Tag: Central Asia

Backstrap Weaving – Ikat – Turning “Blips” into Beauty

IKAT! Ikat can be a little hard to deal with for someone like me who is into planning, charting and precision. I count my warps carefully…this one needs to be floated, this one doesn’t and, oh no, I made a mistake and must un-weave and…. darn!, the design is not looking as I thought it would…better un-weave and re-chart. I am not one for “winging” it or just throwing a warp on the loom and seeing where it takes me. I am even less crazy about letting a “blip” become a “design element” although my work often has such blips!

When I have tried ikat, the tie-dyed warps wandered off as they pleased once I started weaving, blurring the design to the extent that the original planned pattern became totally unrecognizable! You can wrench the warps about and try to get them to behave or just let them go and appreciate the beauty in the “blips”. You can probably guess which one I am more inclined to do.

Way back when I first tried ikat on the above warp I thought that it was all about the tying and dyeing and I was so nervous. Had I used the right wrapping material? It took me a while to settle on cassette tape after trying cabuya fiber (a kind of agave) and then strips cut from plastic supermarket bags. Had I tied tight enough? Was I using the right kind of dye (answer: NO…I used cotton dye on wool which gave me a wishy washy pink instead of  the Mexican red promised on the package). Would the wrapping allow the dye to seep?

Once I had dyed the warp and unwrapped part of it to see my lovely crisp and sharp pattern I was delighted. Now to get to the weaving…the easy part, right? Just plain weave, a piece of cake. And that is when everything went quite mad. The warps slipped around out of position with every move I made, the parts of the design wouldn’t line up and I was terribly disappointed.

Then came this….

On my trip to Guatemala in 2008 I bought this…a prepared ikat warp ready to go on the loom. “Ikat the easy way”! I exclaimed. This warp had been prepared by the experts and surely it would turn out nicely. I took just one section of it and put it on my loom….it was coming out even worse than my own experiment. At least on mine the first motif looked kind of okay. I put it aside very quickly. I just couldn’t bear the thought that someone had gone to all the trouble to tie and dye this warp only to have me come along and mess it up. It’s still there in the closet.

Once you have had an ikat disappointment, it is not really something that you feel like launching into again in a big hurry…all that time spent tying, dyeing, waiting for it to dry. In any case, I felt that I hadn’t really learned anything from the exercise to warrant another attempt. I needed to do some thinking about what needed to change about the way I was handling the warps.

But I did take something away from the experience – a growing awe and respect for the ikat weavers around the world! My gosh, the work they do creating those amazing images in their cloth. The motifs  have that wonderful fuzziness in their outlines which is what makes the technique so attractive.

This is a piece from Indonesia from a collection  of textiles owned by Phil Willett that he and the late  Dennis Penley collected. Of course the warps move out of alignment but not so much that the image is completely lost as mine was. Just the right amount of shifting is what makes this piece beautiful.

I saw an ikat bed cover that my weaving teacher in Candelaria was weaving with both hers and her husband’s names spelled out in the tie-dye technique, watched ikat weavers with their backstrap looms in the towns around Cuenca in Ecuador, saw ikat warps being prepared for floor looms in Salcaja in Guatemala, gazed at the amazing Central Asian ikat robes at the recent exhibit at the Textile Museum in DC and got to touch and examine a Mapuche ikat warp for a poncho on the loom at an exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian in DC late last year.

The Mapuche ikats are known for the minimal shifting of the warps in the design and the relatively clean and crisp outlines the patterns have as a result.

Ikat! Sigh! I read an article here just today that describes it as “as trendy as anything ancient can ever claim to be”. I am not trendy by any stretch of the imagination and wasn’t aware that it was so. In any case, the “trend” does not appear to have reached Santa Cruz, Bolivia. The article says that “this kind of pattern now lends interiors a kind of dressed up Bohemian vibe”.

Let’s hope that this is good news for the artisans and that people are aware of the incredible amount of time and skill that goes into the pieces and will be prepared to pay fair prices accordingly.

This video, which was embedded on Ravelry recently, shows one group’s enterprising way of mimicking the appearance of ikat. They produce large lengths of cloth with large fuzzy-outlined ikat-like images without the long tying and dyeing process….

Schumacher – Darya Ikat Weaving Process from Schumacher on Vimeo.

And I have seen other interesting ways to imitate the look of ikat in the online weaving groups…the “faux ikat” using painted warps. Weaver Bonnie Tarses has a video here that shows how to set up for what she calls “almost ikat”.

In this WeaveZine article Syne Mitchell shows how to create an ikat effect with painted skeins on a rigid heddle loom.

The beauty of the piece is all about the very misalignment of the colored warps that I have been struggling to avoid.

See how the “blips” are turned into beauty!

I would love to weave something like that but I know that I would spend the whole time fussing with the warps and trying to get them to line up! I just wouldn’t be able to stop myself!

