Tag: Andean pebble weave

Backstrap Weaving – Spinning Tales

I am a “cheap spindler” in much the same way as I am a cheap drunk…it doesn’t take much to make me happy! Don’t waste the good wine on me. I do not have a refined palate. So, it is little wonder that I am content to use my humble Cusco drop spindle when I get the urge to spin. I just don’t have a refined palate for spinning tools.

The Cusco spindle was the second one I ever got, the first being from San Pedro de Atacama in northern Chile. The Cusco one that I got in 1996, being more robust, became my constant travel companion. It was practical. Although I have collected many more spindles on my weaving safaris since then, this Cusco one is the one I always use while the others hang on the wall as souvenirs of places I have been and people I have met.

The very first spinning that I did for weaving on my backstrap loom was with some extremely dry, brittle, and filthy llama fiber that I had bought from a farmer while wandering about the back roads of Uyuni in the Bolivian highlands. I cleaned and prepared it. The dust and dirt would have me wheezing and my skin would crawl and eyes run every time I opened the bags to get more. It made for good spinning training. I gave the fiber a tremendous amount of twist because at that time I believed that this was the only way hand-spun yarn could possibly stand up to the abrasion of warp-faced weaving. I have since learned that this is not so.

The natural colors of the llama I spun. I was always amazed at how nice it looked when woven. Warp-faced structures are very forgiving in that way.
And here, dyed with coca leaves, spearmint leaves and cochineal.
The first time I was given prepared alpaca to spin by my friend Janet, I decided that I simply couldn’t put all that heavy amount of twist into that beautiful fiber. With a bit of extra care in the way I handled it on my backstrap loom, it made lovely warp.

Prior to that experience, I had spun wool while still living in the Chilean Patagonia in the mid 1990s. I had brought some alpaca back from my first trip to Peru but had made a mess of it. That had me turning to sheep. There were sheep galore down there and I was given a fleece. So, I got experience washing and carding it and my first project was knitting! I can hardy believe it as I can barely knit. But I designed a pattern and fumbled my way through knitting the front of a vest. I wove the back panel in balanced plain weave on my Navajo-style vertical loom…without a reed. I probably didn’t even know that reeds existed back then. The knitting yarn was spun on the Cusco drop spindle and the yarn for the weaving on an Ashford Traditional wheel that my boyfriend at the time had brought back from the Falkland Islands. Spinning yarn that worked well for this knitting and weaving was a complete fluke. I really had very little idea about what I was doing.

Parts of the vest with a triple cross-knit looped edging. The brown part is the woven back. the multi-colored thing on the side is part of a woven bag also edged with the cross-knit looping stitch.

I really enjoy reading the online group forums about spinners and their spindles. The participants’ love and enthusiasm for their tools is wonderful….I totally get it but I just don’t share it. Some of the spindles they show are beautiful pieces of craftsmanship and I love seeing them. But when it comes down to it, I just want to get the job done.

It seems that when it comes to spinning I am totally product oriented which is kind of strange as it is quite the opposite when I weave.  I just want to get this stuff done so I can go weave with it. In weaving I am all about enjoying the process. I probably would not have been willing to devote any time to spinning if not for the pandemic. The combination of needing to keep my hands busy during Zoom sessions as well as a dwindling stash has had me happily spinning up all the wool I could find in my closet. Now I am making a start on the cotton. There’s still some alpaca lurking in there.

And as with my favored Cusco spindle for wool, I have taken the takli that Elizabeth gave me in Australia as my one and only tool for cotton. It is all I feel the need for right now. It makes for quiet, comfortable, and fuss-free Zoom spinning.

My slow-growing hand-spun cotton stash.

My collection of spindles that I have gathered in my travels includes a few that are used for cotton. Here are two from Guatemala and one that I bought from my Guaraní teacher here in Santa Cruz. The whorl on that one is a piece cut from the sole of a sandal.

And of course, there is the horizontally-held spindle that is used by my teachers in coastal Ecuador.

The cotton is draped on a wooden stand called the “rueca” for spinning. It has a notch cut into its top which grabs the cotton and allows the spinner to draw out the fibers under tension. A small basket is woven from plantain fiber underneath on which the spindle sits when not in use. This is a miniature version of the rueca which I made with my teachers’ help so that I could take an example back with me to Bolivia. I need to place something in the little basket to weigh it down because it is so small and light. The typical spindle can be seen at right with its wooden whorl. More often now you will see people using yo-yo halves and metal wheels as whorls.

