Tag: complementary warp pick-up

Backstrap Weaving – Seasons

Daylight Savings is over and we continue what feels like a rapid slide into cooler temperatures here in the Blue Mountains. I welcome snuggling under multiple layers on these cold nights but don’t care much for having to climb out from under them in the morning. We didn’t have Daylight Savings time in Bolivia and I was surprised by how long it took for my stomach to adapt! I kept finding myself restless at 11:30am with my stomach complaining that it hadn’t yet been filled. I still do a large cooked lunch in the way to which I’d become accustomed in South America. And that post-lunch drowsiness is hard to kick too. I can’t blame the tropical heat for it any more.

With the cooling temperatures came the rolling down of shirt sleeves and the layering of coats. I’d have to put away all my wrist cuffs for a while.

In their place out came my woven scarves and neck gaiters that I’ve been accumulating all these years. It was never cold enough in Bolivia to wear them. Sometimes I’d take them traveling to the northern hemisphere spring and fall only to drag them out of a packed bag looking like pieces of crumpled rag and too ugly to wear.

The fall temperatures here have been perfect for wearing things like this light cotton scarf that I wove about eight years ago and never ever got to wear.

I wove this with handspun cotton singles that I’d bought in Guatemala back in 2008. I used my bamboo reed to achieve the sheer open look and used the same cotton as supplementary weft to weave in patterns. It’s a style that I had been wanting to try ever since I bought a sample from the Coban area of Guatemala.

I enjoy my woven book cover in naturally dyed silk even more now that I am actually living amongst these colors. I was very spoiled by being able to visit Vermont on the Columbus Day weekend many years ago and experience the fall colors there. It’s nowhere near as stunning here but it feels special because I’m living it rather than just visiting.

This little book along with others that I made is now settled in my new home next to books about textiles from this side of the world, places that perhaps I’ll be able to visit some day.

I finally finished the project in which I used my Bolivian teachers’ handspun wool. That project traveled through an entire year of seasons with me and I named the resulting bag Four Seasons in One Bag. The wool went from the sheep of the central Bolivian highlands, washed in mountain streams, into the hands and spindles of my weaving friends and teachers.

I’m pretty sure that the wool was spun during the October spinning event in 2024 in which my teachers and other ladies in the community compete for prizes to see who can spin the most wool. I bought three balls of the doubled singles and dyed some of it with indigo while I was up in the highlands visiting with Maxima during my last Bolivian summer.

It traveled with me to Australia where I spent some of the winter and spring dyeing it with Australian plant materials. The following summer, I moved here to my new home in the Blue Mountains and started the long task of plying.

While I love spinning with a drop spindle, I can’t say the same for plying. I find it downright tedious and I just wanted the task to finish. I’d ply at my craft group gatherings, on the train, at the Arts Society gatherings, at the spinning and weaving group….it just seemed to go on and on.

When I had just about finished all that plying, an Ashford Wee Peggy spinning wheel together with a bunch of accessories became available on Marketplace at a bargain price and I was able to buy it. There it sits waiting to be spruced up a bit until I next need to ply. Perhaps I’ll use it for spinning too. Who knows. The wheel came with lots of bobbins, a niddy noddy (I’ve never owned one), hand carders (I’d had to leave mine behind in Bolivia), a flicking tool and even an apron. A friend at my spinning group has supplied me with a new spring and hooks to replace rusty ones.

I managed to squeeze in some time at the loom between hiking trips. It took two attempts to wind a warp to my liking from all those fabulous natural dye colors but I had to face the fact that I just wouldn’t be able to get them all into the one piece.
Four seasons motifs in progress. The heddle arrangement may look awkward but it works well. I had seen weavers in Bolivia use similar arrangements for their double weave pieces.

Here’s the finished cloth…

The figures as well as the colors are meant to represent the four seasons. The yarn I had dyed with cochineal just didn’t belong here. It can wait along with the greens for another project.

Once I’d decided that this cloth would be a bag, I set about weaving a strap….

I didn’t want to use the handspun wool as weft for either of these pieces and used instead some unidentified soft and very loosely spun ”stuff’ that a friend had given me. It worked well except for the fact that it was somewhat slippery and wanted every now and then to slip out of the shed at the edges rather than lie there snugly. I’d had that very same experience with luscious alpaca yarn that I’d spun once upon a time.

Then came the usual dilemma of deciding which face of the fabric I preferred. The bag would be lined and so one of the two faces would never be seen again. I knew which face I had decided would be the “good” one. The problem was that when I asked others for an opinion, they always chose the other! I stuck with my original plan, though.

The two faces.
I somehow always find myself on the floor at the planning stage. I didn’t have a choice in Bolivia but I’m in a bigger place now with table space. I still end up on the floor.

