cochineal – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – A Little Complementary-warp on the Side

I wanted to write a short post just to record what I have been up to in these last weeks of 2022. Here in Santa Cruz we are marking the end of the year with yet another strike tomorrow. It’s supposedly just a 24-hour one this time rather than another strike-without-end like the one we endured in October and November for 36 days. However, I was up and out early and at the supermarket today just in case it drags on.

This is a summary of what’s been going on in my fiber-y activities. I finally managed to get all the stuff I needed for my cochineal dyeing, including paper to measure pH, and produced a red in my final attempt. Then I ran out of cochineal. My usual supplier in the street market is out of it and I guess I’ll need to find another. I want to make sure that getting red wasn’t just a fluke! You can see the bright red that I got at the top and then all the other colors I got while trying, below.

I made a couple of other experiments. First, just out of curiosity, I threw some alum-mordanted wool in the pot before adding the silk in the last run. I was amazed to see it instantly turned a dark, rich red-wine red. The silk wouldn’t have anything to do with that color! The closest it would go was a dusty pink. Another thing I did was soak some of the dark purple that I had already produced, and didn’t particularly like, in pH- neutral distilled water. It turned an interesting copper color. I had too many orange samples and so I soaked one of those in the same pH-neutral distilled water and got a dull pink.

It’s nice seeing all the colors together. Now I need to come up with an idea for using them.

My original plan had been to create two tones of red to use in a silk ikat project but dyeing with cochineal on silk has been trickier than I had imagined. Wool seems to be easier.. Maybe it’s time to try ikat with wool. I feel sure that using a material like wool which has a certain amount of stretch will make that challenging. I remember my very first experiment with ikat so many years ago. In my ignorance I just dove straight in and used my handspun llama thread with bold red dye that was meant for cotton. Needless to say the result was a very disappointing Barbie-pink background with a barely discernible white pattern.

**The cochineal-on-silk colors surrounded by a silk ikat scarf fabric that I wove some time ago. I used acid dyes for the ikat fabric.**

And on the side, while messing around in the dye pots, I have been experimenting on my backstrap loom with something that I have been wanting to try for a long time. I wanted to try weaving complementary-warp patterns in a complementary-weft structure…I guess you could also call it “turned” complementary-warp, although “complementary-weft” does the trick for me.

I rummaged around in my stash and found some hemp thread that a weaving friend had given me years ago and used that as the base warp. I thought that the hemp would be sturdy enough to stand up to all the fiddling about that was bound to take place as I figured out the best way to execute the complementary-weft technique. The first thing to figure out was the number of warp threads that would make up each group around which the weft threads would turn. I was lucky in that my first guess turned out to be a good one.

I chose one of the fish motifs that I had charted for my Complementary-warp Pattern Book. The fish would normally be swimming length-wise down the warp. In complementary-weft it swims across the width of the warp. The second thing to figure out was how to turn the weft threads at the edges. I wasn’t sure if I would need floating selvedges but after fiddling about with different ideas, I found that they weren’t necessary. The selvedges are neat and stable. Of course, the back of the fabric shows a red fish on a blue background.

For the weft patterns I used some of the naturally dyed cotton from Mayan Hands that my weaving friend Kate had given me many years ago. It was left over from a kit she had brought back from Mayan Hands in Guatemala. The bag of beautiful thread has sat in my closet for years waiting for just the right project.

The natural dye substances used are cochineal (I am so impressed that they can get such deep colors on cotton with cochineal!). There are three depths of cochineal reds. You can see light indigo and dark indigo. I would so love to have more of that dark indigo. Obviously, it was also a favorite of Kate’s! Madder produced the orange, and osage orange the tan colors. There’s quite a lot of natural that I can dye myself. This thread is heavier than the kind that I normally like to use as warp but it has turned out to be perfect as complementary weft on the hemp base warp. You can take a look here if you would like to learn more about this Mayan Hands natural dye project in Guatemala.

Next, I tried an Andean pattern from my Complementary-warp Pick-up Book and then I played around a bit to see the effect of using a much finer main weft and a much heavier complementary weft. I used Omega Sinfonia as the heavier complementary weft. I thought that having the weft section stand out in high relief against the hemp cloth might be attractive. I decided that I preferred a more even surface. However, the heavier weft did produce a motif that wasn’t quite as compressed as the others.

I was done with that experiment and decided that I now wanted to combine complementary-warp and complementary-weft in the same piece. It was one thing to use complementary weft on plain weave. Working it on a denser base of complementary-warp would be different. I am sure that I was somehow under the influence of my silk cochineal colors when I chose the colors for this next sample. I used the Mayan Hands cotton for both warp and weft.

The orange sections are complementary-warp and the red, complementary-weft. I like the fact that I could change the color of the complementary-weft threads at any time, if I wanted to. However, I decided to just stick with red for this sample.