Ravelry member jtellier wove a faux ikat scarf on her rigid heddle loom, which you can see below, and shared it with us for inspiration when we were planning  our plain weave weave-along in the Backstrap Group.

Now we are doing an ikat weave-along and have four participants so far.

In this current weave-along we are trying to do true ikat by tying and dyeing the warps. We recognized that we needed to go into it with the right attitude. I didn’t want people to end up as disappointed and frustrated as I did after my first attempt and so we are all participating with the idea that we will definitely create something “interesting” if not exactly what we had in mind in the planning stage.

I have got some ideas and theories together about how to create my ikat pattern with a minimum of blurring in the design. My weaving friend Tracy and I discussed how the Mapuche weavers appear to leave all their ties in place on the warp and only unwrap enough of a bundle to give them the minimum of space in which to open the sheds and pass the weft. I have tried weaving without unwrapping everything beforehand (the warps still slipped) but not to the extent that the Mapuche weavers do.

I was also intrigued by this picture on the Education and More website, on their backstrap weaving page, of a warp in Guatemala which has been glued to the loom bar with corn masa. (Karen from Education and More tells us that it is used as a paste to secure the threads).

Hmmm… I thought. Maybe I can use diluted white glue to do the same.

Karen from Education and More shared this image with us in the Raverly Backstrap Weaving Group:

It shows how some ikat weavers, with whom she works in Guatemala, tie cotton around the sections of dyed warps to stop the warps from moving. I suspect that cotton against cotton holds well and does not slip. I have tried doing that with the cassette tape. The tape is far too slick to be effective. Doesn’t that warp look gorgeous!

And the final inspiration came from a Chilean lady on Facebook. A Facebook friend of mine “liked” her picture which is what allowed me to see her at work on an ikat piece on a wooden frame loom. I so wish I could have posted the picture here but I have not yet made contact with the weaver and, if I do, I will post the picture next week. I saw that she too was working in a very small space between the partly unwrapped ties and the weaving line.

She had a separate bar which appeared to part of the frame loom which was her shed rod. Unfortunately only a very small part of the loom can be seen. What interested me was that she had multiple sets of small heddles around  the groups of warps that she had wrapped. Each group had its own string heddle rather than having one large string heddle across the entire warp.

So I decided to use all these tactics in my project. As an experiment, it is not a very well conducted one as I will never be sure which of the new tactics will be responsible for the result…one or any combination of all of them.  Ah well.

First came the warping and wrapping. I set up the warp on a frame to wrap with cassette tape…still my favorite medium. I did not get carried away with the size of the warp. I guess that tells you something about my confidence, or lack thereof, in the success of the project! This is a cotton warp.

Here it is after dyeing with Dylon Olive Green cold water dye. I had dyed a skein of Plymouth Yarn with the green and this warp got tossed in at the end. The color is a little uneven and I kind of like the sort of washed-out look.

So here is the first motif. I was very pleased but still reserved in my excitement as I know from experience that the first motif generally works quite well. Things tend to go mad after the frst one.

My friend Annie will recognize the business card that she gave me back in 2010 which I am using to start the weaving and as a wee shuttle. I still have it, Annie and I hope you will give me a new one when I see you in March!

The warp at the loom bar is stiff with white glue which never entered the dye bath. The cassette tape ties down there are fairly ineffective. The warps just slide right through those but I like to think that they help a little. Cotton ties like the Guatemalan use would have been better. You can just see the bunches of white string heddles.

And I used a very fine weft. The warp is similar to a #10 crochet cotton. Of course I forgot to dye yarn for weft. I wove with this fine weft to start and finish the rep weave piece I showed last week and I really liked the feel of the fabric it produced.

Here are three finished motifs and all is well. The motifs are all a little different. I was not precise in my measuring and wrapping of the segments. The space in which I open the sheds is tiny and I am thankful for the fine sword that came with a Guatemalan backstrap loom that Linda in California gave me. I am using shed loops for the non-heddled shed. One shed loop for each section.

Three more motifs to go and I will be done…short and sweet! Very sweet! I am pretty happy with this. Now, which tactic or tactics produced these pleasing results? Good question!

What about the backstrap weavers who just go and unwrap all the ties, throw the warp on the loom and weave away producing beautiful results?…no “glue” or teeny tiny weaving spaces with teeny tiny bunches of heddles. I am completely in awe of these people.

And what about the ikat weavers in Uzbekistan?

My friend Pam took this picture in Uzbekistan and has allowed me to show it here. The ikat Master marks the mordanted warp and the ladies do the tying. Often the warp is mounted in layers on the frame so that multiple layers can be included in each wrap to repeat the patterns along the length of the entire warp. I got the idea of mounting my warp on a frame to wrap from seeing this picture.

The Education and More site which I linked to above and Flickr page have lots of beautiful pictures of Guatemalan weavers and textiles including many images of ikat weavings.

Did you know that Education and More is selling naturally dyed cotton from Guatemala on their website now?


Bobbie who is in the Ravelry group is not joining us for the ikat WAL.