I rounded off the flap of the bag…always scary cutting into the cloth…and covered and protected the raw edge with coil stitches. The sides then had to be woven, lining attached and everything sewn together…the most challenging part for me.

Here ‘s the completed bag being displayed at the Blackheath Arts Society members’ Easter exhibition. It was so much fun seeing it out there on display!

I managed to also get it in at the last minute, thanks to a kind friend from my spinning group, to the Hawkesbury Show where it won a blue ribbon. I was never able to enter shows like these when I lived in Bolivia and I am very excited about this ribbon!

A buddy from my craft group went to the show and surprised me with this photo while she was there….

So, you will have gathered that my hand and shoulder are now allowing me to be busy at the loom. The one-year anniversary of my accident has passed and things are improving. My wrist at the carpal tunnel level is still clogged and blocked by scar tissue which I don’t believe will ever stretch. My hand is a block of wood first thing in the morning but here I am typing, weaving, spinning cotton and plying. My shoulder is thawing very slowly and my range of reach out to the side to pass shuttle and insert sword is improving.

I am, however, in easy reach of all of this beauty and I just have to ask myself every day what I have done to deserve it!

I’m in a couple of hiking groups and get to go out at least twice a week.

I wonder if some Blue Mountains scenery and colors will start creeping into my work. I have a long-ish list of things I want to weave, some of which I spent a great deal of time designing last year when I couldn’t weave at all. I remember starting out charting with my left hand and the great deal of concentration that was required to fill within the lines!

I’ve actually started sampling for that large project now that I’ve decided on the thread that I will use. I need to get an ends per inch reading and also make sure that the proportions of the woven figures match those of my charted ones.

The “real” project will be much wider than this.

I started off the year weaving various narrow items just to make sure that I didn’t overdo things, Last year I had jumped back into weaving too early and messed up my shoulder as a result.

The Canberra Guild of Spinners and Weavers asked me to weave bookmarks/award ribbons for their AGM. This seemed like a great way to start the year even though they weren’t due until March. It’s extremely rare for me to take on commissioned work but the guild folk had made it easier by choosing and providing the yarn and being very specific about the layout. I got to choose the patterns and I had a lot of fun with that. I used the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave.

I wove a name tag for myself once again in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave which produces a quirky style of lettering. The lettering on the award ribbons is less so because the letters are capitals and well spaced. I have joined so many new groups up here that it is a struggle to remember names. At least this tag will help them to identify me and then I can embarrass myself by not being able to identify them in return!

I live above the Aboriginal Health Services office and one day while chatting with the ladies, I admired their lanyards with their indigenous art print. The next thing I knew, one had been popped into my mail box. So, I replied with a woven keyfob. I love these kinds of exchanges.

I had no trouble at all finding a place to set myself up for weaving on my backstrap loom. The previous resident left one of those huge Ikea book cases with 25 cube spaces. I have it filled now with cubes holding pretty much everything I brought over with me from Bolivia. I place C clamps on the edge of the lower shelves and can place my warp beam behind them. It’s a good sturdy anchor point.

Here I sit weaving with some of my late mother’s treasured possessions. She would have had to make the tough decisions about what to take and what to leave behind, just as I had when leaving Bolivia, when she left India in 1962 to come and live in Australia. These things had been in storage waiting for me since my mum died in 2013.There’s a biscuit tin with images of places of interest in Bombay, a pressed tin trinket tray with images of Hindu deities and her sewing basket…all selected by her as being too precious to leave behind. I love that I am able to have them here near me as I weave.

And…one more thing I wove….I converted the pouch I’d made from my handspun llama yarn into a phone carrying pouch for my hikes by weaving and adding a strap…

Between weaving and hiking and other activities, I try to turn this flat, which had been left in a somewhat shabby state, into a cosy home. This town of Katoomba in which I live is Op Shop heaven and I have acquired most of my things there or via Marketplace. Op Shop is the Australian term for a thrift or charity store. There have been a few flat-pack furniture purchases too. Assembling them on my own made me feel like I was playing a game of Twister.

Would you believe I got these Indonesian ikat pieces at a local op shop for the equivalent of US$ 3.50 each?!

I couldn’t believe that after having admired the Indonesian ikat textiles for so many years, particularly the ones from Sumba, that I should run across these in an op shop?!

Next on the agenda is dyeing with lichen. A friend gave me a jar of lichen that she had collected from fallen branches on the coast. It’s been soaking in a mix of cloudy ammonia and water for almost two weeks now and the color it’s releasing is amazing. I still have some of the Bolivian wool left. I just have to wash it and then give this color a go. I hope to find lichen locally that will perhaps produce other colors although I doubt that anything could be quite as astounding as this.