Here are some tiny whorls from coastal Ecuador that the family had found while ploughing their fields. There were close to forty of them sitting in a bowl on a shelf, just like that.

The cotton sliver that I have been spinning was given to me by my friend Betty. One day while breaking off a length from the bundle in the closet to continue spinning, a label fell out which identified it as the Sea Island variety bought from a place called Straw into Gold. Judging from the yellowed state of the label and the fact that it had been typewriter-written, I am guessing that it was bought quite a long time ago. I had been becoming increasingly pleased with my progress spinning cotton but am less so now after having read a little about this variety of cotton online. Apparently it is known for its particularly long staple which makes it one of the easiest varieties to spin. Darn! It seems that I have started at the wrong end of the learning process. Considering how I struggled through the preparation and spinning of that ugly llama fiber all those years ago as well as going to the trouble of washing and carding the fleece I had been given in Chile, it seems like cheating to be picking up this beautifully prepared long-staple cotton as my (almost) first-ever cotton-spinning experience. I wonder if it will feel like going back to square one when I finish this and then start on the other varieties that I have. My very first experience had been in coastal Ecuador where I got to work almost from scratch, de-seeding, teasing apart, and fluffing up the cotton. It was difficult spinning it on the horizontally-held spindles compared to what I do now with the takli. Unfortunately, I didn’t spend much time on it while there, being much more interested in the weaving part of the process. My teachers already had plenty of spun singles that they doubled for warp so that I could learn how they weave their double-pocket saddle bags and hammocks. We would pass time in the evenings on cotton preparation.

My first attempts in Ecuador

I put in a little practice when I got back home but the loom soon called me away…

But now to the present. After finishing my big bag project, I took a few days off to spin cotton and think about what should be next on my loom.

The finishing touch on the bag project…magnet clasps for the flap and mouth of the bag. I had spare fabric to which I could first attach them.

I decided that I wasn’t quite done with the three-color pebble yet and that I should weave a study in color transitions. Upgrading my camera strap gave me a product to justify the use of my hand-spun for this study. I dyed some of it a rust color so that I would have three colors that would work well together in all possible arrangements.

Small quantities of hand spun wool for the camera strap plus some hand spun cotton singles ready to be boiled.
I got totally absorbed in working on the color transitions and different color alignments and thus forgot that I needed to start weaving the hummingbirds upside down at the half-way point so that they would be the right way up when the strap was worn. Oh well. That’s what happens when the things that are important for the final product get lost in the process.

In the picture above, I was testing shapes for the tabs which I would later cut from leather. I have an old home-made leather backstrap that was just the right color and was willing to sacrifice it for this project. I couldn’t get anyone in the street market to sell me just a tiny off-cut of leather and the available colors weren’t quite right in any case. Hand-stitching the leather was fun.

I used the existing strap hardware otherwise I am not sure how on earth I would have attached the strap. There’s a special kind of clip that I have never seen elsewhere that goes through a tiny hole on the side of the camera.

And here I am wearing the strap with its upside-down hummers on one side! and my “Ta-da!” face.

What’s next? I have started a sample for a wool Finnweave cowl. I am using 20/2 wool and need to see if the proportions of the motifs in my weaving with this material match those of the figures on my chart. But first I had to go through that annoying confusion of trying to figure out Finnweave all over again. You make notes from the last project but they are never thorough enough because you stupidly assume that some things are just too obvious to bother writing down. Not so! This time I will get it right and make sure I write down every single detail.

The other purpose of this sample is as a width gauge. This 20/2 wool is a fair bit thicker than the 20/2 cotton that I have been using for Finnweave lately. I have to get used to the difference between the cotton and wool. Cotton, naturally, gives a much sharper image and the hairiness of the wool makes it easier to produce skips in the lower layer of the double weave.

The other project idea that is waiting its turn is a very, very simple double-ikat pattern using my hand-spun cotton. I would hate to waste this lovely Sea Island cotton on a failed double-ikat experiment but I am so curious to see if I can manage to make it work. I will just have to keep reminding myself to keep it simple.

Backstrap Weaving – An Interesting Beginning

First of all, I will say that I am not superstitious. I jokingly wrote on this blog some time ago that getting bitten by a dog on a recent outing was a sign that perhaps I was getting too cocky in the range and frequency of my outings. And then I opened my big mouth in a Facebook post on December 29 with this: “I feel less locked-in now and more able to manage this situation we all find ourselves in.”

The universe responded: “Lol, that’s what you think.”

