double weave – Page 6 – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Warm Smiles and Color in the Lingering Winter

While a majestic Mt Rainier in a grey landscape welcomes me to the chilly Pacific Northwest…

and snow continues to blot out color in the northeast, the time that I spent weaving with fellow backstrap loom enthusiasts has been all about color and warm smiles with lovely work by Ann Lynn, Tracy and Mary Alice…

We have been weaving Andean Pebble weave, supplementary-weft, double weave and complementary-warp pick-up structures. The results have been wonderful and I have been particularly pleased with the designs that the double-weave band-weavers have been creating themselves, from Star Trek symbols to patterns inspired by Turkomen rug motifs. And, there is still some patterned tubular band weaving to be done along with sewn embellishments.

We made a new weaver. Bethany wove her very first piece ever…a plain-weave warp-faced band….

And now she is already into double weave pick-up following pattern charts. She has found a comfortable way to set up at home.

And, more experienced hands, like Stacy, below, dove right in and started winging it and designing their very own patterns in double weave pick-up…

Tracy also got very comfortable with the technique very quickly and was soon adding her own original patterns to the collection of pattern charts with which we were working. I love how people react when they see how effortlessly and automatically the lower layer of the double weave appears. It really is a little piece of magic!

I know that Tracy will come up with awesome patterns and color combinations in supplementary weft too. That’s what she is working on below and her pattern ideas come from the various places she has lived around the world and the various textile cultures in which she has moved. I will tell you more about that in my next blog post. Now Tracy knows two techniques that I like to call ”doodling on plain weave”: double weave and supplementary-weft patterning. There are almost no rules and the pattern charts for one technique can also be used for the other.

Jennifer was weaving patterns in complementary-warp pick-up and is already making jewelry from her finished bands. Her 7-year old daughter, Tabitha, also keen to try this band-weaving stuff…

Kathryn finished off her woven woven backstrap using the instructions in my article on Backstrap Basics...

And, it is always very pleasing to see what people have created since the last time we all had a chance to weave together…

Kathryn moved on with her Andean Pebble Weave skills and wove this fine band in 10/2 cotton using motifs from my second book…

Tracy used the handwoven cloth I brought from Bolivia last year and her tubular edging skills to construct this great cylindrical bag with its drawstring lining. The top and bottom is edged with a ñawi awapa tubular band.

So, these have been the just some of the colorful results of the face-to-face interactions I have had with my backstrap weaving friends in my recent travels. There’s been lots of color to brighten up the lingering wintry days. I got dressed in a splash of color while looking over the awesome ikat robes that my friend Marilyn brought back from her trip to Uzbekistan last year. The one I picked to try on is in one of my favorite combinations of color, as you will know if you have been following my blog. She has prepared a presentation of images and video in which she has documented the entire ikat process and we had time to watch it together. If your guild is interested in seeing this as part of a program, I can put you in touch with her.

Apart from all this face-to-face interaction and time spent sitting by and backstrap weaving with friends, there has been lost of online interaction and long-distance trouble-shooting and guidance as new weaving friends all over the world take an interest in the wonderful backstrap loom.

There is always a certain amount of frustration knowing that if I could only be by someone’s side I could set them along the right path in moments. This usually comes from not being able to communicate in writing how a certain part of the process should feel…how much tension should be applied to warp, how hard should the beat be, how does one ”be the loom”. I want to somehow be able to dive through the computer screen but it is amazing what can be achieved with the right amount of tenacity!

I made my video class on Operating the Backstrap Loom to help communicate those concepts to those with whom I don’t have the chance to weave side by side. I want to help people understand how it feels to be part of the loom itself. The video class is not quite like having me by your side but so many people have commented that it is pretty darn close and that pleases me no end!

I got to visit the home of my video class, Taproot Video, on this trip. It was fun seeing both my and John Mullarkey’s dvds going out to a customer in the one package. John Mullarkey is the latest instructor to join the Taproot Video co-op and his tablet-weaving class is on Egyptian Diagonals. These and all the Taproot Video classes are also available for lifetime streaming.

My interaction with my online weaving friends has involved more cuffs, among other things. Just as I was about to archive our Cuff and Bracelet Weave-along thread in the Ravelry group, I got to see this…

Tracy and I went along to see an exhibit of the private collection of Leslie Grace in Seattle. It included this fabulous example of the woven and twined cuffs made on simple looms by the Mayoruna people of tropical lowland Peru. Check out the two sweet dangling shuttles. Some months ago, I posted on this blog about the way the weavers close the cuffs by threading the braids through the header cord. Jan had brought this to our attention and used the technique to finish her cuffs. She is even using the dangling braids as a wrist distaff for her spinning.

