weft twining – Page 7 – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Weft twining with a twist

WEFT TWINING WITH A TWIST? or WHAT? You tell me.

Weft twining is showing up all over the place. I just discovered what I think might be classified as “sort of”‘ weft twining in an unexpected place in my journal of notes on my first trip to Ecuador. So I have decided to call it ‘weft twining with a twist” as I don’t know how to define this. Perhaps you can help me. More about that a little later…

I have just about finished the Bedouin piece I was working on last week. I just need to make some tassels from some of the weft ends and figure out what to do with the warp ends and I will be done.

I found two more designs in books and online for the last two panels. The design on the right is from a book that I have had for at least ten years and I can remember years ago marveling over the pictures of the Bedouin looms with their long long warps stretched out over the stony ground. It is exciting to now be able to weave some of their designs myself even though I used my backstrap loom rather than a staked out one.

I twined a broader band of design at the bottom this time with three colors and “s” wrapped the warp ends. I also wove two plain narrow black bands which I sewed to the edges to cover the weft ends from the twining.

This one will go on the wall as a long narrow hanging and now I would like to get down to planning a much wider one.

As I told you last week the main designs are done in a technique known as warp substitution which creates long awkward floats on the back. The floats can be eliminated by weaving the designs in double weave but I wanted to stick to the traditional technique. However, I couldn’t resist warping up to try the designs in double weave. I warped up my Ashford inklette as I had showed you last week a little about doing one-weft double weave on this kind of loom.

inkle double weave — On the left you can see one of the designs from the large Bedouin style piece woven white on black using 26 doubled warps in the pattern area. On the right, the inklette is tipped upside down so you can see the same design in black on white.

Now I think I want a belt with these black and white designs made on my backstrap loom. The piece on the inklette is a sampler. You can see that I have put a very short warp on it.

I haven’t paid all that much attention to my off loom weft twined piece but I did make a little progress. I am still having a few tensioning issues with this and the piece is getting gradually wider. It’s good practice until I can get to the stage where I can make something useful with this technique.

latest twining — I am using a swirl border and large motif from Montagnard twined textiles on the left. On the right you can see how the weft twists to encircle each of the hanging warps.

As I was twining away this week my mind was taken back to a trip I did to Ecuador in 2005. There in a small town near Otavalo I met a man who is still making alpargatas, the traditional footwear of Otavaleño men, by hand.

Admittedly most men are choosing sneakers over alpargatas these days but on market day in Otavalo I saw a few older men using them. The very oldest men tend to get about with bare feet.

You can see that the foot covering and heel straps are fabric which are worked in a “sort of” twined technique. The sole is braided and coiled “cabuya” fiber (a kind of agave). The cabuya soles on the tiny pair of alpargatas in the above picture have been mounted on rubber.

I asked around as I really wanted to see how these fabric pieces were made and was told to go to a tiny town, a short bus ride out of Otavalo.

I imagined that I could just stroll into town ask around and be pointed in the right direction. Not so! and this day spent touring this town along little lanes between the fields in search of the alpargata maker is one of my favorite memories of that trip to Ecuador. Everyone was very friendly but no one seemed to have the slightest idea about this person I was seeking.

Finally two people pointed in the direction of some hills behind the town and I headed there not really knowing if I could trust this information. People are so eager to please and will often tell you what they think you want to hear. Of course I should have known that the best place to ask theses things is at the corner store. Corner store owners know everything about everyone and the owner’s daughter was dispatched to take me by the hand right to the door of the alpargata maker.

Aurelio, the alpargata craftsman, can be seen braiding cabuya fiber which will be later coiled to make the soles of the alpargatas. His wife at right asked to have her picture taken with her finest traditional Otavalo clothes.