I strolled a block and a half to the bakery on Dec 31 and….bam! Five days later, Covid. Yes, sometimes you just get unlucky. I am well now, feeling back to normal and grateful that I had managed to get an AZ booster before this happened. First task now…find better masks. The chief medical officer in Australia is now coming straight out and saying that in the face of the more contagious Omicron, cloth masks (I am guessing he is talking about those home-made ones that we were all using) should not be used. I had been lining my two-layer cloth job with two disposable masks…still no good.

So, yes, the beginning of 2022 was “interesting”.

I had what I am calling Covid-head for a while which I would describe as feeling like particularly bad jet-lag. I dared not touch my weaving after losing the plot and destroying one of my PowerPoint presentations. This is what I had been working on before I got ill….

3-color reversible Andean Pebble Weave

This is 8/2 tencel and my attempt to get once more accustomed to the steps that I use to produce this 3-color reversible structure. My plan was to use the structure with my hand spun and I didn’t want to risk stressing my yarn with a whole lot of fussing about and unweaving while I got back into the swing of this technique. I wouldn’t call the way I do this efficient and I am waiting for that magical “aha” moment to come which will allow me to eliminate a step or two… or three. For now, I just plod along with it because I love the results.

Wrist cuff in 3-color reversible Andean Pebble Weave

During the pandemic I have been pulling out every bit of wool I can find in my closet and spinning it on my drop spindle during the various Zoom gatherings I have been attending. It has been slow going because I have only allowed myself to spin during these few gatherings. Goodness knows what I will do now that I have cleared out my closet and there is no more wool left to spin. Actually, there is a bunch of cotton to spin in there as well as alpaca…..

Part-way through the spinning project, I paused to try some of my yarn in two small wrist-cuff projects. I wanted to see if it would be able to stand up to the extra handling that it would experience in the 3-color method. They were just very short warps but I did feel confident after that test that my yarn would perform well even in much longer warps. I decided then that I would try to spin finer hoping that I could also produce finer yarn that would stand up well. That remains to be seen.

Applying an eye-pattern tubular band to a second 3-color pebble weave cuff in my hand spun.

I’ve been enjoying the tencel project. It’s just a mish-mash of various shapes and color combinations. And, yes, there are hummingbirds.

It has allowed me to play with swapping the outline and background colors and change the pebble spot colors at will. After sampling, I decided that a red outline with a green filler looks good against a yellow background while the same thing does not look good against a green background. The funny thing is that I had to walk away from this every now and then because the colors would suddenly start to get on my nerves! This never happens when I work with only two colors. So, I would go away and do something else and then return, look at the piece, and fall in love with it all over again.

Yesterday I knew for sure that I was fully recovered from Covid because instead of giving in to the post-lunch urge to nap, I was able to easily push it aside and go wind a warp.

These are the four colors I chose from my little stash of hand spun wool. Three will be part of the 3-color pebble and the one in the foreground will be the narrow border. I wanted to come up with a project that would allow both faces of the piece to be seen after going to all the trouble of using this reversible 3-color technique. I decided that a strap for a bag would be perfect….not very wide, but long enough to be able to play with patterns, and both sides would be seen. So, I am working completely backwards by first weaving a strap and then planning a bag to go with it. It’s not like I need a bag…I just like weaving and if I need an excuse and the piece simply MUST be something, then a bag strap it will be.

I know what you are thinking…that’s one ridiculously wide strap…but this will narrow considerably once I start weaving. My hand spun is finer than the 8/2 tencel and this warp has the same number of ends as that tencel sample. One of my concerns is that the blue is a tad thicker and hairier than the other two colors and may swallow them up. There’s only one way to find out, though.

I just really like this shot. It almost looks like ikat. This was right after I had made the heddles. I was testing my heddle-making by clearing the sheds. The three colors played together briefly as I raised one color layer above the others. It made for a pretty picture.

And so, I start 2022 with a weaving project that I find challenging and interesting, a collection of Covid anti-bodies (which of course won’t last forever), and the need to find something else to do during those Zoom gatherings. I find it impossible to just sit there. Maybe I will get back into learning about cotton spinning. I was playing around with cotton spinning a few years ago and even wove with some of the results, which you can see below, when I was studying the sheer cotton cloth with supplementary-weft inlay that is woven in some areas in Guatemala and Mexico. It’s the stuff of a beginner spinner but I was pretty pleased with it at the time

By Rodrick Owen

So, I just bought Joan Ruane’s video class on Cotton Spinning on the Takli from Taproot Video because I really need some guidance.

