Burmese weaving – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Vivid!

VIVID is the name of an annual festival of lights, music and entertainment that took place in Sydney at the end of May just in time for my visit. Colorful images are projected onto buildings and landmarks around Sydney harbour and the city center. My brother captured some of them with his camera when we went together to the festival one night….

The white sails of the famous Sydney Opera House were transformed to an amazing piece of crystal glowing in the dark…

And then adorned with butterflies…

I don’t know how to describe this next one!

Other buildings along the waterfront were also used as giant screens onto which fantastic slithering images were projected…

I have been enjoying a variety of landscapes and weather here in Sydney from the city to the country. I had a day out in the pretty rolling hills just west of Sydney…

And a hike in the bush. It was tshirt weather in the middle of winter…

I got rugged up on a cooler day for a trip to the city, the waterfront and Chinatown with my weaving friend, Emerald…

Emerald and her family are from Burma and they invited me to come and stay with them in Sydney’s inner city for a couple of days of weaving. I had forgotten how exciting it is being there right in the heart of all that inner city action. Emerald has distant memories of having taken some weaving lessons in her younger days in Burma. Now she wants to learn more about the backstrap loom and the weaving culture of her homeland.

She showed me her beautiful collection of longyi, the long pieces of fabric that are worn by both men and women in Myanmar. They are wrapped about the lower half of the body. Some of these pieces were woven on floor looms but there are still backstrap weavers to be found in certain parts of the country.

The Wikipedia page on the longyi includes this saying…

Men who cannot read are like the blind; women who cannot weave are like the cripple

—an old Burmese saying at a time when every household had a handloom and the womenfolk wove all the longyis for the family.

VIVID colors against black….

We warped and set up her backstrap loom for an Andean Pebble Weave project. Emerald has placed hooks into the wall of her home and has created a very nice backstrap weaving space.

I feel as happy as she looks here when I am seated in front of a fresh warp! Now it is time to get down to work and pick up the pebble sheds and create the string heddles….

A lovely green warp for a lady named Emerald. I showed her how to operate the two sets of heddles on this wide warp and now she is all set up to weave a cell phone pouch and whatever else she may be able to squeeze out of this warp. Emerald first contacted me via this blog. You may have read her enthusiastic comments here. Then we became friends on Facebook. I wasn’t able to meet with her when I visited Australia last year but it worked out this time and we had two fun days together.

Emerald showed me the book that she recently bought on Sazigyo ,by Ralph Isaacs. Sazigyo are very fine tablet-woven bands from Burma which were used to wrap palm leaf manuscripts. The book comes with its own silk tablet-woven book mark.

Images and lines of text are woven into the tapes themselves. This Facebook page contains many images of these woven tapes.

Emerald is very excited about learning about these and now wants to study tablet weaving so that she can also create bands of woven text in her native language.

It was a very educational experience being with Emerald! She also told me about Inle Lake in Burma where yarn is spun from lotus stems and woven into cloth.

Julie Hall has written a very interesting and image-packed blog post about her visit to Inle Lake and I appreciate her having given me permission to use some of her images here…

Textile weavings made from lotus and silk, a specialty of Inle Lake, by Koh Than Laing — Lotus flower on Inle Lake…image by Julie Hall used with her permission.

xxxxx — Pulling apart a group of cut lotus stems to extract fiber for spinning…image by Juile Hall used with her permission.

The following video from this page shows a small part of the process…

My weaving friend, Wendy Garrity, has also written about a visit to Inle Lake and includes images and video on her blog.

Meanwhile, back at my brother’s place, vivid colors are all around with evening visits by flocks of lorikeets to the backyard accompanied by the screeches of the sulphur crested cockatoos and laughter of the kookaburras at dusk…

I met with weavers up in Springwood in the Blue Mountains in a lovely bushland setting for a weekend of backstrap weaving in the home of Helen Halpin, editor of the Weavers Forum newsletter. Last weekend I wove with folks in a pretty homestead on the suburban outskirts in front of fields of grazing sheep.

Part of theVirginia Farm group getting serious about pebble weave! — Part of the group getting very serious about pebble weave!