The complementary-weft structure lends itself well to motifs with vertical lines. In complementary-warp I can have sharp, smooth horizontal lines if I wish, like the beak of my hummingbird motif at the bottom. In complementary-weft I can have sharp smooth vertical lines like the stalks of leaves and stems of flowers. Once I had figured out the ideal number of warp threads around which to turn the weft threads, the next challenge was to match the widths of the complementary-warp and complementary-weft sections. I eventually got there by the time I reached the third comp-warp section. In order to do so, I had to weave the comp-warp sections at a width that is not natural to me which meant having to regularly check that I was staying on track. The narrower hummingbird sections sits at my natural width and I could maintain that width easily without ever having to check. My attempts to match the width are more obvious in the next picture.

**Working on matching the width of the complementary-warp sections to that of the complementary-weft.**

So, now I want to use these combined structures on a much wider piece to make a bag for cotton-spinning tools…my takli, the mortar in which it’s supported, and my supply of cotton sliver….something that will enable me to easily store and carry it all about with me when I travel or when it’s not in use. I’ll use the Mayan Hands cotton but will dye some of the natural to get more colors. I might dye some more blues to go with the light and dark indigo thread that I already have in the kit.

A fun thing about the sample band I just wove was that I wove it with four selvedges. That’s the first time I have created a four-selvedged piece in cotton. It was relatively easy because I closed the gap with complementary-weft patterning rather than trying to close it in the warp-patterned sections. I turned the loom around and wove some comp warp at the far end of the warp and then filled in the gap between the two woven sections with comp weft. I didn’t go so far as to attempt a pattern, though! I might try that next time.

And with this project in this new-to-me combination of structures I will be starting off the new year. No doubt, there’ll be more cochineal dyeing next year and more ikat. I have no idea why I have so much black 60/2 silk but I would love to get something wide and very detailed on the loom in that black silk. The “dwindling stash” that I am always talking about is still dwindling but there always seems to be enough of the right stuff to enable me to experiment and then go on to weave useful projects.

If all goes my way, there will be a trip to Australia in 2023 to hopefully lay the ground work for my eventual move back. That will perhaps straighten out the stress-inducing mess of unanswered questions in my head and, who knows, I may return here feeling settled and confident enough to work on continuing with the book projects I have started and left long neglected.

Thanks for staying with me. I wish you all the best for happiness and peace of mind in the coming new year!

Backstrap Weaving – Breathing in, Breathing out.

Some place last week, I have completely forgotten where, I heard (or read) someone say that reading is like breathing in and writing is breathing out. That really appealed to me.

Because I have been house-sitting for the last couple of weeks and don’t have all my stuff around me, on top of the fact that the whole city was on strike for 36 days (the strike ended last Saturday), I had been feeling a little as if I were standing still and unable to be as productive as I would normally like to be. However, since hearing that thought on breathing, I’ve been thinking of these weeks as a period of breathing in…time to sit back in my enforced stillness and cruise the internet, soak up inspiration, make sketches and notes in my weaving book while figuring out if the projects I have in mind are actually technically doable, and deciding if my stash will stretch far enough to make them possible…. readying myself to eventually breathe out and create.

**Just a handful of the sample bands in the bucket.**

But of course I haven’t been completely idle. One thing I did during the strike was go back to my home on one of the permitted shopping mornings and bring back the bucket-load of woven samples that I have accumulated over the years. Most of the pieces are bands of motifs that I wove to photograph for my pattern books and double weave book. Some were width samples as I tested a new-to me yarn for a larger project while others were just fun experiments…those funny little “what-if” things that I get a sudden urge to explore now and then. Some have stories attached to them. I have felt an urgent need to downsize lately and I’ve been procrastinating about attacking the pile of woven samples. Taking those pieces out of my home to this unfamiliar place has somehow made the task of sorting and tossing things away easier.

I managed to whittle the bucket-load down to a more acceptable amount of bands. This is one of the samples that I decided to keep. Maybe it’s the horrendously hot and dry weather we have been having lately that has made me feel a particular attachment to this watery scene with its cooling blues.

**Rivers and Ocean-themed band woven for my Complementary-warp Pattern Book.**

I expect that I will make something out of this band one of these days. It might end up being the strap for a bag. It wouldn’t be the first time that a strap has inspired a bag project.

**The bag project that grew from a simple strap. Every part is handwoven…even the lining**.

During the strike I hadn’t been able to get the distilled water that I need to continue with my cochineal dyeing experiments on silk. I finish house-sitting on Thursday and I will get that organized on my return home. In the meantime, someone on Facebook suggested using bottled water…not as a substitute for distilled, but just to see if it made any difference. I thought, why not?

**Cochineal dye experiments on scoured 30/2 silk using hard tap water for some and bottled water for others.**

The dusty pink upper right is the result of alum mordant on silk in bottled water with added cream of tartar. I really like it!