She has just received her shipment of naturally dyed cotton yarn and has launched herself into a new project which has been inspired by this Guatemalan piece.

It is from the Education and More page and Jennifer discovered and shared it with us. It is the simple warp float technique and very effective.

I am sure Bobbie is going to do a beautiful job with it. Look at the Bedouin piece that she just finished:

As for ikat….will I go to all this trouble again? Yes! Now I am thinking multiple colors and trying to figure out how best to do the layering….it will be another sample. I will probably sew the current piece onto a piece of woven fabric. It is fine enough to do so, I think, and I would really like to use it.

In the meantime, I have started the next part of the si’ira inspired piece. All that counting had me procrastinating I am afraid…576 ends in the pattern area. The first row of pick-up is crucial. All other rows are picked up relative to that one and I can tell you that it is not fun to discover on row 20 that the lines in the motif are not meeting as they should because the first row was picked up incorrectly! So I really have to be in the right frame of mind to work on that first row…check and re-check.

And, it is done! and I am off and running.

Backstrap Weaving – Blue, white, black and back to blue

When I said I was excited about the prospect of seeing the fall colors in the north east of the US, I was thinking more along the lines of reds, oranges and yellows…turning leaves and pumpkins.

It turns out that the color palette I encountered was somewhat different in an area that seems to have been ravaged by a series of freak weather events this year.

After leaving a cold, drizzly and dreary Massachusetts last May, a tornado swept through the area where my weaving friend Pam has her studio Firewatch Weavers in Brimfield. Pam’s husband Jim Engberg, who pilots his own plane, took this aerial shot of the clear path of destruction. I am happy to say that I missed this by a couple of weeks.

I was a little disappointed to once again arrive in a dreary drizzly Massachusetts in October but the weather was kind and gave a us lovely blue skies and sun the following days. A wind storm had blown most of the pretty fall leaves off the trees so I had to be content with the soft blue of the sky rather than the golden and red leaf colors.

I came to Massachusetts to see my friend Pam and to weave with friends in her studio.

It was a very productive couple of days in Pam’s lovely red barn studio. Since my last visit, Pam has installed an outdoor table and seating and a frame on which shade-giving vines can creep. I can see us all backstrap weaving out there next time!

One of the group, Jayne, who has my book Andean Pebble Weave, brought in the colorful collection of bands that she has made while working her way through the lessons. Everyone got a sneak preview of a few of things that will be in my next book.

I got to meet Kateri who has been corresponding with me on Ravelry. It is always wonderful to meet in person one of these online friends. Holly and Cindy returned  after having woven with me last spring and I met Ellen and Ruthanne for the first time.

Kateri had recently been to Mexico and brought a bag made by Huichol weavers to show me. Having just completed my own double weave piece using Huichol and Otomi motifs, I was really interested in seeing Kateri’s bag.

Each time I weave this balanced double weave technique I know exactly what I want to look for the next time I have the opportunity to hold one of the Huichol pieces in my hands and so I carefully examined the motifs on both front and back.

By the way, my bag with the Huichol and Otomi motifs won me the People’s Choice award on Weavolution’s Halloweave event and the prize was $250 worth of cashmere yarn from Colour Mart! I will have to think very very carefully about what kind of piece I will use this precious fiber for. Don’t worry, I promise not to use it for a warp-faced heavily beaten project!

The following two days were spent harvesting Pam’s crop of Japanese indigo to dye silk and wool skeins. This would be my first time dyeing with these plants and I was very happy to have this opportunity to learn about the process. We skeined silk from Uzbekistan and wool in their natural colors and also prepared a skein of yellow wool for the pot.

We went through the whole process on day one and  discovered that there is a reason why the author of one of the books we were following said to add “fresh” spectralite. Pam’s stash of spectralite was obviously beyond its prime and we couldn’t get the oxygen out of the bath. Late into the night we had to admit defeat and stat anew the next day with more leaves and FRESH spectralite.

So, a new batch of leaves went into the pot and into the double boiler to slowly heat over a couple of hours. I was excited to get on with it and see the magical results and it was hard not to just stand there and watch the pot trying to will it into heating more quickly…

Pam passed the time weaving off one of her pebble weave samples on her backstrap loom. Freddy snoozed and I went around taking pictures of all the woven treasures in Pam’s studio to stop myself from poking and prodding the indigo leaves in the pot every few minutes…

Here is a weft-twined band that Pam was given made by the Maori of New Zealand which I supsect is a headband. It was so exciting to see this as reading books on Maori twining is what gave me my first clues about this technique which enabled me to experiment with reproducing the Montagnard twined designs.

This is another of the pieces that Pam bought in Uzbekistan that is originally from Turkmenistan. (I showed some others in my last post.) This one has patterning with supplementary wefts and another  lovely shaped flap, what appears to be a finger woven strap and pretty tassels.

Bunches of tassels hang from a band decorated with a warp float pattern. The soumak rug on the right is made of silk.