While on the subject of Taproot Video offerings, I should also let you know that Rodrick Owen’s beautiful book on braids that was published in 1995 and which is now out of print, has just become available for purchase as a PDF.

You can see that I am in some very fine company on the Taproot Video website! I hope that in this new year you might consider buying one of my books at Taproot Video if perhaps you have been thinking about it. We niche-craft authors need all the help we can get. Tell a friend, please! See you next time.

Backstrap Weaving – Between Science and Magic

Between Science and Magic….I have copied the title of this week’s blog post from the title of an article by Maria Popova that my friend Susan sent me on a new publication about the amazing and magical hummingbird…a subject which has been dear to my heart as I weave my way through my series of panels called Within These Walls. The article is accompanied by beautiful pieces of artwork such as this one created by John Gould in 1861 and states that…

There is, indeed, something almost magical to the creaturely reality of the hummingbird — something not supernatural but supranatural, hovering above the ordinary limits of what biology and physics conspire to render possible.

The magically larger-than-life hummingbirds that I created for my first three panels played a fantasy role as messengers, friends, guardians and helpers as I wove my way through pandemic maze and, while poking around online, I found that it is not unusual to assign magical qualities to these little creatures.

I found an article which described the role of a single hummingbird in Andean textiles as being a messenger between the three levels of Andean existence…..the underworld, the heavens, and all that lies between. Hummingbirds are often depicted in pairs in highland textiles with their beaks connected and are said in this case to represent nurturing and new life.

Which makes me even happier when I think back to 1996 and the fact that the very first motif I was shown by my backstrap weaving teachers was a hummingbird….although I had not recognized it as such at the time. It also amazes me that I first came to see it as a individual figure flying straight towards me in its role as messenger and that only years later I was able to also recognize it as two mirror-image figures with beaks connected. I find it magical that this one figure can, at least to my eyes, be seen in both these ways.

In 1997, I returned to Peru where I learned to make sling braids with a gentleman in Yanque in the Colca Canyon. He later introduced me to a weaver friend of his in Cabanaconde. She taught this bird figure to me along with others in a supplementary-warp structure. This is the actual band that I wove with her. I wonder if this too is meant to be a hummingbird.

Here’s another excerpt from Maria Popova’s article…

Essential as pollinators and essential as muses to poets, hummingbirds animate every indigenous spiritual mythology of their native habitats and are sold as wearable trinkets on Etsy, to be worn as symbols — of joy, of levity, of magic — by modern secular humans across every imaginable habitat on our improbable planet.

In the first panel in my Within These Walls series the magical hummers are valiantly fighting their way through the chaos to bring me (caught in a window between worlds….do I try to get back to Australia or stay here in Bolivia?) messages of comfort and solidarity as well as practical items….yarn and sticks for my loom.

In the second, they help me build the walls of my safe space and create a new normal within, planting saplings as a way of bringing pieces of the natural world inside. They even warp my loom for me.

In the third, while I remain safe within the walls, they stand as guardians hard at work trying to maintain some kind of a connection between the four disjointed pieces.

Which brings me to the fourth and final panel in the series which the drawing at bottom right in the image represents.

This one is my vision of a post-pandemic world and one in which the hummingbirds’ work is done. I figured that they should shrink back to what could be called a “scientifically acceptable” size in this final panel.

I got out my sampling band to see if I could create a tiny, yet still recognizable, hummingbird figure. The tiniest that I could create was still the length of the little weaver figure’s face and that was okay because I read that the largest species of hummingbird, the Patagona gigas, grows to eight inches (in some reports 9.1″) in length and is native to western South America. Perfect!

In the fourth panel all the pieces are connected into one smooth shape. This shape, which I create using ikat techniques, is filled with a tree around which three tranquil backstrap weavers sit at their looms.

In my last post, I showed you the root system of the tree. It is unusual for me to weave a newly-created pattern without first having sampled it. I paid the price by having to un-weave and make several adjustments to those roots. I didn’t sample the foliage either but got luckier this time and only unwove to fix mistakes.

A big part of the challenge is fitting all the pattern into the ikat-created shape, not allowing any parts to overflow and disappear into the solid black areas. I wanted the shape of the foliage and the roots to still give the impression of the stair-stepped figures that I used in the other three panels without having them look like hard-edged confining walls.

I enjoyed designing a baby and placing it on the back of one of the backstrap weavers. The hummingbirds are yet to be seen in this image. They are flying high being normal hummingbirds doing hummingbird stuff.