Unfortunately, Aurelio was not in the process of making alpagartas when I met him. In fact, he had just taken the woven pieces off the mold but he was more than happy to show me his tools and equipment and tell me about the process. The alpargata fabric is worked around a mold rather than on a loom. I bought the two finished pieces of cloth from him along with the heel straps and a tiny boy’s pair of alpargatas.

equipment — The triangular fabric pieces are "woven" around a conical wooden mold which you can see on the right. The foot covering pieces called "mantas" are there with the "taloneras" or heel straps. The braided fiber will form the soles.

The conical mold or ‘horma” is made of wood and covered with non slip leather. On this the “mantas” and ‘taloneras” will be worked. Aurelio has several molds of different widths and lengths to cover all range of shoe sizes from boys to adults.

To begin “warping”, a length of cord is tied from the top to the bottom of the mold. Cotton thread is plied and then wound around the mold. Starting from the center cord the plied cotton travels around the mold and passes around the cord before returning in the opposite direction. And so, back and forth it travels until the required length is reached.

weaving steps alpargatas — I am using a cardboard mold here for these photos just to demonstrate this along with some very thick cotton string which I have roughly plied just to give you the idea.

Aurelio plies his cotton evenly on a drop spindle unlike my uneven thick cotton string above which I just twisted by hand. You can see the neat twist in the end loops of the piece below.

The “weaving” process then begins…

A single strand of cotton is passed on a needle between the twist in each of the plied cotton strands from bottom to top, turning at the top and returning through the adjacent twist to the bottom. Designs are formed by passing the needle through the same twist twice, that is, on both the upward and downward journeys, thus creating a float. When the work is finished, the center string is cut and the piece of fabric can be opened out.

So what do we call this? Twining? EDIT: Since posting, there have been a few comments suggesting that this is most likely what is known as ply-split darning (not to be confused with ply-split braiding). Thank you to all who contributed their thoughts and suggestions.

The results look the same. You can see that the “stitches” created have the same slants as those created by weft twining. If you compare the method used by Aurelio to make the mantas with the picture I showed of the weft twining earlier you can see that the same thing is being achieved.

I have been twisting wefts around static warps. For the sake of the comparison we could say that Aurelio draws the “warps” through static twisted “wefts” with the same result. (The moving element on the needle is, however, the weft and the twists the warp).

I have not thought about creating designs with floats this way in my weft twining . I love this textured patterning in one color and can’t wait to try it.

Here are other typical patterns used on the mantas of the alpargatas…

The finished mantas….

The finished alpargatas…

These are a small boy’s size and so, eventhough I only saw them being worn by a few older men in the city of Otavalo, they are quite likely being used in towns and villages in the area by males of all ages.

Women also use alpargatas but theirs are now factory made from synthetic materials. The heel straps, however, are still being made by craftsmen like Aurelio. I did not see a synthetic version of the men’s style.

ladie ap — This tiny black pair is a baby's size.

I wish I had better images of the alpargatas in use but here is what I have…

I am happy to see that a couple of Weavolution buddies have been inspired to give weft twining a try too. Franco has had this on his “to-do” list for some time and has decided to shift it to the top. He has been making a weft twined bag around a cardboard support. You can see it on his blog. Jennifer has been experimenting with it on her cricket loom and I am sure she will have something to show us next week.

I can’t tell you how many things are on my own “to-do” list. Adding to it this week…a belt with black and white double weave Bedouin designs, a larger Bedouin style wall hanging with weft twined bands included and now… float patterns in weft twining inspired by the Otavaleño alpargatas.

I hope that you will be inspired to try some weft twining or perhaps one-weft double weave on your backstrap or inkle loom.

Backstrap Weaving – Spreading the Obsession:warp faced and weft twined

SAM_0836 — Simple warp floats in red and black by Eladio Salas Torres

WARP FACED AND WEFT TWINED

Three things have influenced the weaving I have been doing this week and they are spread across three very different parts of the world:

– a new book in my collection of weaving books on Bedouin weaving which has taken me on a fascinating trip through Saudi Arabia and other lands inhabited by the Arabian Bedouin with their colorful woven tent dividers, bags and camel adornments;

– the intricate weft twined work that the Montagnard weavers of Vietnam, that I met in the US, incorporate on the edges of their warp faced textiles;

– the beautiful combination of red and black in the backstrap woven piece by Eladio Salas of Mexico that I showed you last week.