Pam’s friend Joan had brought a basket to show which had been made by a newly arrived artisan from Burundi who has come to settle in Massachusetts as part of the refugee program.

Joan found out that she made baskets but had no idea what materials she would need to continue her craft.

Pam donated some reed which the basket maker proceeded to split into finer strips to coil.

She then unwove a plastic rice sack and used the plastic warp and weft material to wrap her split reed coil and produce her magnificent basket.

Red acrylic yarn was used to make the pattern.

Hopefully she will be able to find similar materials to those she used at home in Burundi to produce her baskets but what a fine piece she made with her limited resources!

Finally, the water in the indigo leaf pot heated to the desired temperature and it was time to separate the liquid from the leaves and do a ph test.

Then Pam poured the liquid from container to container to introduce oxygen. A heavy froth formed and increased in volume with each pouring.

This time we added fresh spectralite and the liquid turned the right greenish-yellow color which indicated that we could now introduce our wet skeins…finally the big moment.

So, I got to see something that I had so often read and heard about…that magical transformation as the skeins emerged from yellow to gradually deepening shades of blue.

If you have never had the fun chance of seeing it for yourself I made a little video of one of the silk skeins coming out of the pot…magic!

The silk skeins had been bought by Pam on one of her three trips to Uzbekistan the first one of which she made with natural dye master Michele Wipplinger, who is pictured below, with master dyer Madrim Matkarimov in the Silk Carpet Workshop in Khiva, Khorezm Province, Uzbekistan. I was lucky to meet Michele at the Tinkuy de Tejedores in Peru around this time last year (gosh! has it already been a year?!)

Pam told me that Khiva, which is in far western Uzbekistan, was rebuilt by the Soviet Russians using local craftsmen to restore some of the old madrassahs and mosques and the khan’s castle, etc. She said that people do still live inside the wall as well as in the suburbs outside it. All these pictures were taken on Pam’s trips and she has kindly allowed me to show them here.

Above you can see one of the indigo-dyed silk rugs produced by the workshop. On the right, the indigo-dyed silk skeins, as they emerge wet from the vats, are simply thrown against a wall where they stick and can dry. They look like an unhappy tangled mess here which would be a headache to have to unravel but Pam explained that only small lengths of the silk are used for the knotted pile technique in these rugs so there is no need to  unravel the skeins in one continuous thread.

Pam also visited the UNESCO Silk Dyers’ Workshop in Taskent in 2008. In Pam’s own words…this was a project to employ women in the community using traditional arts. Note: Traditionally men are the dyers and weavers of ikat-dyed fabric (women are the cut-pile carpet weavers), but there was a lot of work in new construction in Tashkent that summer so UNESCO couldn’t get men to participate. Therefore they converted it to a project for women.

The dyemaster was named Dalat (pictured below left). The dyepots were huge tanks set into the floor, heated by gas jets. First the skeins of silk were mordanted and wrung out (pictured below left). These were then allowed to “cure” (sit damp overnight) and can be dried and stored.

The mordanted silk is made into  a 100-meter warp on a warping reel and wound on an ikat frame making several layers so that when the apprentices, pictured above right, tie it for dying, they are actually making multiple repeats. The ikat frame is tensioned by securing it to bolts in the floor (below left).

Dalat paints the design onto the warp so that the apprentices know exactly where they need to bind.

The tied warps are then dipped into a vat of onion skins and apple leaves to produce the first of many colors. The bound sections will be unwrapped and other sections tied before dipping the warp in another vat to produce a second color and so on until the multi-colored warp is ready to be woven into fabric like the examples seen below (although these particular examples were not dyed with natural dyes).

The picture above left shows an ikated warp on an 8-shaft counterbalance loom. There is no warp beam – the warp is stretched out across the room and weighted (above right). Each time the warp is advanced it is straightened, smoothed, and sized.  Then they weave it in a warp-faced twill (7/1 – the weft goes under 7 warps and over 1) which looks like satin and shows off the warp colors on the face but is weft-faced on the back.

Quite a process! I at least got the tiniest taste of this ancient practice with our little indigo dyeing experiment and I am so happy that I was able to see the exhibit of the Central Asian ikat robes at the Textile Museum in DC last November. Pam’s pictures and explanations and the stories she told me of her travels in Uzbekistan have added so much to what I saw at the museum last year.

My indigo blue and blue skies which stay with Pam in Massachusetts changed to white, white, white when I got to Pennsylvania.

It snowed!…big fat wet flakes that fell and fell all day Saturday. I was thrilled. I lived in snow for nine months of the year every year for six years back in the eighties and haven’t had a chance to walk about in the lovely white stuff since 1992. I loved it! I especially love that special kind of muffled silence that the snow creates. However, you probably all know of the unhappy results of this early heavy wet snow and we, like hundreds of thousands of others, were a part of the power outages that hit the area. My white wonderland turned to black but we were lucky to have the warm yellow glow of kerosene lamps and crackling logs in the fireplace.

