backstrap weaving dvd – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Paisley Progress

The bands I ordered from the co-op in Cochabamba arrived. That’s always so exciting. I had been able to take a sneak peek at them when Dorinda sent me a picture of them laid out in her yard but there is nothing like seeing the true richness of the colors, smelling the natural dyestuff in the handspun wool and feeling the firmness of the cloth.

I love being able to put faces to most of the names on the tags after having met many of the weavers on my visit last year. We spent a day weaving together. The tags on the bands tell of the work of Maxima, my teacher, and her sister Narciza, the go-getter, (pictured below) who chose one of the largest patterns and kept begging me to show her with ”just one more row” so that she could fully grasp it before I left.

There’s young Eulalia whom I remember as being the quickest to pick up one of my woven samples and start copying the pattern.

Justina’s name is there. As head of the Huancarani weaving group, she represented her weaving friends and Bolivia when she traveled to the Tinkuy in Peru last November. Antonia contributed a band too. She and her daughter wove with me at Dorinda’s place during my visit.

And then there are Felicidad and Casimira as well as a new name I haven’t seen before – Cerila. Her band has a lighter touch and I wonder if she is one of the much older ladies.

As for my own weaving, I drew and erased and wove and un-wove, drew and erased and wove some more. I like sampling and I almost always make something useful from the samples. That was not so much the case this time as I kind of lost the plot along the way and some of the samples are already in the trash. I told you about that in my last blog post.

Sometimes I would go to bed completely dissatisfied with what I had created only to wake up the next morning to be almost completely happy with it. I decided that I needed some feedback and so I put a picture on Instagram. The response was favorable and very supportive and confirmed that I was headed in the right direction…thank you, guys… and so I felt that I was at the point where I could tackle the ”real” project and put the sampling aside.

This is warp-faced double weave in 60/2 silk. My paisley-like shapes don’t have the curled tails that you often see in classic Paisley shapes. That is a further challenge that I will leave for another time!

This is the one sample that I will continue to weave and keep so that I can make it into one of my little conference neck pouches. But for now, I am putting it aside while I return to my chart. I need to convert it so that it is suitable for the supplementary-weft technique that I want to use for my silk scarf project. Here is my blank palette awaiting its pattern…

The parts of the pattern in my sample that have long horizontal stretches of solid white won’t work if they are woven using supplemental weft. They will result in exceedingly long weft-floats. Floats of that length are impractical. They can easily get caught on things and pulled. I needed to break up the long white solid sections into smaller ones. For example, look at the solid white paisley shape that sits within the larger one at the bottom left of the design on my sample. I would need to fill that shape with circles and spots to break up the long horizontal lines of white into shorter floats.

So, here is the scarf warp underway. The start and end of the scarf will have its busy pattern and I will keep things much simpler along its length. I might double the large design for the center of the scarf or I might even repeat it at every quarter. We’ll see how it goes. I used multiple strands of 120/2 silk in three different colors for the supplementary weft….a deep red and two tones of purple. What’s fun is that the colors of the pattern look quite different depending on how the light hits the cloth.

Now I think I will pick up my drop spindle and finish plying the wool I spun for the Tour de Fleece many years ago. It has just been sitting there and I would like to use it to weave just one more cuff for our Bracelets and Cuff Weave-along on Ravelry. I might be able to squeeze this in before the end of the month. This is yarn I spun from a bag of random fiber that I won in a little Ashford online competition and I think the colors might go well enough together for a cuff project. The blue, red and white are wool. Both the red and blue are variegated but you can hardly tell. The red fiber was a weird red and brown combination that I didn’t like at all. But the spun thread looks quite nice.

The cuff in the picture is one I wove from my handspun llama fiber a few years ago. It’s one of my favorites. I used spearmint leaves and cochineal (for the beige and red) as dye. I want to weave something similar with this new batch of handspun and add a tubular edging.

Here’s a nice collage of some of the weave-along bands. I am really happy to see how people are using the patterns and technique from my latest book on complementary-warp pick-up.

Katherine’s latest one looks lovely on her backstrap loom…

I provide quite a few very narrow patterns in my book and it is great to see them being used as borders alongside larger ones as Katherine has done. I love brown and indigo blue together as well as a buttery yellow and blue combination. She also turned the blue bands I showed in my last blog post into bracelets…

The bars that she has at the ends of her band are really pretty. Three small metal loops are sewn to the edge of the band. You can see it better in this next shot of her pink band on which she has added a safety chain…

One thing that KEOG discovered when she added a safety chain to her bracelet is that if the clasp is magnetic it is better to find a chain that won’t be attracted to it. That hadn’t even occurred to me. If you are considering this kind of closure for a bracelet, you should keep that in mind. I have a couple of cheap clasps that came with chains and it just so happens that they are not attracted to magnets.

Rosemary got four bracelets out of the circular warp she put on her backstrap loom. She was also kind enough to show us several pictures of her set-up. When you use a circular warp, you need to clamp the warp in such a way that it doesn’t just slide around the end beams every time you beat. I was taught to clamp it at the end closest to my body. Then I have to un-clamp and un-roll each time I need to advance the warp. Rosemary has come up with an ingenious way of securing it at the far end which allows her to advance the warp without touching anything…

In her own words….