I love how the sheen of the unwoven warp has been captured in this picture. I am again using doubled 140/2 silk for this one. Three threads broke this time…one mysteriously and the other two through my own carelessness. I am impressed by the way this fine silk stands up to this warp-faced structure on my backstrap loom.

Here’s the finished tree. You can see the hummingbirds in this one. I had been wondering just how high hummingbirds fly off the ground in their search for nourishment and read that they have been known to fly as high as the balcony of a 14th-floor apartment to sip at a feeder.

Pale-bellied Hermit Hummingbird. John Gould 1861.

This fourth panel is still on the loom as I have yet to weave the horizontal band of pattern across the top. Of course this leaves me wondering what comes next. First of all, I will get out the good camera and see what I can do to get better photos of these pieces. So far, I have been using my tiny iPod. My good camera has never much liked red so we’ll see how that goes.

My internet wanderings in search of information on hummingbirds have taken me to unexpected places. In one such place I found inspiration for a possible future project in three-color Andean Pebble Weave. If that materializes, I’ll tell you more. One of my online weaving contacts suggested I weave a wrist cuff with my hummingbird figures and the new backstrap weaver. That might happen too. Perhaps the hummingbird is becoming another signature pattern for me. It might be fun to combine my favorite leaf pattern (another I consider a signature pattern) and the hummingbird in one piece.

Thank you for following the progress of this project. I hope that you have enjoyed the developing story. I’ve been working on it for several months now and it is not something I would have considered taking on if I had still been traveling three times a year.

Until next time, I’ll leave you with this beautiful image by Australian-born photographer and filmmaker, Christian Spencer. You can see a whole ballet of his hummingbird photos if you chase him up online.

Backstrap Weaving – Unraveling

No, I am not the one who is unraveling. I am still riding the pandemic roller coaster with all of you and my grip is still good and firm. In the title of this post I am referring to the unraveling of parts of the chaos and uncertainty that these last eighteen months have brought to our lives. This is something that I wanted to represent in the second of my four-part series of panels called Within These Walls in which the hummingbirds are busy unraveling the chaos lines that I had woven into Panel 1.

This Unraveling image showed up in my Facebook feed recently. It had been shared and shared again and although I followed it back for some way, I was unable to find the original source of the image, a title or even the slightest hint as to what its creator might have been trying to convey. (Edit: Pamela in New Zealand wrote tell me that she has tracked down the image to Rebecka Carléns. She has a Pinterest board that she has named Surreal Photography and an Instagram account. Thanks, Pamela!)

It shows lines being unraveled and wound into a ball of yarn carried by birds…the similarities to some of the activity in my second panel made me smile. I guess we can interpret it any way we please. Which reminds me of the little hummingbird motif that I included in one of my posts a while back. I posted a picture of it on Facebook recently without revealing what my teachers called it and asked people to comment on what they saw. Here are some of the answers…..

a devil with horns, a dog, a fox, a bat, an alien being, a folding chair, a butterfly, a spider, a mouse, an angel, a bird (only one person said it!), a bear, a jedi master with a double light saber, Princess Leia with puffy sleeves, a six-legged insect, a person in ceremonial dress, pizza, a hyena, a chalice on a stand.

I mentioned in my last post that I had decided to add a fourth panel to the series. Panel 3 shows me settled within my walls and making what I can of this new normal. All the while I am able to think about how we are all in this together and imagine other weavers seated at their looms in the very same way within their own walls in other parts of the world.

But I didn’t want to leave things there. I wanted to show that I believed that there will be a way out eventually.

I got my first dose of vaccine yesterday. It’s the Chinese Sinopharm one. It’s not the most effective one but it is the one that Bolivia has been able to acquire and that’s the end of that. It helps me feel that a few more strands of suffocating uncertainty have been unraveled. I have not experienced any side effects. The jab site is not even sore. Members of an ex-pat group that I am in will tell me, in their typical cynical and joking style, that this means that what I got was probably a fake! The markets here are full of cheap big-brand rip-offs of all kinds of products. I remember getting someone to try and fix my Toshiba air conditioner. He looked at it and said “Wow, it’s an original. Okay, this is worth trying to fix”.

So, I added the layout of Panel 4 to the drawing that I had initially put together to roughly plan out the Within These Walls series….

In Panel 4 the pieces of the main shape are no longer disconnected. Disconnection is certainly something that we have all felt during the pandemic. The shape is now connected and extended. The central bar is the trunk of a tree. The lower shape will contain the root system of the tree and the upper one the crown. And there will be three backstrap weavers sitting around the tree at their looms.