I will write more about the snow adventure in Pennsylvania, my backstrap weaving friends there and my wonderful hosts over those days in the next post. But I will let you know for now that the snow scape has since turned into a sandscape as I have winged my way to the other side of the country. So, the last color for this post is the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean.

I am here for my second time of weaving with friends out at Martha’s  lovely cabin in the woods. As always Martha is a never ending source of fascinating information and stories and her weaving studio is full of interesting experiments, pieces she has collected in her travels and her current works-in-progress. Oooh, I have so many cool things to show you!!

But, that’s enough for this time. I have just managed to catch a break to put this post together before getting ready to hit the road…..back once again east to no snow and full power, I hope!

Backstrap Weaving – “Click, Click” weave weave.

“Click Click” weave weave! “Click Click” is the sound of the mouse as we navigate the internet finding all kinds of free resources for weaving. It is astounding how much information is out there and I struggle to keep the “click click” time to a minimum and the “whack whack” of the beater on my backstrap loom to a maximum. When I look at my blog stats behind the scenes I see that my tutorials are by far the most visited pages and wonder about all the people out there silently following along and hopefully making nice things on backstrap or other looms.

Anne’s first pebble weave band

Every now and then I am surprised by a letter that makes its way into my email inbox from a weaver on the other side of the world showing me what he or she has been weaving using my tutorials.

They have been silent followers on the blog but manage to track me down to share what they have woven.

This week Anne triumphantly showed me her first ever pebble weave piece. This arrived late at night and her enthusiasm simply made my day!

Dwayne wrote to get some yarn tips, Anna, who came to spend time with me in Bolivia and who always stays in touch, sent me pictures of what she is up to and Natasha sent me a bunch of photos of her backstrap weaving adventures.

Take a look…


From  top left you can see Natasha’s double weave band on her backstrap loom and next to it some weft twining (there are lots of posts here about that). She is hoping to create earflaps for a knitted hat with this twining. Below left is a hanging in simple warp float technique and  finally she took the motifs from my Mexican mug rug pattern chart page and wove three bands which she put together with cross knit looping.

But this wasn’t her first encounter with pick up weaving. She has clearly mastered the supplementary warp technique. Just look at the Latvian design band at left which she wove on a backstrap loom for the first time.

You have no idea how wonderful it is to receive this kind of feedback from something that started with a simple “click click”.

It makes me smile when people tell me how they have struggled for days to get the technique to work and how fortunate I am to have been able to learn by watching people doing it here in South America.  I think that sometimes they forget or don’t realize that my learning experiences involved quite a bit more than a simple “click click” in my living room!!

Here I am, for example, during the six weeks I spent with my teachers in Potosi, Bolivia learning double weave and a complementary warp patterning technique bent over the loom…

On the left I am learning the basics of double weave on a narrow band. My teachers wove this technique on a horizontal loom staked out on the ground. At this stage I wasn’t quite sure how to position myself at this awkward loom…one knee up and one down. Then it was on to the wider piece you can see on the right, on my knees on the hard baked ground up at 4000 meters. I spent some of the time quite ill. My teachers would offer me food and, as it would have been offensive to refuse, my poor gringa stomach suffered a lot! I lost a lot of weight on that trip! After rejoicing in the completion of the double weave piece for a day it was back down on my knees to learn another technique…

You can see how strong the high altitude sun is…my hands are baked as brown as my teacher’s. Compare them to the picture on day one where I am weaving the band. So yes, I was lucky as I did get to watch and learn how to do this kind of weaving but most times there were no explanations! Most talk would be in a mix of Quechua and Spanish from my teachers but we formed a nice relationship, found things to share and laugh about and my six weeks there with Hilda and Julia were fun. Ah, the stories I could tell of the fun, mishaps, joy, lonely times, moving times, exciting and even scary encounters I have had along this journey learning to weave here!……

So, I aim to make my tutorials as visual as possible with both step-by-step pictures and in many cases videos so you too can watch and learn and I try to be as available as possible to answer questions and give further explanations in the online groups, here on the blog, on Facebook or through my personal email. And more recently, I have been traveling to meet weavers face-to-face…you just can’t beat that kind of contact and the chance to meet many of the silent visitors to this blog.

Fortunately there is time to weave too! So, this is what I have been up to this week…

I finished the third in my set of place mats. I fiddled all day to get the blue for the patterned portion of the newest place mat using freeze dried indigo. Again, with a “click click” I found instructions and muddled my way through it. I don’t think I did it quite right as I had no way to measure the temperature of the dye bath but in the end I got the tone I was looking for. I have been wanting to weave red on blue for a long time as that is quite typical of a lot of the Central Asian pieces I have seen but the shades of blue that I can buy here just wouldn’t work well with the reds that I have available.

So, there are the three pieces so far…from left to right, a Central Asian yurt band design, a motif taken from a Mexican belt and a Shipibo pattern. The last one in this set will go on the loom this week. I have found the design I want to weave and chosen the colors and I will show that to you next week.