…..”when I apply tension and beat with my beater, the band does not move. However, if I release tension, just a bit, and put the beater in the shed, and pull towards myself, then the whole warp shifts forward. In this way, I never have to rearrange anything – I keep the fell about two inches beyond the bar at my belly, and I can weave and weave and weave, without having to stop and rearrange, and this fills me with joy.”

I love it!

Katycat placed her crimps and clasps on her finished band to create her bracelet…

This is Julie B’s work using a complementary-warp pattern from my second book, the one I like to call the Rolling River. I love seeing how people use various kinds of looms to enjoy these techniques and patterns.

I will finish this post here with a celebration of Taproot Video’s one-year anniversary. I am one of the founding-year members of the cooperative and we celebrated the anniversary via email recently. I won’t be seeing the other members until April when we’ll be able to clink mugs and celebrate again.

What is even more meaningful to me personally, is that Taproot’s launch also marked the release of my first ever instructional video. It was a scary trip at first, but it has been fun and heart-warming seeing my dvd make its way to countries all over the world and receiving such favorable feedback.

The video can be purchased as a dvd or you can buy lifetime streaming.

People very often ask me if it is hard to learn backstrap weaving on one’s own. Most often this question is more about the weaving techniques rather than about the loom itself. The kind of weaving I do on my backstrap loom can be done on many other kinds of looms and I have written tutorials and books about these techniques and plan to keep adding to those with more books, photo tutorials and dvds. My new pattern book is coming along nicely.

What about learning to use the loom? That is a little trickier because the weaver’s body movements are so much a part of the smooth operation of the loom and that can sometimes be hard to understand on your own. It is a lot about ”feel” and that is something that I wanted to be be able to convey via my video class. Many people have told me that they feel that I am in the room with them as they watch the video class. That is exactly what I was hoping to achieve! Even those who were already up and running and using a backstrap loom speak of having had several ”aha” moments while watching.

It has been a great first year with Taproot and I would like to thank everyone who has bought the video so far. There will be more video classes coming.

See you next time with, hopefully, a whole lot more to tell about the paisley progress.

Backstrap Weaving – Connected

Connected! ”Connected Diamonds” is the pattern theme of my latest backstrap weaving. It’s not a new piece. It is the same very long silk warp that I started some time ago on which I am slowly inching along. A couple of days ago I celebrated having reached half way and stopped to figure out what I would weave in the very center.

I charted a set of six interlocked diamonds in Andean Pebble Weave. They remind me of little ballerinas with their arms linked dancing their way across the warp. Today is not the best day lighting-wise for photography and so I will wait for another time to show them to you.

Here is one version of connected diamonds in the first band of patterning right at the start of the piece. This was done using a reversible 3-color Andean Pebble Weave structure.

The motifs on the side are woven using silk supplementary weft. I used a supplementary-weft technique which has the colored weft extending far beyond the limits of the motif, hidden between the layers of warp threads while it travels to the edge of the cloth. There it exits the shed and turns to enter the next shed to create the next row of pattern.

Let me show you quickly how it works…

You get started weaving warp-faced plain-weave cloth. Then you open a shed, beat and pass the weft. Leave the shed open and drop threads to create spaces, or gaps. Your colored supplementary weft will be exposed in these spaces.

Pass the colored supplementary weft in the shed with the spaces. Open the next shed, beat and pass the main weft. Leave the shed open and drop threads according to the next row in your pattern to create spaces, or gaps. Then, pass the colored supplementary-weft. There it is in a nutshell. I have a more detailed free tutorial on this technique here.

Now, continuing with my black silk project…I finished off the section of 3-color patterned Andean Pebble Weave with weft twining. The twining nicely marks the transition from the complex 3-color weave, where 3 colors (gold, brown and red) show all at once, to plain pebble weave. In the plain pebble weave part, colors A and B (gold and brown) show on one face while colors B and C (brown and red) show on the other,Here is some progress on the piece with various versions of connected diamond motifs in pebble weave and supplementary weft.

If you look at the smaller gold motifs in supplementary weft on the right hand side of the picture you might notice a difference in their appearance to the one that sits beside the 3-color pebble weave in the first picture of my piece, above. Now they are outlined by what look like little dots. Here I used a different technique where the weft hides under just a few warp ends at the edges of the motif and then turns on the surface of the cloth to return and complete the next row of pattern. The little dots you see are the weft turns and they follow the contour of the motif.

You can see the two techniques together in this next example…

I used white supplementary weft to weave the motifs in the band of pattern across the bottom of the red sashes. You can see where the white weft exits and enters the sheds at the very edge of the cloth. Can you see the little white dots along the edge? The small flower patterns were woven using the other technique I described where the turns of the supplementary weft outline each motif. See how the little flower heads are surrounded by white dots.

For me, each technique has its charm and its place.

You can barely see the weft turns in this fine silk piece. They outline the star motifs. In this case, I didn’t want to carry the gold supplementary weft all the way to the edges of the cloth within the shed as I felt the silk piece would be too heavy with all that additional weft thread in each shed.