This photo was taken after one week. It has developed even further since.

The sun is streaming in through my sunroom windows and I feel so guilty for being indoors on such an utterly gorgeous day. But at the same time, I have been feeling bad for having neglected my blog for so long.

I want to thank everyone for making purchases before Taproot Video closed at the end of March. I really appreciate your support and hope to have the PDFs back up for sale elsewhere soon. I thought that launching a new publication would be a good way to introduce my new point of sale but I don’t see that happening quite quickly enough. Hopefully it won’t be too much longer before I have my publications available for sale once more. The flurry of purchases at the end of Taproot Video will help keep me afloat until then.

For those who don’t see my blog banner on their particular device, here’s what it says….Stay tuned.

Backstrap Weaving – Therapy

Long time no see. A lot has been happening but at the same time not a lot has been happening.

In the “a lot has been happening” category I’ve undergone a dramatic change of scene:

It’s certainly dramatic for someone who has been living in a landlocked country for the last twenty-seven years. The following might give you a clue as to my whereabouts….

I pass this mural on my way to the shops.

Yes, I’m back in Australia for good after having talked about making this move for years. But I’m still in transition mode as I will be staying with my brother and sister-in-law in this beachy area on the mid north coast of NSW until mid November when I will then move to my own place in the Blue Mountains.

It’s a lovely area for strolling in bushland and by the shore. I walk around the block to a large open field where kangaroos come to graze in the late afternoon. They’re far too shy to allow me to photograph them. We stop still and stare at each other for a good five minutes after which they nervously return to their grazing. However, I only have to take one very cautious and almost imperceptible step closer and they’re off.

I have these guys waiting to greet me when I step out in the late afternoon to bring in the laundry.

Kookaburras create quite a racket when I take a stroll around the neighborhood but will instantly pipe down the moment I turn on my camera to record them.

I had long planned to fly out of Bolivia on April 28. I had my accident with the four-legged black torpedo that I described in my last post one month prior and it almost messed up everything. Needless to say it was tough leaving after thirty-two years in South America and all the fuss after the accident didn’t make it any easier. I was in need of both mental and physical therapy by the time I reached my brother’s place on May 4.

I’m alone now house-sitting for my brother and his wife who are away traveling for two months. I watched the bag I wove and sewed for my sister-in-law back in 2006 head out the door for yet another world adventure…

Here they are in Alaska on this current trip where Deb’s using it to hold her binoculars….

It’s always so nice to know that a gift has turned out to be so useful.

The best mental therapy during this newest transition period has come in the form of sitting on the beach in the sunshine, inhaling the sea air while listening to and watching the waves roll in. It reminds of this weaving I did some years ago….

I always like to see the white string heddles in this picture as foaming waves rolling onto a yellow sand beach. And there’s a big ol’ sun there in the foreground.

Now it’s humpback whale migration season and on the next clear day I’ll head to the lighthouse to see if I can spot them.

Other forms of therapy…..smelling eucalyptus leaves burning as folks rake the fallen ones up to burn in the cool evening air (such nostalgia!), walking along accompanied by all the magical birdsong that I recognize from my younger days in Australia, making new friends which has turned out to be super easy in this wonderfully friendly community.

Scenes from strolling around the neighborhood.

One such friend that I met at the weekly craft group happened to mention in conversation that she had lived in Papua New Guinea. I immediately asked her if she had seen the bilum bags that artisans there make from plant fiber. The stitch they use is exactly the same as that used by the Ayoreo people in Bolivia although the plant material used is different. I remember my Ayoreo teacher being fascinated by the fact that these people on the other side of the world are making bags using the same technique.

The main difference is that the bilum bags are stitched much more loosely. The looping is very much more open, even more open than the work by the Wichi artisans in Argentina. The bilums are also worked as a continuous round and are, therefore, seamless whereas the Ayoreo artisans work a row from left to right and then flip the work and return, once again working from left to right. Jey brought a bag to show me that she had collected fifty years ago. I’m guessing the colors are from natural sources and it’s amazing how vibrant they are after all these years.

The Ayoreo work is so much tighter that, when set next to the bilum, it’s very difficult to see that the looping technique used in both is indeed the same. It was very exciting for me to be able to see this work and I can’t wait to send a photo to my teacher in Bolivia. Jey tells me that she even used to have a small hammock made in this technique for one of her babies.

What do I do when I go along to these weekly craft group meet-ups with my rehabilitating hand? Well, I’m just about able to put enough twist into my takli spindle to spin some of my brown cotton. There’s progress because when I first arrived here I couldn’t do it at all…couldn’t even grip the spindle. It’s not the most comfortable thing in the world and I can’t do it forever and a day as I used to.