I kind of got into”dyeing mode” after the indigo day and also after having dyed that gorgeous terracotta color for the Shipibo piece. That is a Dylon cold water dye. I decided that since the package of Dylon was open, I may as well do an ikat experiment.

I played a bit with ikat some years ago. For some reason, which I will never understand, I decided back then that I should do it with my handspun llama fiber. As I had nothing else to use, I dyed my piece with a cotton dye which meant that the gorgeous Mexican chilli pepper red that I had been hoping to obtain turned out an awful Barbie pink which gave barely enough contrast to see the ikat pattern. I tied the warps with cassette tape after trying many things none of which were to my liking.

The uppermost project never got dyed after the Barbie incident and did not stand up to the test of time in my closet unfortunately. The lower piece went along just fine except I couldn’t stand the color and, as I can’t find it anywhere now I expect that it got tossed out at some point. I must have really hated it to have done that!

In my wanderings through Latin America I have seen ikat weaving here and there but have never been in the right place at the right time to see the preparation part in progress.

I guess the most time I spent in an ikat weaving area was in the towns and villages around Cuenca in Ecuador.

I was at least able to spend some time watching this weaver in Bulcay at her loom and see and handle one of her prepared warps. A lot of these pieces are woven specifically for tourists but local cholas wear a typical shawl or paño which is patterned with motifs in the ikat technique. The name cholo refers to the group of people who fall between indigenous and whites in the social-economic hierarchy. Besides the intricate ikat designs, an outstanding feature of these shawls is the long fringe which quite often measures a third to half the length of the shawl itself. Once the shawl is off the loom, the fringe is knotted in a decorative form and this work is often starched so that the beautiful designs can be more clearly seen.

Dutch weaver Agaath, whom I met through this blog and then again in person at the Tinkuy, sent me this image of a woman knotting the fringe of an ikat shawl which she took on her own travels in Ecuador. The picture at right is one of the knotted motifs that are worked into the fringes. This textile is part of the collection of the late Dennis Penley, author of Paños de Gualaceo. Sometimes the fringes are knotted into a simple mesh onto which figures are embroidered which you can see below right.

These pictures were also sent to me from Mr Penley’s collection.

I am told that the simple white and indigo-dyed cotton shawls are the oldest and I was able to see these in antique stores in Cuenca and in the museums but one day I was lucky to see a woman walking down the street in quite a hurry with one slung over her shoulder and only by trotting along behind her was I able to get a good look and a quick picture!

I dream about being able to create ikat designs like these but there is no need to get crazy and go tying bunches of intricate designs all at once. One has to start somewhere, keep it simple and experiment. I think that even my Barbie band was over ambitious.

Someone who had a strong influence on me was Linda Hartshorn whom I met at CNCH last year. She showed me one of her ikat woven pieces…a carnival of gorgeous colored stripes with simple bands of ikat between. This taught me that the textile did not need to be all about ikat. The ikat patterning could be used simply as a decorative feature on a large piece of fabric. Here are a couple of photos of Linda’s ikat pieces which she has allowed me to show. My encounter with Linda also had me looking at color in new ways.

The piece on the left has been made with commercial cotton and the other is natural dyed silk. The next time I am in Linda’s neck of the woods (Humboldt County where my friend Janet lives) I think I really should take a dyeing class with her.

Anyway, I created a few strips of ikat and incorporated them in a wider piece of warp and decided to weave some supplementary weft motifs in the center. These designs are from Bhutan copied from a textile in a friend’s collection.. While I think the ikat could stand much improvement, and I have some ideas about how to go about doing that for the next experiment, I am on the whole very pleased with this piece. I wove this with my standard crochet cotton and used the appropriate dye this time!


This form of weft patterning is an inlay technique and so the design is not seen on the reverse of the fabric.
It was a fun project even though I am still working out the mystery of aligning the ikat design warps in both sheds. I didn’t use any of the aids that I have seen backstrap weavers use when doing ikat as I wanted to see how the warps behaved. In the next experiment I will use some of those “tricks”.

Another thing that I have just started playing with is the selvedges on double woven bands. I am trying out something looking at several Bolivian double weave bands that I have here to see if I can create a neater edge. As the weft in double weave has to turn and travel around the edge in order to pass through the shed in the lower layer it often pulls the edge warps out of position on its way particularly if those edge warps are a little slack. So, I am looking for something that can sort of bridge the gap between the upper and lower layers. I will show you the results of this experiment next week if, in fact, there is anything worth showing!

Here is what some of my online weaving buddies have been up to…

At top left, Anna in Australia showed me the pebble weave motif she is doing bordered by an alternating comb design. This is cool! Helena in Brazil has made a purse using a design charted by Adele Cahlander. Marsha and Janet are both in the US and Marsha‘s super seamstress friend, Dana sewed three of her simple warp float bands into an amazing bag while Janet is using the tutorial here on my blog to practice double weave. She is weaving it and getting the technique well established on her inkle loom before transferring the skills to her backstrap loom.

