Tag: crossed warp bands

Backstrap Weaving – What IS backstrap weaving?

What is “backstrap weaving”?

I have been weaving on my backstrap loom way too long now to be able to remember what my ideas about backstrap weaving were before I actually started doing it. For me now “backstrap weaving” is just that: weaving on a backstrap loom, and it doesn’t matter what size, shape or form the finished piece of fabric takes.

For some people it may bring forth visions of narrow warp-faced bands decorated with pick-up patterns. Others may think of the white airy gauze weaves of Mexico or the brightly colored supplementary weft patterned pieces of Guatemala,  fine Asian silk inlay or the heavy woollen ponchos of Ecuador.

Many of the weaving techniques I have learned here in South America were taught to me by weavers who use backstrap looms while with others I learned on either vertical, oblique or staked-out ground looms. I adapt all the techniques to my loom of choice – the backstrap loom.

So, “learning to backstrap weave” to me is all about learning to warp, set up and operate a  loom which uses the weaver’s body as the tensioning device rather than being defined by or confined to any one technique.

Whether it be narrow or wide, plain or patterned, balanced, weft faced, weft twined or warp faced, heavy or fine, made of wool, silk or cotton…it’s all backstrap weaving to me. I even did a tapestry piece once on my backstrap loom (the brown square purse with the orange, red and green figures in the upper right corner – not in a hurry to do more of that! and I know of someone who did knotted pile on hers.)

Being in online weaving groups got me interested in trying some of the more “conventional” weaves (for want of a better word) and so I tried some simple color and weave balanced-weave things like log cabin and shadow weave. I had fun doing the red and white pinwheel and the rosepath patterns using a rigid heddle, string heddles or both on my backstrap loom.

What has me thinking about all this is the arrival of a new non-weaving member to the Backstrap Weaving Group on Ravelry. She was gifted a LeClerc “Mayan” backstrap weaving kit and is looking for tips on how to get started.  If you had been thinking that backstrap weaving is all about narrow warp-faced bands you would have gotten quite a shock on opening the box.

The loom is surprisingly wide, around 24″ I am told, and comes with a rigid heddle.

Here are some ladies at Convergence having their first backstrap weaving experience using the Harrisville Designs kit that also comes with a  rigid heddle. Dawn is on the left and Kim on the right. I have shown some of the bands that Kim has gone on to weave here in previous posts.

So I am hoping that all of us there in the group on Ravelry can help our new weaver to decide on a suitable first project on her Le Clerc loom and give her some tips on yarn choices for the rigid heddle she has (not my area of expertise due to limited yarn variety here in Santa Cruz!) . I take it that the loom comes with a booklet that will show her how to warp it. So it is not only a case of what she perceives backstrap weaving to be but also what ideas she has about weaving as this will be her first adventure with warp and weft.

This is not my first encounter with a new weaver jumping into a backstrap loom. Esmecat showed up in the Backstrap weaving Group on Weavolution last year after having been given a rigid heddle and all the bits necessary to set up a backstrap loom. Her friend helped her get warped up and ready to go. She was well underway with her weaving when she joined the group and her first project, which is gorgeous, was a loom bag made from sock yarn.

You can see the first post about esmecat’s experience with this on her blog and follow on from there. It wasn’t all smooth sailing – most first projects aren’t –  but look at the beautiful result.

Nancy Peck wrote to me recently about her own experiences using a rigid heddle on a backstrap loom. Of course Nancy is by no means new to weaving!!

She shared some pictures with me of one of her projects with this set up.

So you can see that it is fun and intriguing for both new and experienced weavers. Weaving in an armchair…how nice is that?! And I enjoy using the rigid heddle on my backstrap loom too. It is a nice change of pace from doing pick-up and beating away at warp-faced pieces, inching my way along from day to day. Weaving with the rigid heddle zooms along!

All the rigid heddle loom manufacturers that I know of sell rigid heddles separately or you can buy small rigid heddle segments here. You can make your own…Alaa (weave2 on Rav and Weavo) gave me a link to some instructions for making your own. Ruth MacGregor makes what she calls  a semi rigid heddle which you can see at left and read about here.

I have two Ashford ones that were given to me and a Schacht which I bought.

As far as warping goes, as I said last week, there is no one “right” way. I just did what seemed logical and comfortable to me given the small space that I work in but there are most likely much better ways to go about this.

I wound a narrow piece on my warping stakes just to show you what I do.


So I warp up as usual on my warping board, transfer the warp to my loom bars and get into my backstrap to tension the warp. I have the rigid heddle suspended over the warp within easy reach. It sits on two small stools and is propped up with a clamp. I use the threading tool that came with my rigid heddle loom but I have also used a needle when I couldn’t find the tool (not so nice that way).