I went one step further in designing one of the three backstrap weaving figures. In my last post I showed you version 4. I decided to beef up her arms a little. I have been working out during the pandemic and am up to forty-five full body pushups now. I think I deserve those sturdier arms! Version 5 is the one on the right. It requires a tiny bit of tweaking.

Here’s the root system taking shape….

I am actually beyond this point and have added the backstrap weavers. They look very sweet sitting around the tree. The one on the left has a baby on her back. I’ll show them to you next time when I have finished the tree. In the meantime, here’s a picture to celebrate backstrap weavers gathering to weave together on the island of Flores in Indonesia…

This was another picture that was shared on Facebook with absolutely no information to give it context. Fortunately, Sue Richardson, who is an expert in Indonesian textiles, was able to help out. Sue knew that this picture had been taken at a special event in 2015 when over 1000 backstrap weavers gathered to celebrate the textile traditions of the Sikka Regency and attempt to create a record. This is the translated information from an article that Sue found:

“Due to its high historical and selling value, the Sikka Regency Government is very supportive of all its development and preservation efforts. One proof of this government’s support is by holding a national event of the 2015 Ikat Weaving Muri Arts Record and winning because it can be represented by a thousand Sikka district female weavers. This victory was announced and the certificate was handed over by Mrs. Mufidah Yusuf Kalla on November 11, 2015 in Sikka Regency.” Although, according to another source that Sue also provided there were 1057 weavers.

I am currently back to paper and pencil, charting the crown of the tree. I charted but didn’t sample the tree roots and so there was a certain amount of unweaving that had to be done while I adjusted the chart. I always unweave and then walk away from the loom to engage in a completely different activity. That way, I can return and pretend that the unweaving never happened! It somehow helps. Hopefully the crown of the tree won’t involve that many adjustments.

I am happy that weaving friends and guilds, while getting more confident and occasionally meeting face-to-face, are continuing to offer opportunities to meet via Zoom. Zoom time has become my time for spinning and plying while watching and/or listening to programs on topics such as the ikat textiles of Borneo, textile travels through Indonesia, mathematics and sacred geometry in weaving, and warp-faced bands of Iran.

While enjoying these programs I have a produced a nice bowl of singles which will be plied. I still have a lot more spinning to do. The wrist cuff on the right was a sample I wove with this plied yarn to see how well it stands up to warp-faced weaving on my backstrap loom. Even though this was just a short sample, I could tell that the yarn would do well in larger projects. The annual Tour de Fleece spinning event has been creating chatter on Ravelry. I might have a project that will allow me to participate this year although I usually get tired of it after a week.

And so, with the topic of trees on my mind as I once again get down to the enormous sheet of charting paper, I will leave you with some tree-related images.

It’s fall here in Bolivia but in the tropical lowland part of Bolivia in which I live, the change of season is barely noticeable. Today’s temperature is 29 degrees Celsius/ 84 degrees F and the Toborochi trees are in full bloom across the city….not the kind of thing that immediately springs to mind when one thinks about fall or autumn. Last weekend I took a picture of this gorgeous Toborochi which is just a half block from my home…

One thing that happens in the fall that distinguishes this season from summer is that every now and then we get a wave of cooler dry air that comes up from the south. With that, the normally humidity-hazed sky turns a deeper blue. This shot comes from my rooftop on one such day. I love the sharpness of the lines of the buildings against the sky. On this day I was in the sun getting some Ds because the cooler temperatures made that possible. This rooftop is my nightly star-gazing spot (cue The Drifters and James Taylor). There’s a ladder that allows me to sit up even higher on top of a water tank.

And finally, I’d like to share with you another fabulous bag project by Allyne Holz. This one is tree-themed. She creates her bags using a tapestry crochet technique and has used leaf patterns to decorate it. She then weaves a strap on an inkle loom with a similarly-themed pattern for the strap. This time she has used one of the patterns that is charted in my Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms book and it makes me so happy to see the book being enjoyed and used this way. I also love Allyne’s use of a Dorset button on the end of the drawstring.

Here’s hoping that some of the uncertainty is also unraveling in your world. I am resolved not to get carried away by over-confidence. Santa Cruz is actually in a third wave right now. I guess that means that the Chinese vaccine will be put to the test.

Take care and continue to stay safe, please.

Backstrap Weaving – Come Fly With Me

Let’s do a little armchair traveling.