There are issues with my wrist and I’m not recovering the range of movement that I had hoped. It’s taken me this long to get an appointment with an orthopedist here and I’ll see him on Wednesday to find out what’s going on and if there’s any reason for concern.

My occupational therapist dresses up my hand in the most interesting ways! The tape pattern was designed by a Polynesian tatoo artist. While wearing this on my skin I’m thinking that maybe something like this will seep into my weaving one of these days…..a fun souvenir of this slow rehab.

BUT I have been able to weave! In my last post I showed how I had trained my left hand to operate the loom and do pick-up. In this way, the hatband I’d started before the accident slowly got finished and my friend did a fabulous job of attaching it to his hat after I had already left Bolivia.

Well, now I can do all that using my injured right hand. I’m able to wind a decent warp, make string heddles and weave narrow bands with pick-up using medium weight cotton thread. I’ve never before thought about what role each of my two hands plays in my weaving process. When I’m using two sets of heddles, it turns out that it’s my left hand that does the twisting and rolling action on one set while my right only needs to pull the other set straight up. It can manage that and do the pick-up!

So, I’ve been making some key fob thank-you gifts:

First one for Jey for lending me her bilum to play with.

This band got folded in half with its ends clamped between the jaws of the key fob hardware. Then I made another for one of my physiotherapists who I felt had gone above and beyond. I found out that she has two much-adored golden retrievers that have their own Instagram page and so I wove a fob with their names.

I used the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave which produces a quirky kind of lettering.

I think it’s fun that the lettering matches the rather unsteady and quirky writing on my hand-written thank-you note! Fortunately, my former bank in Bolivia has been the only place so far that has insisted on my producing a perfect signature.

The other side of the band just has paw prints and is shown here sitting on top of a very rustic woolen backstrap that I got in Peru.

Alison Irwin created a chart of letters in this structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave which was published in the Winter ’22 edition of Little Looms magazine. I sometimes need to make adjustments to the letters in order to create the ideal spacing in the particular words I’m weaving. The chart for the paw prints can be found in my Complementary-warp Pattern Book along with two other versions.

There’s a long list of people to thank. I’ll be busy at the loom making gifts and that’s yet another form of therapy. Luckily the guest-room bed has a wooden base and I’ve been able to anchor my loom to it in much the same way as I did in Bolivia.

It might be a while before I can get into this though….

This just a part of the big box of luscious silk that weaving friend Laura sent me from her stash in Canada. Such generosity. She shipped it quite some time ago and I could hardly believe it when I got to Australia and finally got to see it.

Some of it is insanely fine but I do enjoy weaving with fine thread and…..silk! I can’t even imagine untying those skeins and winding the thread into balls. Actually, my hand could probably manage that but right now I can’t trust it to wind a good well-tensioned warp with such fine stuff. I wouldn’t be able to maintain a steady grip on the thread. That’s something to aspire to. I think I’ll have to take on working with increasingly fine material in slow steps as I slowly recover function in my right hand.

At craft group I also got to meet up with the lady who two years ago had given me a skein of gorgeous variegated silk. I’d sent her photos of what I’d made with it but now I could take the finished piece and show it to her in person. You might remember this project…..

Now she’s teaching me how to crochet winter slippers. Remember that it’s winter down here. I’m so slow though that I’m not sure I’ll have these finished in time! There’s wrist rotation involved in working the hook and I can’t do that yet. So, I hold the hook steady and move the work around instead. It seems to be working! We’re just using scrap wool for this initial sample while I get the hang of it.

I love that things that I’ve been weaving over the years are now coming out and being used on a daily basis. I never used this bag in Bolivia and now it goes with me everywhere!

When I tell people that I weave, at least I have something I can show as an example.

I was having a bit of a down day at the radiologist having my wrist x-rayed when the receptionist admired this bag that I happened to be using that day. She was quite bewildered when I explained that I’d made it myself…..from scratch. No, I hadn’t bought the fabric. I took yarn, tied a pattern onto it, put it into two different colored dye baths with more tying in between, removed all the ties, wove it into fabric on a simple loom of sticks, then sewed the cloth into a bag, wove a strap and edged the flap. Sometimes I forget what this must sound like to a non-fiber, non-weaver person! And then the inevitable question…how long did it take? After all that, she may have regretted having complimented my bag but that simple compliment had made my day ❤️.

So, while I’m excited about the fact that my hand can tolerate my making a couple of key fobs, the thing that has made me happiest is that there is a new backstrap weaver in the making here in Lake Cathie. Courtney, who comes along to every second session of our craft group meet-ups, showed up today with this….