The second day was cold, blustery and very wintry. We could hear owners Jenny and Phil’s flock of sheep bleating outside but little did we know that two little black lambs were being born as we wove away warm and cosy indoors..

The ladies who wove with me are part of a group whose name forms the fun acronym “EWES”. It stands for Epping Weavers Embroiderers and Spinners. It really seems like an extremely dynamic group. Sydney folk who read my blog might want to join. Here’s Brenda wearing a handknit sweater and her inkle woven EWES lanyard…

Images of warmth and vivid colors have been arriving in my inbox from the other side of the world. Snuggled up under a blanket with a miniature poodle snoozing on my lap, I look at my friend Janet’s sister’s grandkids learning backstrap weaving in bikinis in summery USA. One of Janet’s own backstrap woven guitar straps, made from her own handspun, lies on the ground between the girls providing plenty of inspiration.

Larisa, who is Russian but now lives in the UK, sent me a picture of a fabulous stole that she wove on a backstrap loom…such vivid colors and wonderful pick-up work!…

The image she sent me is of a low resolution and I hope she sends me a larger one soon so that we can all better appreciate the detailed pick-up in this beautiful piece of work.

Weavers who hung out with me on my recent US visit have been busy weaving in their summer months.

They are happy to be able to enjoy the portability of the backstrap loom which enables them to easily weave outdoors or even in the front seat of the car!

Cheryl has a ”loom with a view” at her lake house. She is weaving pebble weave “hugs and kisses”.

I don’t know where Elizabeth was going but she took her loom on the road anchoring the warp in the glove compartment of the car…

Anne has been working on her Andean Pebble Weave and is making great progress…

Charlotte launched herself into a new band challenging herself to some mental gymnastics handling the color changes in the three columns of motifs. This is the same motif that appears on yurt bands of Central Asia. In Central Asia it is woven using a single-faced structure. Charlotte is using a complementary-warp structure . This means that her band is double-faced.

Julia found a good use for a pebble weave band that she had created over a year ago. She made a bag for her sister’s flute. As is always the way with Julia’s work, it has been woven and put together beautifully.

Janet, who wove with me last year, has become an active member of the Ravelry group and has been sharing her latest experiments with supplementary-weft patterning. Sheila is a new member of the group and bought a Gilmore Wave loom for her studies of Andean Pebble Weave. She is working on adding extra string heddles to this two-shaft loom so that she can weave the structure as a semi loom-controlled one as I was taught to in Peru. It is much easier to operate the two sets of string heddles using a backstrap loom which enables you to freely and easily adjust tension on the warp with spontaneous body movements. Sheila is working with a ”fixed tension” loom which means that she needs to apply other strategies to achieve consistently clean sheds with her string heddles. It looks like she is succeeding!

Above, you can see the two sets of string heddles which Sheila is using along with the loom’s own two shafts. She has unrolled her weaving for the picture. When she is weaving, the two sets of string heddles are positioned further away from the shafts than they are in this picture.

She is weaving one of the knotwork designs that I have charted in my second book. The Andean Pebble Weave structure can be used for motifs not found in the Andes. Basically, any pattern that comprises diagonal lines can be adapted to this technique. A part of my second book is devoted to this idea and I show how motifs from various non-Andean cultures can be adapted to the Andean Pebble Weave structure.

I will leave you for now with some more VIVID colors…images of some very exotic neck pieces that I recently saw on Facebook. These have been created via a collaboration of three Peruvian textile artists, one of whom is tapestry weaver Maximo Laura. VIVID! You will probably recognize his contribution if you are at all familiar with his work. My backstrap weaving friend, Dorothy, is going to study tapestry weaving with him in Peru soon! According to the Facebook post, these artworks will be sold via the Puchka Peru website.

My visit to Australia continues….I have a group of friends coming over to my brother’s place this week to weave and then I will head back to Bolivia shortly thereafter as my brother and wife will be taking off to Ayers Rock on their motorbike. Maybe I will squeeze in one more blog post before I leave….

Backstrap Weaving – The Curious Coil Rod

Are you ready for this week’s dose of red, black and white?