I have been enjoying talking to my weaving friends in the USA via Zoom and hearing about the little freedoms that they are now experiencing in their small post-vaccination worlds. Bubbles seem to be expanding to allow some people to feel comfortable in gatherings of vaccinated friends. Here in Bolivia as in many countries around the world, some of which are deemed wealthy, poor or somewhere in-between, we are still waiting. Thankfully, the internet allows us to travel to far off places from the safety of our homes.

First stop: the Tibetan Plateau. Daniel Miller allowed me to share this photo that he took of a backstrap weaver who is part of a nomadic group of people that lives on the high Tibetan plateau. The tent has been constructed from panels of woven yak fiber that are woven on a ground loom. The piece that the lady is weaving in this picture is more likely destined to be a saddle bag. She has found the perfect rock against which to brace her feet and make the operation of the loom a little easier on her back. The rock seems to be deeply embedded in the ground. However, I have to wonder if a rock of such perfect shape and size is a favorite that she transports on the back of a yak from from place to place so that she can quickly set up and weave more comfortably. Cheese made from yak and goat milk lies on the surrounding sheets of cloth.

I like to stare at this picture and imagine the sounds that might accompany this weaver…a gust of wind passing across the plain that causes the panels of the tent to billow and flap, the gentle clacking of the sticks as she changes sheds, the rasping sound of the sword against the handspun wool, perhaps the snorting, stamping or sighing of the yaks or a burst of bleating from the goats. I have a recently-formed habit of thinking sounds into pictures.

Tent panels of woven yak yarn. Photo: Daniel Miller

I have been listening to a BBC Radio program called Ramblings in which Clare Balding walks paths in urban and rural Britain while chatting with friends and other personalities. As beautiful as all that countryside must be, there’s something very special about only being able to listen to the sounds of Clare’s ramblings and her descriptions rather than being able to see it all. There’s the squelching sound of her feet on wet turf, the patter of hooves along a bridle path, the gurgling of a stream….

On a recent episode she walked with a sound recordist who introduced me to the words “geophony”, which covers sounds that are made by wind and water, for example; “biophony” which covers the sounds of animal life; and “anthropophony”, the sounds that we humans produce. It made me think of roughly this time last year when we were in our very tight lockdown and the way I had suddenly become aware for the first time of the sounds of our fall season in the form of the rustling leaves traveling over the cobbled yard as well as the birds that sounded like party whistles. It was weird and just a little difficult to adjust to at first.

Enjoying the sounds of lockdown from my third-floor window.

Sadly, one year later, that has all been drowned out now by the typical sounds we humans make as we go about our daily lives. Some are not necessarily unpleasant. Others are disturbing on many levels.

Just this morning I became aware of a new and unusual sound…a strange grinding metallic scraping followed by a heavy thump which was repeated at least twenty times. Leaning out the window, I came to discover that it was the sound of one man struggling to transport a large green oxygen bottle down four flights of stairs and into a truck. Apparently someone in one of the downstairs apartments has been suffering with Covid. The fact that the bottle was being removed and not replaced by another is hopefully a good sign.

But, back to the backstrap weaver seated at her loom far away on the Tibetan plateau. I would like to share a link of more of Daniel Miller’s spectacular photos that accompany an article that he wrote about these nomadic peoples. He has also published several books that are available on Blurb.

From the Himalaya, a video of a backstrap weaver preparing her warp and weaving her cloth has been making the rounds in the various online forums. Here we get to enjoy the sounds and don’t need to imagine them. The clacking of the sticks is my favorite part and makes me smile every time I watch this precious video. I like hearing her whispered mutterings to herself as she works and try to imagine from my own experience with warping what she might be saying. I love listening to her counting her threads while roosters crow and chickens fuss.

How wonderful that she separates the threads into the various sheds that she needs to weave her houndstooth pattern right there on the warping stakes. I marvel at the weaver’s confidence as she removes the warp from the stakes with her shed rods floating in the warp. I would have them all tied off with additional safety strings in place and still feel nervous about losing one!

And now, let’s fly over to the Outer Islands of Micronesia. Unfortunately, this very low-resolution map image is the only one that I could find. I hope that it gives you some idea of the location of Yap which is written in red on the map.

From visityap.com

I met Emily Robison when she came to weave with me on one of my visits to the USA. She told me about her experience learning to weave with backstrap weavers when she was living In Micronesia and allowed me to share some of her pictures in a blog post I published some time ago. This is the loom that Emily built and set up for her own use in the style that she was taught by the weavers of the Outer Islands of Yap state.