**This is what the tap water and cream of tartar dye bath had looked like….so promising, right? However, a tap-water rinse sent it right back to purple again. Oh well. It was worth a try**.

While on the topic of dye experiments, I can tell you that I just happened to come across the Long Thread Media podcasts again a couple of days ago. I have listened to these chats with fiber artists in the past but because I haven’t subscribed, I keep having to remind myself to go and check out the new episodes. I listened to the fairly recent one with natural dye expert Catherine Ellis the other day and was so happy to hear her speak about the time she had been teaching someplace in the north east and was unable to coax any red out of cochineal bugs. This was due to the hard water that they were using. She also mentioned that using distilled water had provided the solution to this problem. Hooray. It’s so nice to have this confirmed by such an authority. It squashes the thoughts I have every now and then that I am simply doing something very wrong and that it isn’t the fault of the water that I can’t produce red. And so, while I don’t have any nice dyed red silk to show you this time, hopefully in my next post there’ll be some lovely red tones to add to my collection of samples.

The other thing that I have been working on here is the case for my friend’s quena (flute). I showed you in my last post how I was weaving two bands at once in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave on my backstrap loom so that I could have two pieces each with a third selvedge.

The idea was to use the third selvedges at the mouth of the case and at the edge of the closure flap as you can see below….

That gave me two raw edges to take care of at the other end of the case. I joined the fringed endings of the two bands together with weft twining which sealed the raw edges. You can see that in the photo below. I’ll leave it up to my friend to decide how short he would like to cut the fringe. He does tend to like things on the wild and woolly side. All that’s left to do is add a large snap closure or a magnet closure, or even velcro tabs if that’s what he prefers. I have a tutorial on this kind of handy weft twining here on my blog.

**I am so happy with the way the pattern on the flap lines up with that on the body of the case. The pattern is a modified version of one that I include in my More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns book.**

I then got the idea of replacing the decorative bands on the flute itself with woven ones. The bands that are currently in place are made from colored nylon fishing line. There were three bands and I have managed to remove one of them so far. I think that woven bands in red and black would look much nicer.

So, if it’s fun to weave two bands at once on my backstrap loom….how much more fun would it be to weave three? That way I get three pieces each with its third selvedge to place around the flute. The selvedge will slightly overlap and cover the raw edge at the other end of each band. I am weaving these in much finer cotton than the thread I used for the case. This is the good ol’ Clea thread that I used to use for almost everything long before I started traveling a lot to the States to make my yarn purchases. It’s made in Brazil and I have a bin of its odds and ends from all those years ago. It’s a 2-ply crochet cotton which isn’t as highly mercerized as the crochet cottons I have come across in the States. When I eventually move back to Australia, I am sure that I will long for it. I prefer the flatness of 2-ply thread over the round-ness of 3-ply and the less polished feel of the Clea thread.

**Three bands to encircle and decorate the quena in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. This is just one of the hundred patterns in my Complementary-warp Pattern Book.**

And when the evening comes and its time for cat-sitting cuddle duty, I brush this little old lady and spin her fur for fun.

I have two takli spindles here with me. One is occupied with the natural brown cotton labeled as “cinnamon”. By the way, I did some boil tests with the cinnamon thread to see if the darkening of the brown color intensified the longer it was boiled. I started with the two extremes, boiling one lot for 40 minutes and the other lot for only 5. The difference is disappointingly barely noticeable and so that’s the end of that experiment! It was actually the label on the brown color called “coyote” that stated that a range of tones could be obtained by boiling the thread for different lengths of time. I haven’t started spinning the coyote yet and so I will perhaps try this experiment again when I have spun a decent amount of thread.

I’ll be back home by the time I write my next post. I’ll be breathing out some kind of mixture of everything I have been breathing in these last couple of weeks. See you then.

Backstrap Weaving- Back to Black…..and Red

I’m going to keep this post quite short as I am house and cat-sitting at the moment without my laptop and am attempting to write this post on my phone. I am a fast two-finger typist on my laptop but a very slow single-digit writer on my phone due to lack of practice. I don’t even try the dual thumb thing that everyone seems to do.

**The cat in question. This blue-eyed 19-year-old lady lived with me** **until I sadly had to re-home her due to the amount of travel I was doing. Now I get to keep her company while her carer is away.**

We are on Day 27 of the citywide general strike with no end in sight. At least now the authorities announce the plan for the week for permitted supermarket opening hours so that we can all be better organized. Before this, it was mass panic when the stores were allowed to open with the whole city out getting supplies….only to have another shopping morning announced just two days later.

I got out on one of the mornings and managed to pick up more cochineal from the ladies that sell home remedies in the street market. The bugs only come in tiny packets as they are sold here as remedies rather than for dyeing. The last time I bought some, they were sold by the teaspoonful out of a large jar.

**I also managed to find a store that sells cream of tartar to use as a color-shifting agent for my cochineal dyeing but had to buy a minimum quarter kilo**.