From here I cut an end loop on the loom bar in front of me, and thread the pair of ends, one thread through a hole and one through a slot. Call me crazy, but I like to tie each pair of threads together with a  knot as close to the end as posssible and then transfer it to another loom bar on the floor beside me. Most weavers will tie a group of ends together. Actually I usually put the knotted threads on a steel knitting needle which I later lash to a loom bar.


There’s the first pair of threads in their hole and slot.

So this is my way.

It is probably a whole lot easier laying the whole thing out on a table but I don’t have this luxury!

Besides I am very comfortable there on the floor in my backstrap.

I used to work in ski resorts and spent nine months of the year for 5 years on skis. Those long planks used to feel like they were part of my feet and that is how my backstrap loom feels now – a part of my body.

And away it goes…

And some of the results…

But I always go back to my great love –  warp faced, pick up patterned pieces and ethnic themes. Speaking of which…I finished the amulet bag I was working on last week with a crossed warp band for the strap.

I started looking at the different finishes on the various chuspas (coca leaf bags) that I have and decided to try one out on another amulet bag.


I may have used too much yarn for my version on the right. The weaver had woven and sewn a tubular band with diamond or “eye” patterns along one side of the chuspa. When she got to the bottom of the bag she continued weaving and sewing but, at the same time, lodged strands of yarn between the woven tube and the bag before passing the weft and sewing the tube to the cloth. So I did the same. The strands of yarn form a fringe.

I noticed that the weaver wove the tubular band in plain weave where it was covered by fringe…wise move… why spend all the time making the pattern when it was only going to get covered. Actually I was surprised how nice the plain weave band looked when I wove it due to the unusual arrangement of the warps for the diamond pattern. Silly me forgot to photograph that part.

When finished, the tufts of fringe are bound, sewn to the tubular band and then trimmed. It is a nice finish.

For this amulet bag I wove the tubular band in only two colors just to see how that would look and made a braided rather than woven strap. The braid is a six-strand finger loop braid that my weaving teacher in Potosi taught me. It looks very different on its two ”faces”.


Done! Tiny projects like these are good for practicing new techniques. I have more chuspas to examine and more finishes to try.

As you are reading this I should be in Cusco or Urubamba attending the tinkuy, the gathering of handweavers organized by Nilda Callañaupa and the Traditional Textiles Center in Cusco (CTTC). It runs from November 5th -8th with presentations and demonstrations on the 5th and 6th followed by workshops on the 7th and 8th. I know I will be able to catch up with some people I met at Convergence and I know that at least three people I have met through this blog will be there too and then there will plenty of new weavers to meet…all in such a short time!

Navajo weaver D.Y Begay was here in Boliviarecently and I was disappointed to have missed her. Just last weekend we discovered that we will both be at the tinkuy and will be in the same hostel.  She has been exchanging weaving know-how with indigenous weavers in Guatemala and Bolivia and maybe other places too that I don’t know of. She will stay on in Peru for some weeks working with the CTTC.

Here’s someone I met through this blog and if you are a regular visitor you will have already met her here a couple of times…”Cycling Anna” is still on the road in Argentina and heading south and I have a picture to show you of her braiding the ends of her double weave band while taking a break in Chile. Recognize those llamas? She has picked this up super fast.


Marsha Knox has been moving along with her experiments in simple warp floats, floating both colors and getting more and more creative with her patterns.

One last piece of news: I have just submitted the Spanish translation of my Backstrap Basics article to WeaveZine and hopefully that will go up on the site soon.  Only the videos will remain in English. That, combined with the tutorials I am slowly translating here on the blog, will hopefully make information about backstrap weaving and the weavers of Latin America accessible to even more people.

See you all after tinkuy. I’ll be back with cracked lips (super dry air up there) and bleary eyes (my reaction to the altitude is insomnia) and ready to weave after all the amazing things I saw and heard there. I’ll be back on the 11th to answer comments and emails.

EDIT: Yay I have wifi in my hostal in Urubamba and so am able to post this picture that Helena sent me of the band she made using one of the Bedouin techniques that I used in my wall hanging.

She used the threading from the last page of this article that she found by Joy Totah Hilden. It is a simple and very effective design which has long floats on the back.

And here’s a view from the plane somewhere between La Paz and Cusco today….




Backstrap Weaving – There is no one “right” way

THERE’S NO ONE “RIGHT” WAY….and A NEW TUTORIAL

I went to visit Angela again (see last week’s post) one morning this week to see how she has been progressing on her wall hanging and give her copies of some of the photos I had taken during the previous visit.