She had just finished crocheting a stunning mochila bag when I first met her and was, as a never-ever weaver, busily researching how to weave a strap. Well, you know that I can’t help myself and I took one of my key fob warps along to show her. She was immediately hooked and went off with links to my Backstrap Basics article and my Basic Warping for Backstrap Looms video class which are both free and available here on my blog. What a great job she’s done rounding up the bits and pieces and getting herself set up. She made my day when she brought this this morning to show me. How I miss in-person teaching!

Do I miss Bolivia and the folks that I have left behind?…of course I do! Oh my aching heart. I had a teary moment on my way back here when I visited a mega supermarket in the States. I noted the rows and rows of neatly and attractively arranged goods, the lack of raucous cumbia music, the wide open spaces, the comfortable controlled temperature and immediately missed the chaos of the Santa Cruz street markets with their dirt, heat, crowds, odours and noise! (And prices, I might add. Phew, that has been an adjustment!) But, sigh, choices have to be made.

So, that’s all for this post. My hand is saying “enough!” (and unfortunately I had quite a painful and restless night as both hand and shoulder protested against my having typed all this at my laptop). They’re much happier weaving.

I’ll leave you with something I spotted at the beach the other day. Nope, I’m definitely not in Bolivia any more.

Backstrap Weaving – Ummmmmm……

I was recently asked to describe the kind of weaving that I do in an audio-only interview. Ummmmmm ….I was completely stumped and now I don’t even remember what kind of awkward response I made! When talking about my weaving, I’ve always been in settings in which I could basically just let the textiles do most of the talking for me. Although I ramble on in these blog posts, I always try to include lots of captioned images for those who just want the eye candy yet still want to get a general idea of what I’m talking about.

Even when I am away from home and on a plane, for example, chatting with a stranger and the topic of what we do comes up (it doesn’t always), I can just show them perhaps a wrist cuff, my belt or a purse I’ve made with my woven cloth to give them an idea.

Although I don’t typically wear four at once, I’m almost always wearing a wrist cuff when I’m traveling.

I remember the time I was at the CNCH conference in 2010. Inkle weaver Annie MacHale messaged me to see if we could meet up. We’d never seen each other and she spotted my woven belt first from behind and was immediately able to identify me. The weaving did the talking.

Wearing my woven work, such as these belts, is sometimes more effective at gatherings than wearing a name tag!
A more recent addition to my belt collection using both warp and weft-faced structures.

And then there are always my bags and purses. In the last few years I’ve gained more confidence in my hand-sewing and have created quite a few more but there was always one to carry to show to curious strangers.

Using my cotton-spinning bag as a purse on an outing with my friend Emerald in Australia. Multi-purpose items are a bonus when traveling with limited space in luggage.

I was never without my big camera in the earlier days of my travels and a camera strap is always a nice way to give folks an idea of what I do (not forgetting of course all the images stored in the camera). Of course we all prefer to be able to touch textiles, right? We see textiles online and want so much to be able to reach out and touch them. We have to imagine how they feel. What about when you can only hear about them in an audio-only context? Um, I hope I did a decent job of answering that question.

My updated camera strap woven in my own handspun wool and original hummingbird figure in three-color reversible pebble weave.

It was nice when I got my little iPod and was able to leave the bulky camera behind on trips. I would use it as my camera, wearing it around my neck in its special woven pouch. It was often a conversation starter because it was plain to see there hanging around my neck…

Backstrap loom weaving with camera at the ready. There was to need to let the pouch do the talking in this case as there was plenty going on there at my loom.

Which reminds me, there are also woven necklaces like the one I’m wearing above to do the talking on my behalf.

Wearing jewelry in the street here in Santa Cruz is not a good idea. I learned that the hard way in my first months here. Naturally, I do enjoy being able to do so when I’m away.

After the iPod, I got a phone to use as a camera but I found it hard to find a commercially-produced case for this Redmi brand. So of course I had to weave fabric to make a case instead which allowed me to show it as an example of some of my work with wool…

Fabric for the phone slip case on the loom. I only use it when I travel.

Perhaps when I complete my move to Australia and live in the cooler Blue Mountains, I’ll be able to use my scarves and neck gaiters when those “let the weaving do the talking” moments arise. I confess that those items have only very rarely been worn here in the tropics. Even putting up with their unwanted warmth in order to photograph them was a big ask.

Hurry up and get the shot before I melt!

So when I was faced with the question of having to describe my weaving just in words, it was a big “Ummmm” moment. Even given a second chance, I’m not sure I could do it. As I wrote in a previous blog post, I feel that I’ve drifted away from having a particular recognizable style…my style actually being the loom I use rather than the kind of cloth I produce. As I get more and more into creating my own original patterns and change my home to the other side of the world, maybe a whole new assortment of patterns and structures will emerge. Whatever happens, I hope there’s more growth.