My projects have been rather blue lately. I wanted indigo blues for my ikat experiments and have had fun using synthetic dyes for silk and cotton to create different blues. I can’t get hold of natural indigo here. Now I would like to try my hand at using a natural dye for an ikat project and cochineal is a convenient thing with which to start.

I even used blues for my recent silk hummingbird cuff bracelet but that was more about just making do with what was available in my stash of 60/2 silk.

This is what’s on the loom now and I found this red and black kind of shocking after all those cool and calming blues.

But I do need to remind myself that red and black has always been a great favorite combination of mine and something that I have used time and time again over the years and as recently as 2020 when I wove my four-part Within These Walls series.

**The first ever motif I wove with my backstrap loom teachers in Peru back in 1996 was in red and black.**

My latest project is a request from a friend….a woven sleeve for his quena flute. I had to scratch around in my stash for suitable yarn and decided to go with chunky Omega Sinfonia cotton. This yarn is from my workshop stash for creating warps for my beginner students. I have a lot of this standing by for the day I can teach in-person classes again. I knew that I could create something big, bold and striking with this thread.

But, as always, I wove a width sample first. My eyes just seemed to naturally go for blues for the sample. I got the information that I needed from it and I hope to make something useful from it. It’s a good size for a case for sunglasses.

The pattern request for the quena case was for something snake-like. My Guaraní weaving teacher many years ago showed me one of the motifs that she weaves using the structure that the Guaraní people call karakarapepo. I call it Andean Pebble Weave. She explained the role of the snake in Guaraní legend and added that the zig-zag pattern also represents the life-giving Parapetí River along which her community lives.

This zig-zag motif is woven in many different ways. It doesn’t seem to have a single fixed form and it has been interesting to see the various forms it takes during the years I have been here. It’s hard to find any two that are exactly the same. My zig-zag pattern is a modified and embellished version of the one that my first teacher had shown me.

**I never lose the thrill I feel when seated at a new warp all heddled up and ready to go. I am using the very efficient two-heddle method that my backstrap loom teachers from Ayacucho showed me.**

In this chunky yarn, the inches quickly accumulate.

I got this far and then it was time to pack up some things for the two weeks of house sitting. My plan had been to go back and forth each day but the strike has made it less than pleasant to be walking around the deserted streets alone. It wasn’t something I was going to feel safe doing twice a day. And so I faced the fact that I would have to just stay put at my friend’s place which meant packing up my weaving . Hooray for the portability of the backstrap loom.

Sticks, yarn, swords, shuttle, string and cable ties to help attach the far beam to something all went into the tote bag. After completing the first pattern repeat, I didn’t need a chart any more. But darn…I forgot to bring the backstrap…and I have at least twelve of them at home!

But guess what…the tote bag makes a pretty good backstrap in an emergency. I love the idea of a loom carry bag that doubles as a backstrap. However, I would create a thicker cushier one if I were to make something like that in the future.

**You make do with what you have and this tote bag has been working just fine as a backstrap**.

This weaves up so quickly! I will have to sneak back home on one of the supermarket mornings (when there are more people out and about and it feels less creepy) and put together another warp. Once off the loom, I will figure out how to put this flute sleeve together. I am weaving the two sides of the sleeve as separate bands so that each can have its own third selvedge. That will save a bit of hemming.

**I found table legs that I could attach the far beam to at just the right height, piled a bunch of heavy things on top** **of the table, threw a cushioned chair seat on the floor, and was good to go.**

I am very much used to the red and black now. How did I ever feel that it was shocking?

There was some hope that the strike would end today but it hasn’t. Today was a permitted shopping morning and so I walked home to pick up my dyeing stuff.

These are the colors I have so far on silk using cochineal, my hard tap water, and alum mordant. A bit of lemon juice produced the orange tones.

I am hoping that the cream of tartar will give me reds. This is what the pot looked like when I added the cream of tartar. Looks promising, right?

I have hung the skein to dry without having rinsed it. I am thinking that maybe the color needs time to “cure”. When I rinsed the first lemon-juice-induced orange skein in tap water (it was shockingly orange), all the orange color disappeared and I was left with purple! The only way that I found to save the color was by adding a bit of lemon juice to the rinse water. I am wondering, therefore, if I should rinse this latest skein in water that has a bit of cream of tartar in it. Well, it’s all about experimenting, isn’t it? I have yet to get hold of distilled water. That will have to wait until after the strike, I guess. It’s not a supermarket item here.

Well, I have managed to write this by pecking away at the phone keyboard while not making myself too crazy.

Hopefully the next time I write, I will be back home, we will be strike free, I’ll have beautiful red silk skeins to show, and a successfully completed quena sleeve.

Backstrap Weaving – The Right Stuff

We’re standing still as we enter the sixteenth day of a city-wide strike but I have been pretty busy and entertained during this latest of the stay-at-home situations. It’s nowhere near as anxiety-ridden as the last time we did this for twenty-one days at the end of 2019.