The Ravelry group is still spinning away on the Tour de Fleece and, as tomorrow is “challenge” day they hope to warp their looms with their handspun and see how their yarn behaves. I hope my sticky sheds videos will come in handy!

We have a new member, Kathi Pecor aka fiberdance who is doing Saori style weaving on a backstrap loom using a sweet little rigid heddle segment which you can see at left.

And finally, I have embedded a beautiful video about handcrafts of Colombia. This was shared by two of my Facebook friends, Sharon and Danielle. I told you all some time ago about how little I knew about Colombia with a lot of my impressions being sadly tainted by stories of kidnapping and drug trafficking and all kinds of nastiness. And then I met a Colombian weaver at the Weavers’ Gathering that was held here in Santa Cruz some months ago and everything changed.

This is a really lovely piece of video narrated in English and I hope you have time to take a look.

In the video I was excited to see alpargatas being made in what seems to be much the same way as they are in Ecuador.

I spent a lovely day in Ecuador visiting with one of the few remaining alpargata artisans. You can read about that in this post.

And so, here’s the video and thanks Sharon and Danielle for showing me this story with its haunting final phrase “I want to remember with my hands”.

THE HANDS OF COLOMBIA from Club Colombia on Vimeo.

Backstrap Weaving – Sampling: Short, Sweet and Simple

I don’t mind sampling before I take on a new project. I usually end up making something with the sample…count the zippered purses I have around here! They are just a fraction of all the sample projects I have made. Those little zippered purses make great gifts and swap items.

I know how important it is to sample width when trying a new pick-up technique on my warp-faced weavings.

With a backstrap loom it is so easy to wind a twelve-inch long warp or even shorter and test this out before warping up the major projects.

Sometimes I just need to see if I have gotten the scale right when I am charting a new design which is what I was doing on the sample pictured above.

That sample was enough to show me that I was on the right track and from there I finished the chart and wove my cell phone pouch.

Right now I am agonizing over colors, trying to find the right combination of red and blue to weave a Central Asian design that I have had my eye on. It doesn’t matter how long I sit here and stare at my color options, nothing helps. In the morning I favor one combination and in the evening it is another. I even pleaded with the online backstrap weaving group to make the decision for me only to be reminded of my own words…”make a wee sample” (thanks Jennifer).  I will never really know how this will turn out until I make a warp and start weaving.

So it has come time to sample again.

First those shades of red and blue and then my handspun alpaca. I have to say it is a lot harder to sample and risk wasting that precious handspun especially when I am not someone who gets terribly excited about the process.

As I said last week I just want to get it done and go weave with it.  So far I have a ball of white, dark brown and black ready to go. There will be a slight delay with the medium brown as I had to turn the house upside down looking for one of the balls of spun single that my cat had made off with. I am lucky to have something to which I can aspire. Some Aymara backstrap weavers from northern Chile brought some of their handspun alpaca with them when they came to attend a weavers’ gathering here in Santa Cruz last March. I was able to weave with and keep some of it. I wove the grey and brown band above with their yarn – a short and simple sample.

Once again I am grateful to the backstrap loom which will enable me to weave the tiniest sample with my own handspun before warping the main project. I have selected my pattern. I even have a product in mind and can’t wait to get started although I still have a couple more colors to spin.

As I said last week, spinning seems to be calling me. Thanks to Jennifer and Naomi the Backstrap Group on Ravelry now has a TDF 2011 team. If you don’t know what TDF is, don’t worry. I didn’t either until last week. I started noticing that avatars on Ravelry were being changed to show special TDF buttons with team names. TDF stands for Tour de Fleece and is a spinning frenzy that runs in conjunction with the Tour de France. The idea, from what I gather, is to set spinning goals for yourself, step outside your comfort zone, share, learn and have fun.

I haven’t set any goals yet but I am thinking that I should do something with cotton. There is a lot of expertise in my group and, as I have the above tools to play with and some nice cotton that I have been given in swaps and which I brought back from Ecuador, I should take advantage of this opportunity to learn.

I learned to spin cotton in coastal Ecuador in 2007 where spinning is done on the larger of the two spindles seen above and using the rueca, or distaff, fashioned from a three-pronged branch.

Getting back into this alone would be a good enough challenge for the TDF as I haven’t done this in ages.

The smaller spindle in the first picture was sent to me as part of the swap package and I am told that it is a homemade tahkli which is a lightweight support spindle. I have never used it nor have I used the Indian charkha which was given to me in the US (although I take it out very often just to admire!) While this one calls to my Indian roots, I think that I should get a good grounding with the other spindles first.

Cotton spinners I have met in my travels…Above left is Montagnard weaver Ju Nie and on the right is a lady spinning natural brown cotton with a support spindle in Guatemala. My Guarani weaving teacher also spins cotton with a support spindle.