For me, the outlining technique works best around regular shapes with smooth sides, like triangles and diamonds. I like weaving leaves and curling vines with supplementary weft but those kind of very irregular shapes look much nicer if the weft is carried all the way to the edge of the cloth and turned there.

That’s what I did on this piece with its leaf motif. You can see the turns of the white weft along the edge of the cloth.

The regular shapes on this piece work well with the turns of the weft outlining the motifs.

Because the motifs in this piece are irregular in shape, the supplementary weft travels from edge to edge where it exits one shed ready to enter the next. You can probably just make out the dots of weft along the edge. On the small sample band on the right, I didn’t take the supplementary weft all the way to the edge. I stopped just before the edge at the beige vertical stripe and turned the weft there to camouflage the turns within the stripe.

As I said, each technique has its charm and its place. The dots of the weft turns on the edges of the cloth can sometimes look like beads and look very attractive. However, that technique tends to thicken the cloth as the supplementary weft is sandwiched, along with the main weft, within every shed.

But, there are times when that kind of bulk is exactly what I want; for example, when I am making a bookmark or a key fob with very fine cotton. I like the way the fine cotton allows me to create patterns with a lot of detail in a small space and I also like the way the supplementary weft, which is sandwiched between the warp layers, gives the cloth more substance. The band needs a bit of sturdiness to perform well as a key fob.

If I am weaving a plain-weave piece in fine silk, I don’t want to lose the luscious liquid drape of the cloth by having lots of additional weft stuffed in the sheds. I will choose, in that case, to turn my supplementary weft as close to the motif as possible. This means that I have to think carefully about designing the kind of motif that suits this technique…preferably something regular and smooth-sided.

Almost halfway and ready for the dancing diamonds. — Here I am almost halfway through this silk piece and ready for the dancing diamonds in the center.

The folds in the cloth give glimpses of different parts of the patterns. I used red here and there to tie in with the third color in the 3-color pattern at the start.

Connected! I am feeling particularly connected to weaving friends around the world this week as my new dvd starts to arrive in various parts of the USA, Canada, Thailand, Australia, England, Germany and South Africa, Thank you all so much for your support! The dvd or streamed option can be found at Taproot Video. Thank you for the encouraging comments on last week’s post.

I didn’t get to see the actual disc in its nice case as I had to return to Bolivia immediately after filming. I was able to participate in as much editing as was possible in the evenings after filming but I have not yet seen the final cut with my chapter title pictures, music and various other details added.

When I returned to Bolivia, I designed the artwork for the disc and case, took the title pictures and chose the opening, closing and transition music. I sent the artwork off for printing and the music for editing. I love the rhythm of that music! Sometimes I feel my warp is jiggling and dancing along to that rhythm as I weave plain weave….strumming, opening a shed, beating, passing weft… sometimes accompanied by the clacking of sticks. And, you will learn when you watch the video that moving your body is a big part of creating a smooth and rhythmical sequence.

Mary was sweet and sent me a picture of the dvd in its case when it arrived in her home…

I hope you will indulge me as I link to some of the comments I have been receiving. I really appreciate the efforts people have made to give me feedback.

Videographer, Rainer Romatka, had all angles covered so that you often feel like you are seeing things through my eyes…

I sat right under the tripod and was careful not to move my head forwr=ard or bump the tripod as Rainer captured the ''weaver's view''. — For one sequence, I sat right under the tripod and had to be careful not to move my head forward or bump the tripod as Rainer captured the ”weaver’s view”.

A nice close-up showing how I handle the weft for neat edges in warp-faced weaving.

Connected! I also felt connected once again to the highland weavers I visited last month as I received some sweet snail mail from them. I posted about that visit to the highlands and the time spent with the weavers here and here.

Veronica, Abi, Nelva, Maxima, Dorinda and Justina made Thank-you cards and sent them along. They are really lovely.

Veronica with her hook pattern band almost finished. — Veronica was very pleased with her progress on the hook pattern band on the first day.

Vero and Abi drawing their Thank You cards in Dorinda's lovely garden — Vero and Abi drawing their Thank-you cards in Dorinda’s lovely garden.

Here are two of the cards posed on a couple of the beautiful woven bands made by some of the weavers I met. Maxima and I are winding a warp together in the drawing on the left and then I am shown weaving on the leaning vertical loom in the other (a blob of dark hair! against the yellow wall). Dorinda is shown drinking tea on the stoop and strolling in her garden….sweet!

I LOVE all the tones of cochineal in this band. This card is from Dorinda and Justina.

These are cards from Nelva and Maxima on more of the beautiful woven cloth.

A closer loom at those stunning natural dye colors…

Now I just need to repeat everything I have done so far on the other half of my silk piece. I can’t wait to do the wet finishing and feel it relax and ooze into supple silkiness.

I hope you enjoy the tutorial on supplementary-weft patterning. Many of you will already know it but it might be a nice reminder to give that technique a try.

I will leave you with the drawing 12-year old Nelva sent to me. What fun!. She even drew the patterns on my belt. I am holding the sample band that I wove and left for them.