I have quite a good selection of colors with which to work here in Santa Cruz. None of the colors go by fancy names. They are pretty much the basic tones. Therefore, when someone asked me to pass them the “chartreuse” yarn for their weft in one of my workshops, I had no idea what they were talking about. Here, we get dark green and light green. But, I have to say that there are enough colors here to keep me happy.

Why then do I keep being drawn to black? I guess there is just something so clean and sharp about black and white.

Even the local Guaraní weavers can’t resist going back to this combination from time to time despite the fact that many of them use the same brand of colored cotton that I do…

The third piece in my wall hanging series with the Wayuu-inspired design is an inch or so away from being finished. Naturally, as I have sat there these last few days picking up threads and heaving open the sheds, my thoughts have been turning to my next project. It will probably be a purple scarf decorated with supplementary wefts using cotton yarn from Guatemala and mostly silk supplementary wefts.

I am still planning the motifs and, while digging around at the book shelf, I unearthed a packet of patterns that was given to me by Sharon, a Weavolution weaving buddy, a year ago.

The packet contains three enormous sheets of detailed Guatemalan motifs. The front of the envelope states that this is Series 1 from Nahualá Village. Nothing on the packet or within indicates when these patterns were charted, by whom or how many packets comprise the entire set. Imagine if this person or people graphed patterns from dozens of villages!

Happily I tracked down another packet, series 3, on Ebay and it seems that there is a weaving guild that may have some others in their library.

However, I probably won’t use any of these motifs for my scarf. I have something quite specific in mind that I learned when I was studying in Guatemala but which also has a slight Bhutanese influence.

I told you about circular and dovetail warps last week and I have decided that I will make a circular one for my scarf. That will keep me in good foot-bracing distance from my bed. Winding a circular warp is straightforward enough. I was easily able to make some changes to my standard warping board to make this work well.

The two off-set stakes to hold the cross were all I needed. However, that picture is cropped and the following shows the complete set up…

The extra unnecessary stake was incorporated so that I can try to learn more about the mysterious coil rod. So far, I have not seen a coil rod being used in Bolivia and Peru. The first place that I came across one being used was Ecuador. It was in the ikat- weaving town of Bulcay and I had no idea at the time what this piece of equipment was.

There is a black arrow pointing to the coil rod in the above picture…the thin stick just below the upper beam.

When I visited with this weaver, I was concentrating more on seeing how she prevented having the warps move out of alignment and excessively blur the ikat pattern. I suspected that the coil rod was her”secret weapon” but when I asked, she told me that it had nothing to do with it. Actually, I have to say that she was not very keen on answering my questions. Let’s face it…not everyone is fond of having strangers hang about pestering them with questions while they are trying to weave! She was nice enough to let me sit by and watch and take pictures.

Dennis Penley, author of Paños de Gualaceo, writes that the coil rod, (he calls it a “rolling stick”) in Gualaceo, one of Bulcay’s neighboring communities, is added once the warp has been placed on the loom. He says that the warp threads are wound around the stick in bunches of ten. The stick serves to stop the warp threads from slipping.

You can see how the warps have been grouped in the above photo and the way they are coiled about the stick at left.

Of course, as time went by, I discovered that coil rods are used by many backstrap weavers who work with circular warps and I have since seen many examples of weavers in Asia using them.

When I met and got to spend a little time with Burmese weaver Dar Ku in Massachusetts, I noticed the coil rod in her loom.

It is the rod furthest from the weaver in the picture. I didn’t think at the time to ask her if she added it after or during warping. I was concentrating more on her use of supplementary wefts to make her patterns and the fact that she was weaving her designs while looking at the wrong side of the cloth! Her heddle system was also very interesting. You see, there are just so many wonderful things to see and take in when you watch a backstrap weaver at work!…what is the shape of her sword, how does she open the heddles, how hard does she beat, what does she use to pick up her threads and much much more!

As she wasn’t weaving ikat and her warps could move without causing any harm, I assume that the function of the coil rod in this case is to help maintain width and keep the warps spread and in order in the potentially messy area beyond the heddles and shed rod.