First I took a step backwards as I had decided that I didn’t like the weft twined piece that I was practicing on last week. Fortunately I discovered that un-twining is a lot easier and faster than un-weaving. It is just a sample piece for skills-building but I just was not happy with the colors and motifs I had chosen and it had to go! Half of it got pulled apart and I did some searching on the net to figure out how I would like to continue. So now I am continuing with a swirl design from a Jarai tribal textile and will finish it off with other Montagnard motifs.

Meanwhile the Bedouin designs were calling to me…fabulous red, white and black warp faced pieces interspersed with bands of weft twining. I noticed that there was a small three color band of design that was common to many of the pieces which Joy Totah Hilden identifies as al-‘uwairjan pick up patterning and so I decided to sample that before launching into a big project.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — The three-color al-'uwairjan pick-up patterning. It is used to create triangles and diamonds and other simple designs and creates long floats on the back of the textile.

In Hilden’s book I see that Bedouin weavers use staked out horizontal ground looms with their heddle bar suspended on forked sticks, rested on top of oil cans, cement blocks or other such objects or tied to sticks driven into the ground. The weaving is suspended just a few inches above the ground. As the weaving progresses, the work is not rolled up. Instead, the weaver sits on the completed work and inches her way along the warp to stay close to the weaving line. Weaving is even done inside the home with the loom bars and warp held under tension in ingenious ways. One picture shows the loom bar tied to another bar which has been lodged behind a doorway.

Images of Bedouin textiles and looms can be seen here and here.

Here was my chance to put the reds and black together and learn some traditional Bedouin designs. The main panel of my weaving is done in a technique which I believe is called warp substitution. This pick up technique creates long floats on the back of the textile. I have never been a fan of long floats and much prefer double faced weaving but I wanted to use the technique employed by the Bedouin. To eliminate the floats I could have woven the very same designs in double weave.

The center panel of my piece is woven with the warp substitution technique called “shajarah” (tree) pick up patterning.

This weaving also gave me the opportunity to try weft twining on the loom. Many of the pieces shown in Hilden’s book have not only weft twined edges but also several bands of twining at various stages within the weaving. I have been enjoying my off-loom twining experiments and was looking forward to comparing them with twining on warps under tension on a loom.

I have kept these first attempts at on-loom weft twining narrow and simple.

I had to consider how many warps to use in a bundle around which to twine the wefts as well as the right thickness of weft yarn so that the warps didn’t get spread too much thus widening the piece. Should I twine loosely or tightly? It took a few attempts to get it right. The warps did get spread slightly and so I had to work to get them back into place so I could continue with the warp faced weaving.

I plan to leave the weft ends on as a decorative feature. This piece will be a wall hanging. I was thinking about using it as part of a pillow cover but my cat, no doubt, will chew those weft ends off.

Feeling a bit more confident, I did a slightly wider weft twined band at what will be the center of the piece and added in a little bit of chaining.

It is lovely doing the weft twining on the loom and the added control that one has by having the warps under uniform tension allowed me to use a much finer yarn than I have been using on the off-loom pieces. I expect with more practice I will eventually be able to do fine off-loom twining too….some time in the distant future!

The motifs in the warp substitution band have been copied from images in Hilden’s book and from those I have found online.

You can see the bands of al-‘uwairjan pick up on the sides.

I am now just over half way through this piece and hope to finish it with a wider and more complex piece of weft twining.

I will add to the weft ends that are hanging from the sides to balance both sides and perhaps add some tassels.

Hopefully it will be ready to show next week.

There are many beautiful weft twined camel adornments in gorgeous red, tan and mustard tones that I would like to use as inspiration in other pieces.