Designs with SE Asian leanings have already been starting to appear.
Ikat, rep weave with pick-up, warp-faced double weave, open balanced plain weave with inlay, complementary-warp pick-up, supplementary weft patterning.

I put this collage together to show some of the different kinds of things that I do. But of course, if you’ve been following my blog (maybe there are some die-hards who’ve even been with me for the last 15 years!) you’ll already know. I guess my purpose in writing this post is to to see if I can in fact, by way of these ramblings, answer the question for myself in my head….how would you describe the kind of weaving you do? I often find myself pondering certain things at the time I’m writing a blog post and find a solution right here as I sit typing. That’s one of the reasons I keep writing this blog and am so grateful to all of you who follow along and “listen”. It really helps clear out the mental clutter.

Until next time…….long-time blog followers may remember this dearly loved one making appearances in various posts. Rest in peace sweet girl.

Ozzie
April 1, 2003 – August 29, 2024

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Backstrap Weaving – The Empty Wallet!

With the new year comes a new (woven) wallet. I’m still very much a cash person which probably comes from the fact that I’m still living here in Bolivia. I had the experience of almost going hungry while spending an eight-hour layover in Atlanta airport recently. I couldn’t find a place that took cash but in the end was able to buy a yoghurt from a juice bar. It wasn’t quite the full American breakfast I had been promising myself after the long overnight flight. For a variety of reasons I didn’t have usable cards on me. Even the vending machines only accepted cards!

Mind you, Bolivia is moving along rapidly. It’s not unusual to see vendors in the street market displaying signs with their QR code on their humble stands. I find it’s way too easy to spend when using a card or electronic device. I prefer to go to the market with X amount of Bolivianos in cash and thus oblige myself to stay within budget.

If I were superstitious, I might think that I’m jinxing myself by starting the new year with an empty wallet! On top of that, I didn’t wear yellow underwear on New Year’s Eve which is the local superstition for attracting money. Red underwear attracts love.

If you read my last post, you’ll know that I wove a sample using my handspun cotton singles thread in preparation for this wallet project to see how it would stand up to being used for pick-up patterning. It involves a lot more handling than simple plain weave.

The finished sample showing its two faces. I used the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave.

The sample gave me the information that I needed for calculating the number of ends that would give me the right width for the wallet. I dyed some of my handspun cotton dark blue and black.

Here are my 632 ends set up with the two sets of heddles that give me my “pebble sheds”. It’s so satisfying sitting there and finally making the very last heddle and knowing that I’m all set to go.

However, in this case, I was not. I had neglected to dye some of the thread for weft. I could have got away with using white weft because I was after all planning to edge the piece with a tubular band which would cover the selvedges, but there’s always a chance that I’ll change my mind and go in another direction, in which case I wouldn’t want to see the dots of white weft at the edges. So, it was back to the dyepot. Luckily it’s summer here and things dry really quickly.

I decided to use part of the sample pattern that I had designed. And because I loved both faces of my sample band, I decided to plan this so that both possible faces could be seen at the same time.

A little progress and all going well. No broken threads yet. In the end, only one broke.
At this point, I was ready to put a bit more thought into exactly how I was going to construct the wallet and therefore, the layout of the pattern.

I got the idea of using the sample warp as a coin purse on the back of the wallet. I am always dismayed by the amount of coins I seem to accumulate when I am traveling. Australia has dollar and two-dollar coins (no one and two-cents) and the fifty-cent piece is huge. It’s not unusual for me to be carrying up to twenty dollars in coin! And in the US I’m forever handing over notes to pay for things because I never know how much something will cost until the tax is added at the register. With a line of people behind me, I don’t want to be scratching around in a tiny coin compartment for the right change. Urgh….all those pennies!

So, I wanted a large coin compartment from which I could quickly and easily fish out what I needed as well as comfortably carry all those bulky Australian coins.

This meant that it would be a waste weaving pattern for the back of the wallet only to have it covered by the coin purse. I got to do some plain Andean Pebble Weave instead which certainly accelerated the pace of this project. I returned to the pattern just to weave the final section for the closure flap.

Here are the completed pieces. From left to right, the front, plain back and closure flap. Construction can begin.

As usual, fusible interfacing was my friend when It came to cutting the cloth. I had a selvedge at one end but I cut a curve at the other for the closure flap. I used some black fabric that my friend Claudia had given me for the lining and to create the pocket for bills. All these pieces got held nicely in place by the tubular edging. The woven tubular edging that I use is woven and sewn at the same time around the edge. The sewing thread doubles as the weft. It fully encloses the edge rather than just perches along it. It’s a wonderful way to stabilize and protect cut fabric.

It can be plain (which is how I wove it for the wallet and the bag flap above) or patterned as you see below in the edging I used for a wrist cuff.

