Amazonian Peru – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving -The Bag of Tricks

I had to dig deep into the bag of tricks this week to come up with a new idea for finshing off my latest three-panel wall hanging. Two days of experimenting with the structure that I had hoped to use for the two outer red panels finally led me to the conclusion that it just was not going to be as I had envisioned. It was time to plan again and take a look at all that I have at my disposal in my “bag of tricks”. And there is a lot of stuff in that bag of tricks after having spent almost 18 years now studying weaving techniques and simple looms used in South America.

The main panel for the wall hanging is now finished. I can’t cut it off the loom yet to better show you the stepped effect of the woven fringe as I will need to place the two red panels, when I am done weaving them, on this same loom and then twine across the top of all three to join them together.

It is always fun turning a finished piece over to look at the other side. I have been looking at white squiggles on black for so long now as I inched my way through this weaving. Yes, literally inched. I took note of my progress on the woven fringe part and it was pretty much an inch a day.

This side actually looks more like the painted Shipibo cloth that inspired this project. It is much more common to see light cloth with dark lines. But I don’t have to make any decisions here about which side to show. It needs to be the dark side in order to match the other pieces in this wall hanging series.

I want this second wall hanging to represent the weavers of the tropical lowland regions of Peru. For that reason I had chosen to use the structure that is used by people of the upper Amazon Basin to make wristlets.

I have never been to that part of Peru and so was relying on a sample that I had been given from the work of Nora Rogers and Ann Blinks as well as notes by Cheryl Samuel in order to reproduce the structure. I bought red hemp twine for this project while in the USA. The weave is based on having twined warp threads lying next to what Samuel calls a “half basket weave”.

I did succeed in reproducing the structure but the hemp twine did not give the design the relief that I had been hoping for. It was just a flat red mass at which I had to peer in just the right light in order to make out the pattern.I tried all kinds of weft and beat but I simply could not get the desired effect. Nevertheless, I found myself sitting alone stupidly squealing with happiness as the piece started to take shape. It was a joy just to able to reproduce it but a disppointment not to be able to use it in my hanging.

Back to the drawing board. I wanted something that would be all red but with texture and, of course, something that would represent textile techniques of the lowlands.

But, of course….simple warp floats!

Some time ago I had woven the placemat, above, using a two-color simple warp float technique. I copied the pattern from a cotton bag from tropical lowland Peru that Teyacapan shows on her Flickr page. The design is one that I have also seen painted and even embroidered on Shipibo cloth.

The set of placemats I wove became a study of the use of this structure in several regions across the globe…

At the Encuentro de Tejedores that I attended in Cusco in 2012, I was able to observe Matsigenka backstrap weavers from Bajo Urubamba creating striking black and white pieces with their handspun cotton. The pieces were decorated with patterns that were created from simple warp floats.

The picture above was taken at Tinkuy 2013 in Cusco and shows a weaver from Pacaya, in tropical lowland Peru, weaving a warp float pattern with handspun cotton on a backstrap loom.

It isn’t necessary to have two colors to create patterns in this structure. If I used an all-red warp, I could create patterns of raised red-on-red….textured patterns rather than colored ones. I also had a Mexican sash that my friend Annie MacHale had given me way back in 2010. I then remembered that weaving a single- colored piece with warp float patterns had been on my to-do list for some time. It was all coming together nicely!

The weaver of this Mexican sash has alternated a heavy warp thread (doubled threads) with fine to create a high-relief pattern in white on white.

Above, you can see my red experiments…the hemp twine wristlet structure and the red-on-red simple warp floats.

I experimented with floating pairs and floating single threads and decided that single was the way to go. I wanted the pattern to be fairly delicate and subtle so as not to interfere with all that is going on in the main black-and-white panel. I decided to weave the solid lines of the main panel with the arrow motif in the center.

I set up both panels on the one loom in the same way that I had done for the first wall hanging. This would ensure that both came out the same way.

You’ll have to trust me when I tell you that these panels are deep red and not the weird pinkish-red that you see here.

Now it is time to start sketching ideas for the weft-twined pattern that will go across the top of the finished three panels. I remember I had a heck of a time with the twining on the first wall hanging trying to group the warps correctly so that the twined width matched the woven width. Hopefully it won’t take as many attempts this time to get it right!

And in my spare moments I doodle and think about wall hanging number three…the ikat one. Luckily I have a giant cone of thread and a a huge roll of ikat tape (thank you Betty!). I expect there to be a few do-overs for that one! I am also hoping to use supplementary-weft to create patterns on that piece. These ideas are just sloshing around in my mind for now but I hope to base the overall design on hook motifs in positive and negative space like the ones I played with recently in silk supplementary weft on cotton…Then there will be the third series of wall hangings in which I hope to put what I learned with my ticlla (discontinuous warp) experiments to use….using wool and the red-black-and-white combo, of course!

I have spent a lot of time putting that big bag of tricks together. It is nice to be able to use these experiments to create bigger things. I look way, way ahead and I get excited about all these projects as I inch my way along!

See you next week.

Backstrap Weaving – Songs from the Lowlands

While scrambling to prepare for my up and coming travels, I have a little time to show you the latest progress on my Shipibo-inspired piece. I have spent some time looking about online for more information about the Shipibo designs and my head is reeling with the variety of information that is out there on the meaning of the patterns.