While we are in red-and-black mode….

I promised you last week some more information on the lettering used by the Montagnard weavers in their bag straps.

Anyone who knows how to do simple warp floats as detailed in my tutorial here will pick this up in no time. The lettering is done in simple warp float technique with some variation.

In simple warp float technique you are using a shed of each color, for example, all the red warps in one shed and all the whites in the other. You weave alternating red and white horizontal bars and then go floating one of the colors over the other to form your designs.

The difference in the Montagnard method is that they have one shed of red and another shed of alternating red and white which you can see at left (with a two-warp red border).

In the red and white shed, they drop all the whites which exposes their black weft – you can see black dots on the above lettered band. They use twenty-nine warps in each shed to weave their letters, that is, twenty-nine reds in one shed and fifteen whites alternating with fourteen reds in the other.

When they want to weave a letter, they…

-open the shed with the reds and whites and drop all the whites except the ones that they need to form the letter.

-pass the weft.

-save those whites and add them to the red shed.

-pass the weft.

–open the red and white shed again and keep the same whites from the previous weft pass along with the whites needed to form the next part of the letter.

-drop all the other whites.

-pass the weft.

-save only the whites needed for the next part of the letter and add them to the red shed.

– pass the weft.

AND SO ON……

This will be double dutch to those of you who have never done simple warp floats. Well what are you waiting for? Here’s the tutorial! Become familiar with the simple warp float technique first and then try the letters.

NOTE:

If you use a red weft instead of black you will create the impression of a smooth solid color background.
This is not a double faced technique.
This technique does not produce the stiff band typical of true warp faced weaves.

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There was a question in the Inkle Weaving group on Ravelry about doing one-weft double weave on an inkle loom and so I warped up my Ashford inklette and have added some pictures to the one-weft double weave tutorial for this. I only warped up to take the pictures and wove a triangle as a sample. This morning I had some time to play around with the warp…

This is very easy to do on the inkle loom. One-weft double weave produces a thick band with sharp motifs on a solid background. It is double faced.

Flipping the loom upside down, this is what you see…

This is the first time I have tried this on the inkle loom. Weavers in the Backstrap Group at Weavolution have tried it but warned me that it is a bit stressful on the loom. I wasn’t sure if my inklette would be able to take it but I actually don’t find it stresses the loom at all.

You will warp your loom normally except that you will be using doubled threads.

See the full tutorial with all the details and more pictures here.

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You may remember my blog post about Anna who came to visit and learn backstrap weaving with me here in Bolivia. She and boyfriend Alistair are on their way by bicycle to Ushuaia after having started in Alaska in May 2008.

Well they have just completed the Lagunas trail in the salt lake area of Bolivia and Chile and are currently luxuriating in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. Anna described that riding section (which turned out to be more of a pushing section for the last five days…deep sand and a strong headwind) as one of the most physically demanding things she has ever undertaken.

Anna and Alistair teamed up with a couple of German cyclists for this part of the trip and Anna has been spreading the obsession by teaching new friend Carolin to backstrap weave. They are carrying printed pages from my Andean Pebble Weave download with them.

Here are some fun pictures of them weaving on the road…

2. uyuni, first weaving class — Anna on the left gave the first weaving class to Carolin in the town of Uyuni in Bolivia before heading off on the lagunas trip. The little table has been fashioned from "madera de cacto" (wood from the dead pillar cactus)

5. idem — Carolin with her tiny loom tied to her bike and weaving on the salt lake.

10 bike double weave back side — Anna designed a fitting motif with which to practice her newly acquired double weave skills.

13. idem — Anna warping in camp somewhere in the desert. She said her fingers nearly froze off! I recognize those pencils...

So nice to see my apprentice so enjoying her new skills! Apparently Carolin will be doing a long sailing trip after this bike journey so we can expect to see the backstrap loom being used in the middle of the ocean some time in the future!