She had several projects going at once and was very pleased as she had just been given an order for 1500 woven greeting cards from her regular Christmas customer. Now she is planning a trip to her hometown of Isoso to organize the other weavers there to help complete the order. She told me that when she took on this task last year she had been able to weave ten cards a day.  Imagine!

The smaller of her two looms is occupied with this gorgeous wall hanging which I watched her warp on my last visit. As I told you last week, the designs that the Guarani women weave in the Moisy technique are nothing like anything you will see anywhere else in Bolivia.

And here is something else she is working on in the Moisy technique…


The band says Centro Cultural Boliviano Americano which is the institute where I taught English for eleven years. The teachers are wearing these around their necks to hold their ID cards. Gee, I wish we had had these when I was there! The band includes a small snake skin design. There are over sixty teachers there and so I imagine that this task is keeping her somewhat occupied as well!

Lettering! I was excited to see that but haven’t taken a good enough photo to get a really detailed look.  I think I will ask her to weave me an alphabet band if she ever has the time!

Another thing about which I am very tickled is that she has put one of her sets of heddles on a stick (see photo above). She had asked me to teach her how to do it on my last visit and now here she is using it. If you watched the pick up video in my last blog post you will see that opening the lower of the three sheds is a little tedious with the loose string heddles that she makes. So now she is using the stick on this lower heddle with the extra hitch as I showed her.

The actual stick that she is using as her heddle stick is a large wooden needle which she uses to pass the weft when she is weaving a four-selvedge piece. When she is closing the final piece of weaving and there is very little room in which to manipulate the sheds, she passes the weft under and over each warp with this needle until there is so little room that she has to use a regular steel needle. I loved this needle and, as she has three, she offered to sell me one.

And then I remembered to ask her about spinning. Yes, of course she knows how to spin cotton and she had a tiny bit of cotton to demonstrate. Just a touch of saliva on the spindle tip got her started. Of course, she is usually seated when she spins. This was just a quick demo. She told me that in Isoso both white and brown cotton is still cultivated (there is not a single boll to be found around Santa Cruz although it used to be a very large and important cotton growing area) and that several women still spin and ply their own cotton and carry their spindles about with them when they are plying.

However, she told me that those who grow the cotton are very careful to keep their hold on the small market and won’t sell it with the seeds. Sounds good to me! Deseeding cotton is not a fun task. I did a bit of that in Ecuador although it was fun there as we sat together in a chatty group and worked.

Angela’s whorl is plastic and a spindle that I bought years ago from the store where she used to work has what appears to be a piece of the sole of a shoe as its whorl. However she tells me that in Isoso, clay whorls are used. Guess what I have asked her to bring me from Isoso when she returns next Wednesday.

Above you can see the spindle I bought here in the city. The shaft is essentially the same as that on Angela’s spindle. I love the little knob carved into its end.

I also took home the yellow and black sample pebble weave band that Angela was warping up in the video that I put in last week’s post. She has warped this and set up the heddles quite differently to the way I was taught in Peru and so I can take a closer look at it now at home.

And this is kind of what I am alluding to in the title of this post. There is no one “right” way to do these things and I am constantly astounded by the similarities and differences I see in the way people are setting up their looms and weaving as I travel around. I had never seen anyone make string heddles the way Angela does and she was keen to learn the way I had been taught by my Navajo weaving teacher years ago. There is always room to learn something new and adapt your techniques. I am looking forward to a chance to try Angela’s way of doing pick up. It doesn’t work on the backstrap loom, believe me I tried it!

I wish I could do a tutorial on all the ways I have been shown to make string heddles so that you can try them all and see which way you prefer. Making the string heddles takes practice…string and fingers all over the place and then you just get them done and find that there are some that are woefully short…

I ran into Jamie’s blog last weekend where she had been battling to make string heddles following my video. It’s a good thing that resourceful Jamie came up with her own solution to the problem, made some heddles and wove a pebble weave piece.

Above right you can see the individual string heddles that she made and successfully used on her warp. She says that this way is much faster. Well, I had to tease her about that because I disagree 🙂 but I can definitely see that these are much easier in that you get guaranteed even length heddles. If you are an inkle weaver you probably already have a bunch of these heddles lying around that you can use. If you don’t, Jamie made a nice tutorial on her blog showing you how to make them.

Above left you can see Helena’s (telarahna on Weavolution) solution with her nifty re-useable heddles. She says she needs to clean them after a project as bits of yarn fluff adheres to them but then they are good to go.

So, if you have been trying to make heddles the way I have shown it here and have been getting frustrated, there you have two nice solutions. Try different ways and see which you prefer and, as Jamie so rightly says in her blog, it’s easy “once you get the hang of it”.