I have heard several version from my weaving teachers about the name and meaning of this Bolivian motif. explaations of the — I have heard several versions from my weaving teachers about the meaning of this Bolivian motif.

It doesn’t surprise me. I have written here before that I can ask five weavers here in Bolivia the meaning of a certain motif and receive three different answers. I have heard different stories about designs from people even within the one small community. The real question is, do the weavers even want to share this special information with me?

My warping activity is fairly mindless. I wind warps, make heddles, and sometimes weave a few rows to get the piece started. I don’t need to concentrate except to count revolutions on my warping board and so, it is an activity that allows me to put on some music and sing. And, after having read one of the web pages that has information about Shipibo patterns, it is fun to imagine the woven designs in the cloth in my latest piece singing back at me. I will explain that a bit later…

Unfortunately, I can’t sing while I weave this piece. It involves a lot of concentration… jumping back and forth from chaotic curvy lines to orderly straight ones. One miscount, that may seem insignificant at first, can add up to a big blooper further down the track. I’ve learned that the hard way!

Now…about the songs and the singing. The Center for Shamanic Education is one of the sites from which I learned a little about the Shipibo patterns and their relationship to music. According to this site, the Shipibo people, who live in the Amazon Basin region of Peru, believe that everything is a song and that everything can be sung.

Image from the web site thestorybehindthefaces.com

“In the Beginning a giant anaconda swam through the darkness. She sang the patterns on her back and the patterns fell from her mouth in her song. The patterns took form and created the universe and the people – The Shipibo.”

The patterns are called Icaro (another site calls them Kene) and they are woven into or embroidered on cloth and painted on ceramics, houses and skin.

At the Encuentro de Tejedores that I attended in Cusco in 2012 anthropologist Dr Luisa Elvira Belaúnde, who also called the designs Kene, talked about the patterns that are tatooed on the skin saying that the Shipibo-Konibo people believe that patterns already exist within the person and are simply made to emerge on the skin. A woman’s body is wrapped in design either in the form of tatoos or by wearing patterned cloth.

The Center for Shamanic Education also writes that the Icaro carry healing energy and are a form of musical notation.It says that the Shipibo do not differentiate between seeing and hearing which means that the Icaro patterns in the cloth are constantly singing. What a lovely concept! In rituals, Shamans can hear and sing the tunes of songs from the labyrinth of lines in the patterns.

The labyrinth of lines…what I have been calling a “curvy chaos” in my own piece…is musical notation to the Shipibo people.

One Youtube video which shows a number of pieces of patterned cloth created by the Shipibo people is accompanied by song and the wonderful sounds of the forest.

I have a couple of very small pieces of Shipibo cloth that I bought in a store in Ecuador. I have never been to the Amazon Basin region of Peru.

My friend, Yonat, has a gorgeous piece of Shipibo embroidery in her textile collection…

The painting and embroidery are now done on industrially-produced fabric. I wondered if there was anyone still weaving among the Shipibo people. Teyacapan posted a picture of a woven bag from the Peruvian Amazon Basin on her Filckr page. As I had done with my pieces of painted cloth, she had bought the bag in a gallery in Quito, Ecuador. The designs on this bag appear on some of the painted cloth pieces that I have seen.

I am guessing that this is the single-faced warp-float technique only because all the lowland weavers that I have encountered so far in Peru and Ecuador who use this structure weave the single rather than double-faced version.

I used this design on a placemat that I wove along time ago….

I wasn’t able to find other images of Shipbo woven pieces or weavers until I came across a video, made in 2011, which is the trailer for a documentary on footage that was shot by anthropologist Harry Tschopilc Jr in 1953. The footage has been uncovered in the archives of the Field Museum of Chicago and the documentary covers a project which involved taking the footage and showing it to the Shipibo people. The documentary captures the reaction of the Shipibo people, both young and old, to seeing aspects of their culture and lifestyle that have been lost in the last 60 years. The 60-year old footage shows a Shipibo woman weaving using a backstrap loom as well as one weaving on a small frame that could have been made from a bent tree branch. There is also recent footage of a woman using a backstrap loom to weave a very long and colorful narrow band.

Here are a couple of screen shots from the old film…

And here is the complete trailer…

I try to imagine the sounds of the forest that you can hear on the first Youtube video in this post as I sit at my loom. The weavers most likely have the songs of the Icaro in their heads as they work. Right now, I hear planes droning overhead, the sounds of car alarms and the rumble of the big plastic trash bins as they are wheeled out to the street…life in the city!

There are two quite long Youtube videos, parts 1 and 2, that show the process of creating the painted patterns on the cloth here and here. Again, there is song and forest sound in the background…lovely.

So, I will continue with my wall hanging panel. It will be flanked by panels of deep red and I will join the three panels at the top with weft twining. I hope to twine a pattern that has been inspired by the work of the Shipibo people.

Maybe now you can understand better what I was doing when I was on the floor a few weeks ago drawing squiggles. I had seen wavy lines amongst the hairy wool warp threads on which I had been working a few months ago and from that was born the idea for this Shipibo-inspired work.

See you next week!