Anna brought me some spindles and llama bone picks from Sucre.

I gave her very precise directions to the curandera stalls in the crazy campesino market which sell llama fiber, weaving tools and all kinds of home remedies.

She not only found the curandera area but I believe she bought the things at the very same stall at which I shopped when I was there.

I have sent some of the spindles to the Netherlands and the US and have one left if anyone is interested. I have a few llama bones left too.

Drop me a line if you are interested. 🙂

Backstrap Weaving – Building skills and resources.

BUILDING SKILLS AND RESOURCES

I have been busy behind the scenes building the resource pages on this blog. I am about three quarters of the way to finishing the “Frequently Asked Questions” pages which will deal with fifteen or so topics related to making your own backstrap loom and weaving on it.

You can access the index by clicking on the FAQ INDEX tab on the header image. There you will find links to the finished pages or you can go directly to each page by clicking on one of the topics on the sidebar.

The pages include explanations with photos, links and images. I hope that you find them useful and please feel free to ask any questions, add information from your own experience or suggest other topics by leaving me a comment here on the blog or the relevant FAQ page.

And….I will be translating all the tutorials to Spanish and putting those on new pages too. (Y….voy a traducir todos los tutoriales a español y los voy a poner en paginas nuevas también).

So, that was my keyboard activity for this week along with writing an article and getting some pages done for my next book!

As for 0n-the-loom activity, I was asked to weave some bookmarks for a friend. I was told what design to use but the colors were left to me. I got to use some more of the Turkish cotton that I bought recently and I can’t say enough about how beautiful it is to weave with. It is only for special projects, though, definitely not for sampling as it is a bit pricey. Details can be found on the FAQ 3 page which answers the question “What yarns are suitable for backstrap weaving?”

These have been woven in double weave. As the borders are plain weave I used two wefts. One weft wove the borders and upper layer of the double weave and the other wove the lower layer. Lettering is really easy to do in double weave and although these letters I invented are very basic, they can be very effective. I have charted them out for you all to use. Most of the letters are in the following two images and I am sure that you can invent the ones that are missing. You can, of course, weave the letters after following my tutorial for one weft double weave.

Other woven messages can be done in the Montagnard style lettering. I learned this warp float weave by studying a band I bought from some Montagnard weavers that I met in the US on a recent visit.

This is a “looser” weave and the resulting band is quite flexible unlike the double weave which is very firm.

Next week I will do a tutorial on this warp float lettering.

You have probably heard me mention before my love of the letters that Linda Hendrickson has charted in her book Please Weave a Message.

I got this book hoping that I would be able to use the charts for double weave but found that the “stitches” produced in card weaving sit one on top of the other as opposed to those in double weave that are staggered from left to right. This meant that I would have to adapt Linda’s charts for double weave. I did adapt many of the letters but they were seriously altered and just did not look as nice as Linda’s but now I have had an idea!

I realize now, after my recent experiments with weft twining, that weft twined “stitches” also sit one on the top of the other and that I should, therefore, be able to use Linda’s charts to twine letters and messages. I am not sure how much the slant on the weft twined stitches will affect the appearance of the letters but I can’t wait to try it out.

I haven’t done so yet as I am still building my weft twining skills while working on another project this week with slightly finer yarn.

This time I am using three and sometimes four colors at a time and it is a little cumbersome but I do like the results. The design has been inspired by pieces in a book on Bedouin weaving. From a distance this looks pretty much like a piece of tapestry. Many things amuse me about this technique….firstly, it is something new, secondly, it helps me to better understand what the Montagnard weavers are doing at the edges of their warp-faced weavings and thirdly, it is an off loom technique that does not require tools apart from one’s own hands.

I am grateful to Bonnie Datta who told me that a chapter of Peter Collingwood’s book The Techniques of Rug Weaving is devoted to twining…both warp and weft. The book can be downloaded for free here. The opening line of the chapter reads….Twining is not weaving,… so that settles that debate!