This is what I have been up to:

SILK: soaking, scouring, squeezing, steeping, stirring

COCHINEAL: squashing, sifting, soaking, steeping, straining

DYEING: Sighing (over the dull colors), squealing (over the lovely ones), searching (for the right additives)

**Dyeing experiments on silk with cochineal and alum mordant have kept me entertained during the strike.**

But I don’t have the right stuff if I want to get the gorgeous reds normally associated with cochineal. Never mind, I’ll just pop out and get some. But of course everything is closed due to the strike. What I would like to have is cream of tartar and distilled water. The former is supposed to push the color towards a cherry red. Yum. My tap water is far too hard. I have read that dye molecules tend to adhere to the minerals in the water and not so much to the fiber. And that’s where the distilled water comes in.

**Citric acid shifts the color to a strong orange.**

The supermarkets have been allowed to open on two mornings a week from 6am to 11am. Imagine the whole city out trying to shop in those two time slots especially since the Day of the Dead fell right in the middle of it all. You would think that it would be a simple matter of getting some cream of tartar at the supermarket. I went to three and didn’t find it. I don’t have an oven and, therefore, don’t bake. I have never had a reason to look for it before. I found a place on Facebook that supplies commercial kitchens. Of course, it’s not open during the strike. I suppose I will have to buy a bagful! The distilled water will have to wait until the end of the strike too. In the meantime, I’ll just make do with what I’ve got and have fun.

This is the kind of red-ish purple that I got on my handspun llama with an alum mordant and tap water many years ago. I was really pleased with it. Many years ago, I used to have a softening attachment on my tap and I don’t remember if I still had it when I was dyeing this llama fiber. The company that supplied the cartridges for the attachment closed and that was the end of that. I know for sure that I hadn’t used cream of tartar.

In a way it’s a lot of fun making do with what you have on hand. Using coffee filters was suggested as a way to strain the bug particles out of the cochineal liquid. I don’t have any but I found that cutting two of the three layers out of one of the disposable surgical masks made a pretty good strainer. I could hang the elastic straps over two bottles to suspend the mask over a bowl. I had a little re-usable draw-string sack that can be used for tea leaves or yerba mate. That worked well for containing the crushed cochineal while the color was being extracted.

I got a few different purples…nothing terribly exciting….but adding lemon juice to the bath brought on a powerful zing of orange. Wow. Almost too powerful. I learned that I had to rinse the orange skeins in water that had a few drops of lemon juice. My first orange skein, rinsed under the tap, released a lot of orange liquid in the first rinse, a rosy quite attractive orange in the second, and then the skein magically turned purple before my eyes… and a very dark purple at that! Not a trace of orange left. How bizarre. I rinsed the others in lemon-y water after that and got some pretty colors.

**Purple and orange and pink tones in silk from cochineal.**

So, that’s what I have so far. I am looking forward to getting some reds when things are back to normal and I can get the right stuff. In the meantime I can start skeining and scouring and mordanting the next lot of silk. I have a new even greater appreciation for the person who prepared all these tiny sample silk skeins from natural dye experiments using all kinds of mordants and color-shifting agents.

**Skeins of naturally dyed silk that were gifted to me.**

I had so much fun combining those small skeins to weave book covers…

Hopefully I can get colors that work well enough together for a future ikat project.

As you can imagine, when doing this kind of thing there is a lot of time spent waiting for yarn to dry or soak or steep. I had to keep myself busy with other fiber pursuits so that I would stop impatiently poking at things in the pot. I am still spinning the brown cotton that is labeled as Cinnamon and am about to start experimenting with boiling small quantities of it for different lengths of time to see how that affects the resulting deepening of color. I first soaked one lot and allowed it to dry to see if the color changes at all from simply being thoroughly wetted. It doesn’t. Now it’s time to start boiling.

**The color labeled Cinnamon is the uppermost one in this picture.**

The other thing I did was weave a band in 60/2 silk to experiment with making jewelry…wrist-cuff bracelets and possibly pendants. I enjoy wearing these when I travel but am also thinking about possible income sources when I eventually return to live in Australia.

I added a hummingbird cuff bracelet to my collection of blue ones….

And then I unearthed a sample I had woven in indigo-dyed fine cotton from Guatemala. It will make a nice storage bag for the blue bracelets.

I finish my cuff bracelets in a number of ways. Sometimes I add a button to one end and a loop to the other. This involves finishing the raw edges of the band in some way. Usually the material is fine enough to turn under twice and hem. If not, I turn once and sew down after having sealed the edge with diluted PVA glue. This is not my favorite way as the dried glue can sometimes be scratchy against the skin. A more complicated but enjoyable way is to edge the perimeter with a woven tubular band. Using metal ribbon crimps and some sort of clasp takes care of the raw edges. However, cuffs with clasps like these are the hardest ones to do up. I have had lots of practice, though!