The one time that I have seen a warp being made which incorporated a coil rod was when I studied with the Montagnard weavers in North Carolina. Again, there was so much to see especially since this was also the first time I had watched a weaver add heddles as she warped. Naturally, much of my attention was focused on that.This is what Ju Nie’s warping path looked like…

If you flip this upside down, you will see that my new warping set up was designed to resemble this. Stake C on Ju’s set-up separates the threads into two sheds. Stake D holds the heddles that Ju makes as she winds the warp. Stakes B and E will be replaced with the backstrap loom bars. Stake A will be replaced by the “curious” coil rod.

As I am not going to make heddles as I go, stakes C and D on my set-up will hold the cross.

Here is a diagram showing the two-revolution warping path to complete the cross in my set up…

From left to right…loom bar 1 will replace the first stake. The next two stakes will be replaced with cross sticks….I used pencils. Loom bar 2 will replace the next stake and the last stake on the right will be replaced with the coil rod. Below you can see how it looks when taken off the warping board. I have just wound a tiny warp and used some random sticks for the sake of this demonstration.

Below you can see the loom almost ready for use. What remains to be done is make the heddles and select a suitable shed rod.

The yellow and green pencils are holding the cross. Heddles will be made to raise the threads that pass over the yellow pencil and a shed rod will replace the green pencil to raise the other half of the threads.

The coil rod has been rolled from its original position, in the picture below left, over the loom bar into its new position as seen below right.

This is what it looks like on Ju Nie’s narrow warp.

So, I know how to wind a circular warp and put the coil rod into position now…yay. The question remains…what exactly is the purpose of this wee stick? I guess I will find out as I weave my purple scarf. I suppose I will have to weave with a coil rod for a while and then without one in order to note the differences.

In Weaving and Dyeing in Highland Ecuador, Anne Rowe notes that the coil rod, as used by the ikat weavers in Azuay Province, helps secure the slippery cotton warp and maintain an even width for the fabric. However, it is not used by cotton ikat shawl weavers in Rumipamba. I imagine that the resulting shawls in both areas are equally well made.

I have a book on backstrap weaving in Bangladesh, Strong Backs Magic Fingers, which describes the looms and textiles woven in twelve areas of that country. While the vast majority of the looms shown have coil rods, some of them don’t. Certainly those that have the finest and silkiest looking thread always do. Yet, some weavers manage happily without them. It appears to be more of an aid than a necessity. Perhaps it is simply tradition that has some weavers using one.

I am kind of excited about having this new piece of equipment to experiment with!… a mere stick.

In Spiritual Fabric, Sadae Torimaru calls the coil rod that is placed in a body-tensioned loom used to weave narrow bands in China a ”temple stick” and says that it is used to keep yarns and width constant.

Some of you may like to read Maria Christou’s thesis An Ethnographic Study of the Loom and Weaving of the Sa’dan Toraja of To’barana’. Her research took place on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia and on page 26 she ponders the coil rod and quotes the thoughts of other researchers on its purpose and use. It would seem that she found the answers to her questons in the course of her one year of study. I have to confess that I haven’t gotten that far in my reading of her paper to know for sure….printing out to read this weekend!

If you have made it this far in reading this post, thank you for bearing with me in my ramblings about a stick!

And so, let’s enjoy looking at some of the fruits of these looms we have been talking about.

You can see a length of black skirt fabric with warp-float patterns woven by Ju Nie with a weft-twined edge added by her sister. The back cover of the book on weaving in Bangladesh shows the supplementary-weft patterned work of Chakma weavers and Dar Ku shows the white cotton fabric she wove for a dress as well as a richly patterned traditional blouse.

For those who may be curious about how Ju Nie adds heddles as she winds her warp, here is a video I made explaining it. Ju Nie works way too fast in the video that I took of her doing it!

Wonderful, isn’t it? Maybe one day I will do this. For now, I find it very relaxing sitting at my loom and making my string heddles. There’s always something new to learn!

I will leave you with a video of Dar Ku weaving. She has such a beautiful peaceful way about her…