It shows some ways to turn the wefts at the edges for rug making which I must try as that is something with which I am still battling. The piece that I am working on now is still a “skills builder” but, who knows, I might be able to make something useful out of it.

As far as lettering goes, my boyfriend’s mother asked me a long time ago to make something for her. She is from Cochabamba in the Bolivian highlands and, although she was raised speaking Spanish, both her mother and grandparents were bilingual, speaking both Spanish and Quechua. She told me that there are three lines that comprise the “Law of the Qechua” which go…

which translate to… Don’t steal; Don’t lie; Don’t be lazy. She would like me to weave these words into a wall hanging for her. Well, I might not weave them, I might twine them.

What I am really leading up to with my twining experiments is weaving a double weave piece on my backstrap loom with twined edges where the design on the twined edge matches the double weave motifs. There is much skill-building to be done before that point. Hmm…I am not sure if I am less adventurous now or wiser. I am sure that in years gone by I would have launched myself straight into this and not bothered with the “skill-building”!

In the meantime I have been admiring some ikat pieces from Sumba which I found online which have very broad twined edges. They leave the wefts tails hanging out at the sides as fringe. I am trying to hide the weft ends so I can have smooth neat edges, without much success, I might add!

This has led me to look at other twisty twined off loom techniques and especially one that is practiced right here in Santa Cruz where I live by the Ayoreo people. Actually, I have always wanted to learn about this but gave up some time ago trying to find a willing teacher. Maybe it is time to try again.

Information about the Ayoreo people is sketchy. Population estimates in different sources range from seventeen hundred to four thousand Ayoreo people, distributed amongst seven to ten clans living in the area known as the Chaco. They use off loom netting, twining and knotting techniques, sometimes with the aid of a needle, to make a type of shoulder bag called utebetai using a fiber called garabatá fino from the Bromelia Hieronymil plant. The fiber is twisted by rolling it on the thigh using ashes to take away some of its stickiness. It is plied and may be also dyed before use.

I have three of these bags but have opened them out to use as wall hangings.

According to a booklet put out by CANOB (Central Ayorea Nativa del Oriente Boliviano), the designs used in the pieces represent seven clans. The motifs include representations of the patterns on armadillo shells, clouds, snake skins and the eyes of a jaguar.

Miniature pieces are also made which are said to be used to carry talismans.

Even if I don’t make something like this myself, I would like to sit down with the ladies and watch the process and document it. Sometimes they are seen working with the fiber in the street but unfortunately I have not found them very open to my questioning or hanging about in the past.

The Ayoreo also use weft twining to make bags and carve beautifully simple bowls.

My friend Kathleen sent me pictures some time ago of bags called chácaras, which are said to be of Mayan origin, being made in Panama by the Ngöbe and Buglé people. The fiber is from the Aechmea magdalenae plant and is also twisted by rolling on the leg. The netting method appears to be the same although their color palette is quite different.

To finish this week I have some projects to show you from Marsha Knox who is in the Backstrap Weaving Group at Weavolution and Eladio Salas Torres who lives in Mexico and follows my blog.

Marsha used a tapestry loom to weave a band patterned with simple warp floats. I know that Marsha had a few false starts with this but she persevered and I thank her for showing us how warp faced bands can be woven on a tapestry loom.

Eladio has woven a wide piece incorporating three strips of simple warp floats using patterns from my blog. The red and black together look stunning!

He is using the double bird design from coastal Ecuador and a hook design that I adapted. He also sent me a picture of himself at his loom. I LOVE getting photos like this!

It looks like he is using a cardboard roll for his shed rod and maybe pvc pipe or wood for his loom bar and roll up stick. I wish I could sit cross legged like that! He has just bought my pebble weave book and I am sure we are going to be seeing pebble weave bands from him soon.

NEWS AND STUFF…

Here is the link to the most recent Synergo Arts newsletter about their latest progress with the ergonomic bench in Guatemala.

