chevrons on the Bedouin weaving that Tracy in Qatar sent me are also very striking sandwiched between the multiple rows of single-color twining.

Maaike27 from Canada has been weaving up nice bands on a homemade inkle loom using many of the pattern charts that I have posted here on my blog. These bands have all been made with what I call the simple warp float technique and she has sewn them into a bunch of useful purses, key fobs, bookmarks and pouches.

There has been action in the Ravelry group both in and around the plain weave weave-along but I am saving all that for next week.

I will be leaving next week and hope to hit the northeast at the height of the fall colors. I arrived  a wee bit late for it last year. I will try to keep up the posts while I am away but they may be a bit erratic.