**A tubular edging added to a wool band encloses and protects the edges.**

Apart from enclosing and protecting the cut raw edges, ribbon crimps also allow you to wear the bracelet showing either of the two faces.

I wove my hummingbird design in warp-faced double weave. I love the smooth, solid color look of this structure. There are no floats and no spotted background. If you think that you would like to try double weave yourself, I have written a book which gives instructions via dozens of step-by-step photos, detailed explanations and video clips for those who like to weave bands on standard inkle looms. I think that it is a technique for those who have already tried and decided that they like the slower pace of weaving bands with pick-up patterns. It’s not the first-ever kind of pick-up patterning that I would recommend trying. I learned this structure in the highlands of Bolivia way back in 1997on a horizontal ground loom and have adapted the method to the inkle loom. Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms is available as a PDF or as a spiral-bound book at Taproot Video.

I made the most of every piece of this short band…

My friend Dorinda is back in the States now after visiting Maxima and all her other friends in the Bolivian highlands. Maxima runs a small grass roots weaving co-op made up of women from her town and neighboring rural communities far, far away from tourist trails. Pre pandemic, I was able to take and show examples of the ladies’ work that I own using their handspun wool and natural dyes and generate a lot of orders for them. The profits would go towards simple needs like buying supplies for their children at the start of the school year. If you were reading my blog during those years you will know that I got around a lot and there are now folks from Florida to Washington state who own some of the beautiful woven cloth. Although the ladies do sew the cloth into useful products, most of my weaving friends were interested in buying lengths of cloth that they could use in their own sewing projects.

Here are some of the youngest and newest members of the co-op who have recently graduated from the body-tensioned band loom to the leaning vertical frame loom on which they weave wider pieces. The youngest one has yet to graduate but will do so next year. Look at those lovely reds they get on the wool from cochineal. I need to get some of that good highland water!

Maxima’s sister, Narciza is one of my weaving buddies and is here showing the 4350 meters of yarn that she spun during the Spinning Week competition that Dorinda helped organize in October by seeking out funding for prizes.

Two groups of spinners competed for prizes. The first prize winners on the right are wearing their new skirts and the second prize winners received a knitted cardigan. Donated funds were used for the purchase of the skirt fabric and yarn and the skirts were sewn and cardigans machine-knitted by members of the co-op. **89, 887 meters of yarn were spun in the week!** **There’ll be plenty to go into the dye pots next season.**

These ladies were the participants in the Spinning Week competition in the first week of October. It’s a very humble group of ladies living a simple rural existence deep within the highlands, growing vegetables for the Sunday market and raising livestock. There are no passing foreign tourists and no local interest in their woven goods in the nearest city nine hours away (it’s a spectacular bus journey!) Please do take a look at Dorinda’s blog, PAZA Bolivia, to read her fascinating stories about the lives of these women and their efforts to keep their spinning and weaving traditions alive. You might think about subscribing to automatically receive notification of her future posts. I hope that I can travel soon to promote their work and help out in my own small way as I used to. In the meantime, I’ll do my best via my blog.

I’ll leave you here with an idea for using ribbon crimps to make some tree ornaments. I show these every year! The bands don’t necessarily need to be holiday themed. I think any pattern looks good.

These are all woven using the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. If you would like to learn how to weave Andean Pebble Weave on an inkle loom. I have written a book that teaches just that: Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms. If you use any other kind of loom to weave bands you can still learn the method that enables you to weave these kinds of double-faced bands in this book: Complementary-warp Pick-up. The advantage of the inkle loom book is that it includes instructional video clips in both its digital and physical versions.. Both these books teach the method that enables you weave all the patterns in my two follow-up pattern books.

Hopefully, the strike won’t last too much longer and there will be a peaceful end and a solution to satisfy all concerned. Until next time…..

Backstrap Weaving – Percolating

Ikat! I have been giving myself time to allow the abundance of images and information that I keep finding on ikat to slowly filter so that I can focus on the next project. Without this filtering, there is the tendency to want to try everything in the one project. Another thing that is driving that tendency is the fact that my supply of natural-color 60/2 silk is coming to an end. I had used much more than originally planned in the last ikat project. This project was supposed to be a “sample” which for me is typically pretty small. The project turned into something else all together and will end up hanging on a wall.

Here it is after having been pressed good and hard. That always brings out the sheen of the silk but it has been hard to capture it in a photo.

In a way I am being forced to stop and ponder and allow the ideas to percolate because I was surprised to find that the suppliers of alum that I have always used here in Santa Cruz suddenly don’t carry it any more. I had been planning to dye my next ikat project with cochineal and was depending on being able to find alum. I have yet to find a substitute for alum as the mordant. That brought the plans for the next project to a halt.

