band weaving books – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – A New Book of Patterns and more!

I have three bits of exciting news to share with you in this post 🙂

I have been promising a new book of patterns for the last few weeks and am pleased to announce that it is now available at taprootvideo.com.

The second part of this exciting announcement is that this is the first time that I am releasing a new publication as a PDF as well as a printed book! Both are available at Taproot Video.

It’s called More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns. It contains the pebble patterns from my 2012 publication More Adventures with warp-faced Pick-up Patterns, plus six brand new ones. The Pebble weave patterns in the 2012 publication were drawn on charts that are made up of spots and lines. In my new book the same patterns have been drawn on the more classic block-style of charts that I use in all my other books.

The new book is aimed at two groups of weavers:

All those who are fans of creating patterns using complementary-warp pick-up and/or Andean Pebble Weave and who don’t already own my 2012 publication, More Adventures with Warp-faced Pick-up Patterns. If you fit this group, you will have 132 new patterns to use in your bands and other projects.
All those who do own my 2012 publication, More Adventures with Warp-faced Pick-up Patterns, but who are not really in love with the spotted charting system that I introduced in that book. I have found that many people have overlooked those patterns in favor of those that are charted on the more classic block style of chart that I use in my other publications. I fear that they may never get to enjoy those patterns. So, in this new book, I present all 126 of those patterns again using the block-style charting system. Plus, there are 6 new patterns.

The new patterns….The new set of patterns that are included in this book came about because I became interested in the sweet dragon pattern, that you can see above, when ladies on Ravelry were talking about it in a tablet-weaving discussion. You can see an awesome hat created by Penelope Hemingway with nalbinding using Oslo stitch. She felted it down to size and edged it with a band she wove on her inkle loom using a chart I drew for her. The motif is based on one from a tablet-woven band from a 10th century Viking find in Dublin. The pattern is often called “Little Dragons”. I have seen it online in pictures where it has been woven in several tablet-woven structures. I was able to easily adapt it so a version of it could be woven in Andean Pebble Weave, a complementary-warp structure.

Online searches showed me several sweet patterns woven with tablets that use the head of the little dragons and I adapted them for my latest book. Five of the six new patterns in the book use the little dragon heads.

The other patterns include snake and star motifs that appear in various forms on textiles from the Bolivian lowlands, knot-work and historical patterns adapted from tablet-woven bands, motifs from belts of Russian origin, adaptations of motifs used in Komi knitwear, Kuba cloth of Central Africa, storage bags from Baluchistan and textiles of Central Asia as well as contemporary figures found in Andean textiles.

Star pattern with various filler designs.

Pattern adapted from a Central Asian textile.

The printed book is spiral-bound and has 85 pages. You can read more about this latest publication, in both PDF and print form, as well as take a look at sample pages at taprootvideo.com.

The third piece of exciting news involves all my other English-language e-books that can be found in PDF form at Taproot Video.

They are all now available as printed books at Taproot Video! (Note: The complete version of the tubular band book is available in print form but not the abridged version).

You can see the full list of titles here. If you are unsure about which book best suits your level of experience, learning style and preferred loom, information on a page that I wrote here on my blog, may help you decide…or just drop me a line via a comment. I’ll be happy to advise.

A lot has been going on with my ikat experiments too. Experiment #5 is well underway in the finer 30/2 silk and I am really pleased with it. There’ll be more about that in my next post or, in the meantime, you just might catch a glimpse of it showing up on my Facebook or Instagram pages.

Happy weaving and a million thanks to all those who bought my new book following my announcement on Facebook a few days ago. THANK YOU!

Backstrap Weaving – A new home for my ebooks: Taproot Video.

Patternfish.com has been the home for my e-publications since 2010 when Syne Mitchell first introduced me to its dynamic owner, Julia Grunau.

Sadly, after eleven successful years in business, the site closed its doors for sales on May 31, 2019. I would like to thank, Julia, Phil, Dale and all the team for the support they gave me over those nine years and particularly in the weeks and days leading up to the final closure. And, I would like to thank all of you who bought my e-books and gave me your vote of confidence right from the start when my first ebook, Andean Pebble Weave, was made available on WeaveZine.com back in 2009.

Now it’s time to move forward and I have found the perfect new home for new purchasers of my ebooks on the website of Taproot Video, which is also the home of my video class, Operating a Backstrap Loom. I couldn’t have asked for a smoother transition thanks to the hard work of the good folk at Taproot Video as well as those at Patternfish who were there to help out right to the very end.

As you can imagine, it will take me a while to update all the links to patternfish.com that I have placed in my blog posts over these nine years! The main links on the side-bar of my blog have been updated to Taproot Video and I have also included the links in the book titles below the next photo. Old links that continue to take you to patternfish.com will show you my old product page with a direct link to the new page at Taproot Video….at least until June 30, 2019, when the site may disappear all together. In that case, I hope that the message I have placed on the header of this blog will guide people to the right place.

Andean Pebble Weave

More Adventures in Warp-faced Pick-up Patterns

Complementary-warp Pick-up

Complementary-warp Pattern Book

The Eye-pattern Tubular Band and Other Decorative Finishing Techniques

Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms

Foreign language editions:

Andean pebble Weave in GERMAN, FRENCH, ITALIAN and SPANISH

Complementary-warp Pick-up in GERMAN

Remember: if you have purchased one of my e-books from patternfish.com any time in the past but not yet downloaded it, please do so before June 30! Sales have ceased but the site will remain open for downloading purchased files until then. Please ask for help if you don’t know how to do that.

I hope you will visit Taproot Video after you read this blog post. While you are there, why not take a good look around at the other products that are offered, for example, video classes on tablet weaving by both John Mullarky and Kris Leet…cotton spinning by Joan Ruane….weaving on an inkle loom for beginners by Marilyn Romatka…sprang by Carol James…ply-split braiding with Linda Hendrickson… and more.

As for me, I have more ebooks in the works which I will be offering at Taproot Video in the future.

In the meantime, I am pleased to say that I finished the straps for my big pocket bag and have sewn them on! This bag will go away with me on my next trip and we will see how my hand-sewing stands up to it! I am very happy with it and especially like the plain-weave tubular bands that edge the pocket and sides of the bag. The pocket is the perfect size for my iPod.

Right now I find myself sitting at an enormously long warp that was given to me by a weaver in the USA who had taken some classes from a Karen backstrap weaver. This was her student warp. It’s a circular warp and so it is actually twice the length of what you see here! It had about six inches of cloth woven and I have taken it back to the beginning to start afresh. I can only wonder what the weaver had planned for this long, long warp….perhaps a couple of scarves?

This warp has been sitting in my closet for a couple of years and now seems to be the perfect time to take it out and get it going again because I have received several questions from people about circular warps since I showed the picture of Yan Zhang’s loom in my last post. Following along with this project will help answer those questions better than words alone.

I have placed sticks in the original cross so that I can try to get a read on how wide this piece wants to be. It came with a simple temple ( a flat length of wood with pins taped to the ends) which would normally tell me the width but it was being woven as warp-dominant cloth rather then truly warp faced.

You can see the simple temple in the picture below. It’s the small stick at the bottom of the picture.

In the meantime, I need to get over the lack of symmetry in the stripes which is making my hair curl! This is me, below, pondering how difficult it might be to cut and pull out some of the green threads so that I can even up the stripes. And then there’s also the need to add a couple of white threads niggling at me. Pulling threads out is relatively easy but adding threads to such a long warp is not something I am willing to tackle!

There’ll be a full progress report next time….!