This and the following three photos are from the website of weavingconnections.org

An organization called Habele found Emily via my blog post and contacted her for help on one of their projects called “Weaving Connections. Habele describes itself as…

a 501c3 nonprofit promoting educational access and accomplishment among Micronesian communities.

“Weaving Connections” an initiative of Habele established in 2020 to support Remathau women in the mainland United States. “Weaving Connections” helps in sustaining and continuing their distinctive weaving traditions that keep and maintain cultural identities and can provide means for economic support.

On their website you can find detailed instructions with plenty of step-by-step photos on how to build one of the typical looms as well as tutorials on constructing a warping board and making a sword.

An interesting feature of these looms which I find quite unusual is the use of a board as the cloth beam. Instead of a rod, a broad board is used as the near beam and it is to this piece of shaped wood that the backstrap is attached. I can see the advantage of this in that it raises the top layer of the circular warp high above the lower layer. I have often found the closeness of the cloth to the unwoven warp ends in the lower layer of a circular warp to be distracting, particularly when I am using supplementary weft.

You wll find more pictures of this broad beam in use on the loom on the website.

Emily writes:

I’m super excited to share a project I’ve been working on to support the preservation of indigenous Outer Island Yapese backstrap weaving. One of our major goals is to help young Micronesian women living in the US get access to the tools they need to learn their craft while going to school and such, but this website is a great resource for any backstrap weaver interested in Pacific Island technique, including plans for building tools.

Other articles on the website talk about the lavalava which is the typical garment that is made from the cloth woven on the backstrap loom. You can also read about what weaving means to the women who live on these Outer Islands.

When thinking about sounds, I like to add those of the ocean, tropical birdlife and breezes blowing through tropical vegetation as I imagine these women seated at their backstrap looms.

In my next post, I’ll take you to visit the Boruca people of Costa Rica via the pictures that Constance Lee generously shared with me. Constance traveled to Costa Rica from her home in the USA to stay with a family in a Boruca village in the Talamanca Mountains. She was shown the process of preparing, spinning and dyeing cotton with natural plant dyes so that it could be woven into cloth on a backstrap loom. I had no idea that backstrap loom weaving was still practiced in Costa Rica and was so grateful that Constance organized an invitation for me to attend a program that she gave on her experience via Zoom. Here’s a taster…

As for my own backstrap loom, it currently sits as a pile of sticks on my bedroom floor while I plan Panel 4 in the Within These Walls series. Yes, I have decided that a fourth panel is a must and I would like this one to represent what I imagine my post-pandemic world will look like. I am skipping the post-vaccination stage as I have absolutely no idea what that world might look like. Does anyone?

The panel that I just finished is the transition between the chaos of Panel 1 and the relative harmony of my new normal within the walls of Panel 3.

The hummingbirds will unravel the lines of chaos from the first panel and help build a space of safety and harmony.

I won’t explain this in detail. Everyone has had their own pandemic experience and I have actually been enjoying hearing how others are interpreting this series. As I have said before, it is a combination of literal story-telling and symbolism. You can make of it what you will. 🙂 Yes, I am still struggling to get decent photos of it.

So, I see a definite need to weave a fourth panel so that I can end the story on a note of hope as well as create a match for Panel 1 in terms of layout.

I would like to include several weaving figures in the fourth panel and have been working on designing another backstrap weaver in the Andean Pebble Weave structure. This one is viewed from the back rather than in profile. That way I can place several weavers sitting around a tree weaving together.

This is my fourth attempt on this sample band to get this weaver right and I am pretty pleased with. It does include some floats that are longer than ones that I would normally tolerate in this structure but I think that I can get away with them in 60/2 silk. I just need to add a heddle rod and shed rod to the warp. That part is easy. The stick that is currently in the warp is a sword sitting within a shed. The hard part was creating a weaver in the same scale as the other weaver figure that I have been using in the other panels so that they can happily sit side by side.

So, launching into another warp of doubled 140/2 silk that needs to be tied and dyed before I can even begin weaving gives me a lot more time to spin yarn for the projects that will follow this Within These Walls series. There won’t be a fifth panel! I have been devoting all my Zoom time to spinning and that’s coming along nicely.

As I type these final lines, the sounds I hear are those of the birds raucously finishing their day with the setting of the sun. And then one of them gives a signal, or so it seems, and they all stop at once. There’s a moment of hush.

Until next time…..