Backstrap Weaving – Weft twining: the learning process

WEFT TWINING: THE LEARNING PROCESS.

It has been a long time since I have learned something fiber related that it is completely new to me. As fun and interesting as it is, it has reminded me of just how much time is involved in practicing something so you can get to the stage where you are making something even half decent.

It is great finding weavings from different cultures online, finding that I know the technique and being able to chart and weave it like the Tarahumara band that I wove last week. When I visited the Montagnard weavers I saw a variation of a pick up technique that I already knew so it was not difficult to come home and weave it.

tara and viet — Tarahumara design band and Montagnard pick up patterned piece

However, I also saw that the Vietnamese ladies were working with weft twining, something that I had not tried nor seen worked before. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see the process and so I needed to come home and dive into my books in order to learn something about it.

This is a technique that has interested me for a long time. I bought Cheryl Samuel’s gorgeous book on weft twined Chilkat blankets from that wonderful newspaper-like catalog that Unicorn books used to put out back in the 90s. It is a stunning piece of work with beautiful illustrations – a joy to look at even if you don’t actually use it to make anything. Making a Chilkat blanket was perhaps a little daunting and so later I got a book on the Taaniko weft twining practiced by the Maori people of New Zealand. This seemed a lot more manageable. The book has fabulously clear step-by-step drawings but the disappointing lack of a variety of traditional Maori designs left me uninspired to try the technique.

More recently, my friend Caroline in Australia sent me a monograph on weft twining by Virginia Harvey and Harriet Tidball which has proved to be very useful.

Seeing the fine designs worked by the Montagnard weavers into the edges of their woven blankets and shirts was the motivation I needed to finally get down and learn how to do weft twining. Being able to touch the textiles and meet the weavers made all the difference.

kteh twining — Susan Stem shared the image above left with me of a loin cloth with a red and white weft twined edge. The other two examples were made by Montagnard weaver Nach Rahlan.

I remember being amazed when Betsy Renfrew, who is working with the Montagnard weavers, told me that this weft twining called kteh is worked off the loom. However, after reading my books and searching online, I have found that this is more often the case than not. Now that I have tried the technique myself, I don’t see any need to have the warps stretched out taut and can just hold everything in my lap. Maori weavers apparently have the top of the piece stretched out between two vertical stakes with the warps hanging down loosely.

And how is this for wonderful timing… the book you see at left, which I had ordered online and which has information about weft twining, arrived today. I can’t wait to get into this! Author Joy Totah Hilden has a wonderful website on Beduin weaving (she chooses to use that spelling) with seven pages devoted to weft twining which include images and instructional diagrams on the technique. The roll of cotton string which you see on top of the book is what I used for my warp and the yellow ball is Sugar and Cream cotton which served as my weft.

In her book Joy Totah Hilden describes weft twining as “the oldest weaving technique known in the world”. She quotes Mary Atwater who says “Twined weaving is so ancient that it may be said to have no history”. There is a discussion in a forum online about whether it is , in fact, classified as weaving. In any case, the results are beautiful!

So after a considerable amount of reading and trying to visualize the process, I got my materials together and started. This is one of the lowest tech techniques ever! That roll of string, the ball of yarn and my hands is all that I needed…no needles, pins, stakes or hooks. Okay, you do need one more thing in abundance: patience, as this is a slow technique.

I would liken it to learning to knit or crochet. The basic moves are not difficult but you have to figure out how you are going to hold and tension everything and you need to practice it a lot to get into a rhythm and settle into your own personal tension. You are all thumbs at first, tension is all over the place and the results are not too pretty! Basically you are taking two wefts, generally in two different colors, from one edge of the warp to the other twisting them as you go so that they encircle each warp.The twist is single or double depending on which color you need on the upper surface of the piece to form the pattern.