Getting cochineal here in the lowlands is usually the tricky bit, not the alum. Cochineal is not used for dyeing here but is sold instead by the ladies in the street markets who carry home remedies. They tell me that it is to be taken as a remedy for susto which I can only understand to mean “fright” or perhaps that could be stretched to mean “anxiety”? Finding cochineal was even trickier this time. The massive street market that lies just two blocks from my home was recently “cleaned up”. All the vendors who normally wander the streets or sit on the sidewalk were ordered to move on. This must have included some of the home remedy vendors.

Asking the wrong vendor brought on a cranky almost offended response. It seems to me that this attitude is somehow part of the Highland-versus-Lowland vibe that is quite strong here in lowland Santa Cruz where certain things associated with the highlands, such as the chewing of coca leaves, are rejected as inferior and “indio”. It appeared that only the vendors from the highlands would have cochineal in their home remedy stalls. In any case, you can see that I was successful in finding someone from whom to buy the little dried beetles.

One down, one to go – alum. I was told that the Mennonites use alum when canning their produce so I will be off to the Mennonite market to see if I can find it there. I have not been to that market before and look forward to it. I am told that it is a market of farming implements and supplies for raising livestock etc.

With those two items in hand, I can start to make some experiments. I wonder what kind of red I will get? I will be happy with pretty much anything except pink. Here’s the color I got with cochineal on my hand spun llama fiber many years ago using an alum pre-mordant. I used it in small double weave, tubular band and complementary-warp pick-up projects.

My challenges for this next ikat project include using a natural dye and tying a much finer pattern. I was lucky to be shown a detailed image of a small section of an ikat textile from Indonesia in which I could actually count the warp threads. I could see that the weaver had tied around groups of six ends to create such a fine and detailed pattern. I could clearly see the three white warp threads in the woven cloth against the morinda-dyed background. WOW.

I know that the hand spun cotton that weaver was using is most likely thicker than the 60/2 silk I have been using. That makes it hard to make a comparison. In my last piece I tied around sections of fourteen ends in the pattern area and around twenty eight ends where I had created broad bands of resist. I would love to know generally how fine the hand spun cotton used in the Indonesian ikat pieces is in terms of wpi.

The other challenge is creating a new pattern to use with the finer tying. That hasn’t been easy….I have been looking around a lot for ideas and there’s just way too much input!

I have sketched out something very loosely based on leaves. Leaves have become one of my signature patterns and so I figured it would be appropriate to do something with stylized leaves. What I have drawn has ended up being so stylized that it may not be recognizable as leaves, but that’s okay. Whether I can transfer my sketch to the warp remains to be seen.

So far, I have worked with steps of fixed height and width to form the diagonal lines in the patterns, all carefully plotted and measured out. All the angles have been the same. The pattern I have sketched will involve a lot more free-form tying. Oh my goodness, what have I done?! I can often get very carried away creating these challenges right up until the moment I see the warp stretched out before me. Then some hasty adjustments are made. I remind myself every time I think I have become ridiculously over ambitious with this new pattern I have sketched that I did, after all, manage to tie a a couple of fairly nice circles some years ago. Let’s wait and see what happens.

The other benefit of taking time-out is that I have had much more time to spend on the book. I still can’t quite see the end in sight but I have made really good progress.

Now, I have something wonderful to show from a weaving friend, Emily Robison. I can’t remember exactly how Emily and I connected but she contacted me online and we were able to meet up on one of my trips away and weave double weave bands together. You can see her already weaving a pattern of her own creation at left.

I asked Emily if she would like to write a couple of paragraphs to share with you about her woven work and her experience learning to weave on a backstrap loom in Micronesia and I will leave the rest of the story for you in her own words….

To my knowledge, the type of weaving that I do is found only in the outer islands of Yap state, in the Federated States of Micronesia — migratory origins unknown. They are a collection of about 16 tiny inhabited low-lying coral islands (possibly all less than one square mile). The culture practiced in the outer islands is very distinct from the main island of Yap — the two cultures have languages of unrelated origins — but they are very intertwined. The islands practice a caste system, and the main island considers outer island people and culture to be either very low caste or other caste, meaning that a main islander wouldn’t go to the homes or eat the food of an outer islander, and main islanders do not weave lava lava.

Photo supplied by Emily Robison of her own non-traditional use of some of the patterning elements she learned with the weavers of the outer islands.

The backstrap woven fabric called lava lava is used in certain patterns as the only form of outer island female dress — a type of wraparound skirt — and in other patterns it is used as part of the traditional male main island dress. It is also used in main islander funeral ceremonies. Therefore it’s an important trade item from the outer islands to the main islands, but main islanders consider it taboo to participate in any part of the manufacture.

Photo supplied by Emily Robison of her current work which she says is a reproduction of one of her teacher’s pieces except for the supplementary-weft pattern.