You need to get creative with how to hide the cut unwoven warp ends when you have stitched around and returned to the beginning. On the wrist cuff, I wrapped and sewed the cut end to the cloth. It wasn’t pretty but it was secure. I then covered it with a button which was part of the button-and-loop closure that I often use for my wrist cuffs.

For my wallet, I simply sewed a small tab of black fabric to cover the join.

Then came the task of figuring out card slots, zippered sections etc. on the inside. I created some black stitched shibori fabric for this. I included an unusual tiny pocket that I have always wanted to have in a wallet….a pocket that can only hold my door key. Nothing else fits! I get fed up with searching for my key in pockets amongst all the other paraphernalia that accumulates there.

The tiny key pocket is just to the right of the card slots. There’s a zippered pocket on the right for other odds and ends.
I remember being so pleased when I discovered that my key fit perfectly in the tiny pocket in this pouch that I wove. This pocket is part of the original warp and was not added later. Creating that special kind of warp that includes a pocket is a technique that I learned with one of my teachers here in Bolivia.

Here’s the coin purse on the back of the wallet…..

It was nice being able to use the sample for something.

And because I am skilled in creating expandable sides after my two recent folder projects, I added expandable sides to this purse. It’s very easy to get my hands inside, quickly find the right coins and avoid receiving yet more unwanted change.

So, wallet number one is complete. As I mentioned in my last post, I think I’ll make another using an ikat pattern this time. I’ve crunched the numbers and can start warping.

Here’s a reminder that I wrote a tutorial some time ago showing how I cut and prepare my woven fabric to take the woven tubular edging. At the end of the tutorial there’s a link to the tutorial that shows how I weave the actual tube.

I’d also like to give a big thank-you to those who responded when I plugged a couple of my books in my last post. Thank you for your support!

I hope you’ve had a wonderful start to the new year. Take care and see you next time.

Backstrap Weaving – Pick-up or Wrap Up?

Before I get into the Pick-up Vs Wrap Up question, I’ll show you the completed expandable folder that I was constructing in my last post. All that was left to do was find some buttons and braid some loops. Rather than go out hunting for buttons, I stole one, a good heavy one, from one of my many wrist cuffs. I then I found two small ones lurking in my sewing box purse. I had originally been planning to use them on that little purse but ended up going with snaps instead.

The sewing box purse with its snap closures.
The finished folder with one large central button and two side buttons to keep all the bulk contained.

I guess I’m in a weave-and-construct phase and have had the idea to create a wallet. I just use a simple plain-weave zippered purse here for notes and coins (it’s still pretty much a cash society here) but upgrade to a proper leather wallet when I am traveling and need to carry more stuff like Yellow Fever vaccination card, public transport passes, credit and debit cards etc.

Plain-weave zippered purses that were fun to create.

I want to use some of my handspun cotton singles for the wallet project. It won’t take much to create such a small piece of fabric and there’ll be plenty of thread left over for other more ambitious things. I finally got all the white handspun boiled and ready for use.

This is my supply of the Upland cotton variety.

So far, I’ve only used my handspun cotton singles in plain-weave ikat projects….three small pieces, a zippered purse, a draw-string bag and a slip case. The cotton stood up well and I love how the simple warp-faced plain weave shows it off.

I have another ikat project in mind using a soft butter yellow, burgundy and black and thought that this would make a nice wallet. But then I thought that perhaps I should use the cotton in another way this time. I’ve already tried it in ikat and know that I like it. Maybe it’s more interesting to try something new? It would be good to know how well the singles thread stands up to a pick-up technique like the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave, for example.

The process of creating both options is pretty intense! Ikat involves plain weave. That sounds so simple. However, it’s all that goes into the creation of the warp before it even hits the loom that makes it so complex. There’s the winding of the warp, the sectioning, folding and wrapping. Then comes the dyeing, more wrapping (if you’re dyeing more than one color) and dyeing again. This is followed by unwrapping, the careful settling on the loom and heddle making. Then you get to the weaving part which goes relatively quickly.

Wrapping the folded warp for the zippered purse project.

I’ve always liked these kinds of time consuming projects. These days I like them even more. They give me a whole lot of satisfying creative mileage out of just small amounts of materials.

As for pick-up, well that can be super intense as well, depending on the kind of pattern that I choose. As I’ve never used my handspun cotton for the Andean Pebble Weave structure, I needed to weave a decent-sized sample to gauge width. First, I dyed a small quantity black and wound a short warp of 320 ends.

That’s what it looks like on the loom.

I thought that I may as well go with a very busy pattern and give the thread, my fingers (and my brain) a good workout. Two threads broke. I’m quite used to working with black in pick-up and am pleased that these older eyes can still manage, although I think that my left one is doing most of the work.