I soon got bored with my first red and black piece with a small design from the Taaniko book. What I really wanted to make were some of the Montagnard designs. The good thing is that the designs are really easy to chart on basic squared paper. You can see the great variation in tension between the two red and white samples above as I slowly got used to doing the twining and settled into a consistent rhythm and tension.

The Taaniko book teaches you to first twine from left to right one row at a time tying off the yarn once the right hand edge is reached and then beginning again from the left side. This results in a series of knots down the right edge. This has you twisting the yarn with your right hand while holding the warps with the left. The idea is to eventually become ambidextrous in order to be able to reach the right edge, turn, and go back in the other direction twisting instead with the left hand.

Well I am sorry to say that I simply don’t have the patience for this part of the learning process and so I just flip the work over and return with the back side facing me twisting with my right hand all the way. You soon learn how to read the pattern equally well from the back side (this is a single faced technique).

As you can see above, the resulting “stitches” are slanted which means that diagonal lines in the design take on a different appearance depending on which way they are slanting. I thought at first that I must be doing something wrong but a close inspection of the Montagnard pieces showed that their designs have exactly the same appearance.

Getting increasingly adventurous I created a wider warp and charted one of the motifs from the photo that Susan Stem had given me. This is not a completely faithful reproduction as I could not see the details well enough in the picture. I chose some small border motifs from the Montagnard pieces, a Maori border and another main Montagnard motif and lumped them all together in the one piece.

Ideally, you would work with weft long enough to twine back and forward and finish the whole piece but this length of warp would be very difficult to handle. You eventually have to finish at one edge and knot the wefts there, take more weft and start again.

Now what to do with all those knots and tails? From what I have read, it is common practice to cover the knobbly knotted edges with braid or add a fringe or tassels along the entire edge. In the picture below, I added a fringe along one edge to see how that looked.

That doesn’t look too bad although you can see that the edge in general needs a lot of improvement. What I might do for the next piece is add a Navajo-style twining down the side.

My first weaving experience was with Navajo-style tapestry and this is one of my early pieces. I always loved the way this twining looked on the sides. I would like to see if this helps smooth out some of the lumps and bumps in the edges of my weft twined work.

So now I have an even better appreciation of the work that the Montagnard weavers are doing creating the weft twined edges on their weavings. Of course they are working with much much finer yarns and their warp is the fringe of their woven piece. They use several strands of their fine warp yarn as one warp for the twining.

Maybe I will get down to finer yarns eventually but for now I am content to continue with the chunky stuff and I would like to make some of the designs from my new book. I love the colors of these pieces..all those sun faded reds, blues and mustard yellows that work so well together. Now to start planning a piece that can be made into something useful. The result is very sturdy and would actually make a brilliant backstrap, belt or bookbag.

That was my week of practical work and then there was the charting. I have plans to reproduce the Huichol piece at left that I photographed at the National Museum of the American Indian. It has been woven in balanced double weave.

I have woven this technique only once before from a ready made chart but I don’t have enough experience with the structure to be able to chart it directly from a textile so there will be a lot of experimenting and sampling before this project gets off the ground.

Actually there are some charts in an old issue of Prairie Weave Companion which I should probably weave first to get my hand back in. One of the charts is of a Chinese lattice work design – gorgeous!

As usual I will leave you with some work done by members of the online backstrap groups on Weavolution and Ravelry.

Kimberly, whom I met at Convergence, has taken to Andean pebble weave in a big way following my book…

The band on the left is made with size 3 crochet cotton and the one on the right size 10 – Coats Royale – beautiful rich colors.

Carinefile in Belgium made a backstrap following my article in WeaveZine and Evelyn has been pebble weaving.

I see many more days of weft twining and charting Middle Eastern designs coming up hopefully with improvements in my technique. If all goes well, I will have a balanced double weave project underway too and there is a supplementary weft piece taking shape in my mind after having seen a yurt band online. Oh and there’s another Tarahumara piece that I would love to tackle….!