Traditionally, lava lavas were woven of banana and hibiscus bark fibers and naturally dyed in reds and blacks (maybe other colors, but I haven’t seen them), but this practice has shifted in favor of commercially available thread from China. This transition is less than 50 years old. The traditional fabrics weren’t warp-faced, I don’t think — at least the few I’ve seen weren’t — but today’s lava lavas are.

Silk is too expensive, wool too hot, and cotton doesn’t hold up to the production, so they exclusively used polyester (but I’ve heard rumors of people incorporating more cotton in the past 10 years). Their patterns are pretty distinct and uniform. People can use many colors (reds are off limits unless used as an accent color or on the edges), but the two types of patterns are the lava lavas with large fields of solid color and accents on the edges and in the middle. These are the ones that have a supplemental weft, and an example is the one that I am currently weaving. (Emily tells me that the supplementary-weft patterning technique shows pattern on both faces of the cloth. Here is a view of the back of the cloth of her current piece showing the black supplementary-weft pattern.)

Another example is the style with 6 or 7 contrasting stripes (I don’t know when one would be chosen over the other — 6 is more common) on a colorful background. The stripes are made of two complementary colors and some patterning.

The ones for men are just black and white, 6 or 7 striped.

Image of a Yapese man’s lava lava taken by Laverne from the website of worthpoint.com

Single-thread floats in the green section on the upper face of the cloth.

Much to the chagrin of my Yapese host family, I studied with outer islanders and wove in secret for about 18 months. It was a real taboo thing to do and it didn’t make me any friends… so I don’t know as much as I could have learned if I’d been living with an outer island family.

The patterns are made with two sticks that control the floats — one for the right face, and one for the reverse face. The warp is always continuous, and the tension rod loop, string heddles, and pattern floats are all created in the warping process.

(Note from Laverne: I just love that extra heddle peg sitting there so neatly like that. If you are curious about how heddles are made during the warping process, I can show you how my Montagnard (Vietnames hilltribe) backstrap weaving teachers do it. It’s probably not exactly the same way as the Yapese weavers do it but it will give you an idea for now. There’s a video showing how Ju Nie does it embedded in this blog post followed by a video I made slowing the process down so that you can more easily see how it works.)

Lava lavas must be long enough to cover a woman from upper hips to knees (it is taboo to show off any thigh). and so they are usually about 26 inches wide and 60 inches long. Once cut, the strings of the fringe are kept long to create a kind of modesty curtain between the legs. They’re worn by wrapping them in half around the body, and then pinching the two sides together at the right hip and folding the fringe inward to sit between the legs. They’re usually tied on with a belt, but some ladies just tuck them in.

You can follow Emily’s work via her Instagram account: @thewovenworld. She is hoping to create a website soon too.

To finish, I have a few things to show you from my online weaving friends….

Kathleen Frtiz recently received a Guatemalan backstrap loom and has taken off on her backstrap weaving adventure as if she had been born for it. This is only her third piece as far as I can tell. It is woven in fine cotton and she is pleased with how surprisingly pliant it is even before it has been wet finished. She used this piece to experiment with patterning with supplementary weft using the patterning sticks and techniques that I describe in this tutorial.

Nancy Ayton made sweet hanging ornaments from her Andean Pebble Weave bands. The deer head motif is her own creation. I love it when people start designing their own patterns. The owl and bird motif is from my Complementary-warp Pattern Book and the knot-work pattern is from More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns.

Nora Dereli is using her inkle loom to weave one of several knot-work patterns that are charted in More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns. This is a motif that Louise Ström weaves in one of the structures that are woven using tablets. I translated the motif to the Andean Pebble Weave structure.

Susan Bratt finished weaving a guitar strap on her backstrap loom using the Andean Pebble Weave structure. The pattern is from the Complementary-warp Pattern Book.

Wendy Garrity completed what she tells me is her first silk-on-silk wrist band using the supplementary-weft patterning technique known as sampa in Bhutan. The multi-color spots of color that appear between the floats of supplementary weft are so pretty. Wendy studied weaving on a backstrap loom and various traditional patterning techniques while living and working in Bhutan and leads textile tours there every year. Her website is Textile Trails.

Gregory W and I wove double weave bands together and she came up with this lovely band with her own original design shortly after. Her guild had challenged members to use these colors in a project and this was Gregory’s contribution.

Marilyn Albright and I have never met but I feel that we are bound to one of these days in her movements between Alaska and Mexico. She has been experimenting with Bedouin al’ouerjan patterns using my tutorials here on this blog and adding her own twist to the traditional pattern .

And here’s one more from Priscilla Bradburn who wove this band after learning Andean Pebble Weave from my book Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms. She has taken flat-top S hooks, hearts, diamonds and other basic shapes and combined them in her own unique way to create a new pattern of her own. This and her creative use of color has produced a beautiful band!

Let’s hope my hunt for alum is successful otherwise it will be back to the synthetic dyes for me. I wonder what other interesting things I will see at the Mennonite farmers’ market.

Until next time…