But first things first…I will get that alpaca done, a sample made and the project warped!

Here is last week’s project off the loom…

This is a Central Asian design woven in a simple warp float technique where both colors in the warp are floated to create the motif and fill in the negative space. It is not a double faced technique as gaps are left on the reverse of the fabric by the floating warps which expose the weft. Nevertheless the back of the weaving can look quite attractive…

Anything made in black in my home attracts every stray cat hair! I made this into a sleeve for my notebook computer and so you can see the band I wove for the sides positioned and pinned ready for sewing. I rounded the top and added a zipper. You can see the zipper pull below….that is where the zip starts.

This was made from the demo backstrap warp that I took with me to the US on which I showed different techniques for opening the sheds. This case will protect my computer from dust and scratches but what will protect it from the cat hair?!

I am all about simple warp floats at the moment being influenced by two things I saw while I was away…

On the left…a Native American sash that Pam in Massachusetts showed me from her collection where the weaver has allowed the horizontal bars to shape the motif rather than the floats. Quite often we think of those horizontal bars as an annoying distraction from the motif which has been formed from floats and wish that we could somehow cover them up and make them go away. Here the weaver has used them as the design. Below you can see the more typical warp float designs that I have made where the floated motif sits on a background of horizontal bars.

The other piece that I found intriguing is the old Mexican (we assumed) belt that Susan showed me in Eureka. Here both colors in the warp have been floated just like in the Central Asian piece I made. However, we could just make out the remnants of a purple supplementary weft that had been used to fill in all the places where the warps had not been floated and, therefore, horizontal bars had been exposed.

The supplementary weft had almost completely deteriorated in this belt but you can probably better make out some of its remains in the above picture. That made me curious about the possibilities of combining supplementary weft patterning with simple warp floats, maybe not in exactly the same way as the Mexican weaver had, but it could be a way to add an interesting third color accent to a structure that is normally restricted to two warp colors. The best part about supplementary wefts is that you can change the color at will meaning that you could have a base warp of say red and gold and then add a turquoise accent, later a purple…any color you want, when you want. And, if you don’t like the third color accent you can just cut it out without affecting the structure.

So, I warped up this red and yellow band and played…no charting or planning, just messing around. I used a brown supplementary weft to add in some small accents. I had originally filled in the bottom diamond completely, decided that that was over the top and just cut it out. This was fun!

I tried the design on the red and black Native American belt but I think it might look better with stronger contrasting colors and/or heavier thread. Floating single threads instead of pairs, as I did in the example on the left, was an interesting exercise too. In this 35wpi cotton, it almost gives the appearance of a solid color background.

Sampling done! I want to plan a larger project now and see what else I can do with this.

It is amazing how many places this simple warp float technique turns up…

When I was in Santa Cruz California, Yonat showed me an Indonesian ikat textile in her collection which had a border of simple warp floats. On the right is one of the textiles made by the Burmese backstrap weavers in Massachusetts.

I learned this technique from the cotton saddlebag weavers of coastal Ecuador and have used designs from the coastal region in my own work above left. The Montagnard backstrap weavers with whom I studied in North Carolina float warps to create patterns. They use a slight variation in their warping set up and weaving. In the above piece I used a motif woven with a suplementary weft alongside the warp float patterns. The end has a design in twined wefts.

Here are two pieces woven by people who follow my blog. Eladio in Mexico wove the bird pattern from coastal Ecuador and a hook pattern which are charted here. Jeannine in Belgium designed her own warp float pattern.

Recently, Lydia in Texas sent me a picture of the piece on the left that a friend had bought in Madagascar. Apparently a Danish group has taught the local weavers this technique. The bag on the right is Betty Davenport’s and was collected in the hilltribe area of Thailand.

Amber in the Ravelry Backstrap Weaving Group showed us her finished piece above right on which she has used the motifs of coastal Ecuador. Now she is weaving a band which will be the sides of her pencil pouch.

Tracy finished her band in the warp substitution technique after studying with a local weaver in Doha, Qatar where she lives. Check out her blog to read about her visits to Souq Waqif in Doha.

And Traudi, after having already completed a few backstrap weavings, decided it was time to have her own woven backstrap. She wove this following the instructions in my Backstrap Basics article.

A couple of other things I have been pondering…

Here are my gorgeous bamboo reeds. I finally cut them down off the wall where they have been on display. They are a size 20 and I really want to use one to make some kind of balanced type weave…maybe a colonial overshot pattern after the inspiration I got from my recent visit to the National Museum of the American Coverlet in Pennsylvania and there’s always shadow weave.

Another thing that is percolating…I just finished charting a Shipibo design from a piece that is woven using two-color simple warp floats (the same technique as the Central Asian piece I just finished). I want to use the colors that are in the two pieces of Shipibo fabric above so it will be either a beige and brown combination or I might try that Dylon dye that I got in the US to see if it makes anything resembling the terracotta in the other Shipibo fabric piece.

There is plenty to keep me busy, you see!