Speaking of “getting the hang of ” something, I spent a great part of last weekend trying to get the hang of tubular woven bands and am pleased to say that I succeeded!…eventually.

This is kind of my warm up for the tinkuy (gathering of weavers) which I will be attending in Cusco next week. I signed up for a class on tubular woven bands but, as it is only a morning session I have doubts about whether we will have time to cover the tubular band that I really want to learn.

I used Adele Cahlander’s booklet pictured above. It is still available out there for under ten dollars. I have had this book for at least thirteen years and have never made the tubular bands. I guess I tried at one point as I have scribblings in the margins and have penciled in the colors that I was using but it seems I gave up as I have nothing to show for it.

The book has two versions of the band that I wanted to make. One has a sequence of six steps and the other eight. The problem is that there is not a picture of what the six-step version is supposed to look like. It is in fact a slightly imperfect version of the eight-step one and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why my six-step band did not look like the bands on the cover of the book. I did not feel encouraged to try the eight-step version if I could not even get the simpler version right but in the end I decided I would just go ahead and try it.

In the pictures above you can see the eight-step version on the left. See how it has two neat diamonds enclosing a center spot. In the six-step version the diamonds are not quite so neat and well defined, they overlap and cross and they actually get progressively messier as you proceed. This is just so you know what to expect if you buy the book and have a go yourselves.

Once I had this sorted I had the crazy urge to edge everything I could get my hands on with this tubular braid! I learned a tubular braid here in Bolivia many years ago but it is a very much simplified version of this one and looks nowhere near as nice.

This is one of those bands that are generally simultaneously woven and sewn to the edge of a textile using the weft as the sewing thread. So this is what I did with my Tarahumara bag and I love it!

I was so excited about having learned how to make these bands that I could have quite easily dug out everything I have woven and edged them all with them . But I resisted and decided to weave a miniature piece where I could put several finishing techniques to use. The Cahlander book also has instructions for crossed warp bands which are very interesting. So I decided to make  a small amulet type of bag, edge it with a tubular band and make a crossed warp band as a strap.

Crossed warp bands are used here in Bolivia as ties on the ends of belts like the one from Potosi seen above left and as chin straps for hats like the two wider bands on the right.

And then I fished out Karen Searle and Suzanne Baizerman’s wonderful work on finishing techniques and found the instructions for Bolivian pompoms I had made years ago to decorate my zampoña.

This book is full of all kinds of useful finishing techniques from around the world

First I had to brush up on the crossed warp techniques.

Then I wove the wee bag. I decided to keep it simple and warped up for plain warp faced weave so I could weave in a small motif with a supplementary weft (see the tutorial here).

A very simple design and there’s the pattern chart for you if you would like to use it.

Next I wove and sewed on the tubular band.

And I had fun making and attaching the tiny Bolivian pompoms.

But darn, I didn’t have time to make the crossed warp band for the strap so I have just placed thread there in the photo so you can get the idea. I am thinking of doing cross knit looping as an edging for the top of the bag too. Now I am mad for not thinking about this earlier. I think that these would have made nice gifts to take to the tinkuy- bags covered with little Bolivian techniques (although the suplementary weft motif is not Bolivian).

However I did find time to put together a NEW TUTORIAL. This one is on warp faced weaving with warp substitution which is the technique I used to weave the band with Bedouin designs that I showed you a couple of weeks ago.

Below is the sample band I wove in order to put together a set of instructions for you.

This is a great stepping stone to one-weft double weave.

You will learn the kind of pick up you need to do for one-weft double weave without having to deal with the extra manipulations and steps involved with weaving the doubled layers.

If you are interested in Bedouin weaving Helena (telarahna on Weavolution) gave me a link to an article by Joy Totah Hilden, author of the book on Bedouin weaving from which I got a lot of these designs.

Alaa (weave2 on weavolution and Ravelry) also gave me two great links to follow on this topic here and here.

And for the Spanish-speaking visitors to my blog, I have put up one tutorial so far in Spanish – the one on simple warp floats (although I haven’t found a way to say “simple warp floats” in Spanish. The literal translation sounds ridiculous!). There is a tab on the header photo and side bar.

Para las personas que hablan español he traducido el primero de los tutoriales que puedan ver aqui. De vez en cuando pueden chequear haciendo “click” en la pestaña “tutoriales en español” en la parte de arriba de la pagina. Alli podran ver si he traducido algun otro tutorial mas.

I may have time to squeeze in one more post before I go to Cusco on November 4th, but if you don’t hear from me you will know where I am 🙂