Lately, I’ve been looking at textiles and basketry from the other side of the world….East Timor, Indonesia, Borneo…I guess with the idea of perhaps spending time in that area when I return to live in Australia. The pattern that I created for the cover of my folder was inspired by the shapes I have been seeing and in the same way, so was the pattern that I drew for this current project. It’s very busy!

The two faces of the band using the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave.

It was a good call weaving a sample (it always is) as I’d started off slightly too wide. It soon settled into a consistent width. I used the method that I was taught by my very first teachers from Ayacucho which involves two sets of heddles with pick-up being done at a permanent cross. I used the “saver cord” which they taught me to use (although, to be honest, I had no idea at the time what purpose it served!) I soon learned that it is the instrument that helps me to read the pattern and saves me from having to handle and count each thread one by one. Having a permanent picking cross (rather than constantly creating and re-creating a temporary one) saves the warp from a considerable amount of wear and tear.

I figure that if the singles thread can stand up to this amount of handling, it should be okay with any other less complex pattern that I happen to choose. Hopefully, I’m not getting too cocky here. If I were to use this pattern on the wallet, it would be aligned sideways like this.

I changed the last part of the pattern (on the right) as an experiment to see what it looked like with a bit more open space.

I’m very satisfied with this sample. It’s answered my question about the suitability of my handspun for working with this structure but I still have the urge to create the aforementioned ikat piece. I haven’t come up with a pattern for that yet, just the three colors. So the question remains…Pick-up or Wrap Up? Of course, the solution is to make two wallets! Why not? That will certainly keep me out of trouble for a while.

In the meantime, I’m doing something I’ve never done before…I’m using up leftover scraps from other projects. I usually can’t bear to throw them away immediately after completing a project. They hang around until I turn them up six months later and think… why the heck am I keeping this?…and throw them away. But these I’ve kept. Perhaps I’ve been watching too many HandyMum videos (she often uses the tiniest scraps of fabric from her vast stash of commercial fabric to make sweet projects). I’m making a sample wallet with them so that I can test my ideas for putting one together. It might even be good enough to keep and use.

I have bits left over from ikat projects using my handspun cotton (that black scrap, for example, is the end of the ikat drawstring bag project). There’s a bit from the ikat cross-body purse that I wove in 20/2 cotton. You’ll recognize the stitched shibori leftovers from my folder project. The other side of the stitched shibori rectangle that you see in the picture (which is the inside of the wallet) is leftover plain blue Andean Pebble Weave fabric from this project….

I thought I’d finish this post with a little bit of book promotion, which I haven’t done for a while! The structure that I used for my latest project is the one that I call Andean Pebble Weave. This structure creates patterns that are double-faced. Of course all cloth has two faces. What I mean by double-faced patterns is that both faces of the cloth are structurally identical with colors reversed. That’s how I created one face that has a white pattern on black with the same pattern on the back in black on white.

This is a characteristic of a larger category of structures that are known as Complementary-warp. The structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave is just one variety that sits within this category.

Some of the varieties of complementary-warp weaves.

In the picture, above, you can see at top left both faces of a pattern in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave with its “spotty” surface. The image top right shows another complementary-warp structure which is known as intermesh. It gives a very smooth, solid color appearance. In some places it is woven more open so that it does indeed have a very mesh-like appearance. However, my Guarani teacher here in the Bolivian lowlands weaves a very dense version which closes all the spaces between the warp threads. At bottom left, you can see the two faces of another variety with its characteristic diagonal twill lines. The image bottom right shows how a pattern can sometimes employ multiple structures, in this case, both pebble (center) and twill structures have been used side by side.

As for my books, here are two that I can recommend to those who would like to learn how to do this kind of pick-up. I wrote them for those who are already competently and confidently weaving warp-faced plain-weave bands and who would like to try one of the many kinds of pick-up patterning structures.

If you use what I call a standard inkle loom (the Schacht and Ashford models are examples), this is the book for you…..Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms…

This book teaches three methods for weaving these patterns to suit different learning and weaving styles. It includes access to supplementary instructional video clips.

If you use any other kind of loom or set-up that allows you to create two sheds and weave warp-faced bands (including standard inkle looms) this is the book for you….Complementary-warp Pick-up…

This book shows one method that allows you to weave any kind of complementary-warp structure. It includes patterns in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave as well as other complementary-warp styles.

Once you’ve learned the methods in either of these two books, you’ll be able to weave the patterns that I offer in both my follow-up pattern books… Complementary-warp Pattern Book and More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns. All my books are available as PDFs or as spiral-bound books (shipped from Washington state, USA) at Taproot Video.

I wish you all the best for your celebrations and will see you in the new year with, hopefully, at least one new wallet.