The Mayoruna cuffs have subtle patterning in relief. If you look closely you will see a diamond pattern. Certain warp threads are twined while others are not. The twined threads stand out in relief against the others. I had tried this some years ago using twine for the warp threads as I had wanted to weave border panels to accompany my Shipibo-inspired wall hanging. I chose twine because I thought that it might resemble the kind of fiber used by the Mayoruna people. I thought that using a lowland technique would be very suitable. However, the pattern simply didn’t show up enough in the twine. I think that something even stiffer is needed to make it work and I didn’t want stiff panels for my hanging.

That’s my sample in red twine above closest to the black-and-white panel. You can see the red-on-red cotton warp-float technique I decided to go with instead on its right. You can see pattern in my twine sample but it wasn’t showing up as well as I had hoped. (Actually, now I am looking at this picture and wondering why I had rejected that band. The pattern seems to be very clear to me now!) In any case, it gave me the opportunity to explore the technique and understand better what was going on. Next to my cotton panel is a lovely white-on-white Mexican example of a simple warp-float pattern.

Here’s the finished cuff from Leslie Grace’s collection.

Of course, there are plenty more things to show you from that collection. My adventures with dear Tracy in Seattle at this exhibit and in her home in magical Port Townsend will be coming in another blog post as well as pictures of some of the amazing textiles and bands that Marilyn brought back from Uzbekistan.

And then, something else came into my hands to pour some more energy and interest into the Cuff weave-along (which officially finished at the end of February but which may never really end!)…

Here are some sweet wooden ends for woven bracelets that come in four different kinds of wood. I have already ordered some maple and walnut ones and look forward to using them with my bands. I do have, after all, a whole bunch of woven sample bands from my last two books that can be made into bracelets or cuffs.

Indigomargo made another cuff since I last wrote a blog post…I love seeing this pattern which is one of the ones I created myself for my first book way back in 2010.And speaking of those books, I have been receiving the sweetest feedback of all…pictures of things people are weaving using the patterns and techniques!

My friend Emerald in Australia wove this belt using a backstrap loom. There’s probably a pattern from each of the four books in this piece. The viscacha is in the latest book.

These ones come from Alexandra (top left), Maxine, Nancy and Maxine again who has just started on the various ”River and Ocean”-themed motifs. All three weavers are using inkle looms. The complementary-warp pick-up technique is well suited to inkle looms and any other kind of loom that can give you two sheds and allow you to weave warp-faced fabric. My third book teaches the technique and provides 42 patterns for band weavers. The fourth book has an additional 100 patterns using the technique for bands and beyond.

Marsha on Ravelry is weaving a hatband in 20/2 silk using the horse motifs, ”Eldy’s Mustangs”, designed by my friend Deanna. Now she is playing with lots of different patterns in the left-over warp from the various themed sets in the latest book of 100 patterns…

I will leave you here. I simply must. I’ll be weaving double weave tomorrow with friends old and new and I have been experimenting with a new way of arranging the edge threads and need to get my head straight on that. Of course, I have learned a couple of different ways of handling the edges from my indigenous teachers and I am using a bit of this and that to create something a little bit different.

But, I must show you something that just arrived in my inbox as I was writing this post. Dorinda sent me pictures of Maribel’s very first faja.

I have written about Maribel quite a few times. I met her last January when I went up to the highlands to meet with the weavers in Huancarani. She was 19 years old at the time and she was alone waiting for us in the football field with her toddler Daniel when we drove up…waiting patiently long before any of the other ladies arrived.

She was keen and determined to be a weaver, join the co-op and produce things to supplement her family’s income. She was the first in the group to ask to learn the new pattern I had brought to show and she fast became my favorite. Since then, she has produced some of the bands that get made into yoga mat straps using the pattern I taught her as well as the traditional patterns of her community. Her husband has been really supportive and sometimes helps her wind the warps.

Here’s the first yoga mat strap she made with the pattern I taught her. It has its little swing tag with her name on it. I imagine she was very proud of it. However, it is a slower pattern to weave because threads need to be picked up by hand in every single shed. The traditional patterns of the area are in a technique that can be partly loom controlled and, therefore, just that little bit faster to weave.

I adore this picture of her proudly showing her first faja with a variety of local patterns! What a way to end a post that began with the awesome yet somber and snowy Mt Rainier :-)… with color and a warm smile!

Backstrap Weaving – Paisley Progress

The bands I ordered from the co-op in Cochabamba arrived. That’s always so exciting. I had been able to take a sneak peek at them when Dorinda sent me a picture of them laid out in her yard but there is nothing like seeing the true richness of the colors, smelling the natural dyestuff in the handspun wool and feeling the firmness of the cloth.

I love being able to put faces to most of the names on the tags after having met many of the weavers on my visit last year. We spent a day weaving together. The tags on the bands tell of the work of Maxima, my teacher, and her sister Narciza, the go-getter, (pictured below) who chose one of the largest patterns and kept begging me to show her with ”just one more row” so that she could fully grasp it before I left.

There’s young Eulalia whom I remember as being the quickest to pick up one of my woven samples and start copying the pattern.

Justina’s name is there. As head of the Huancarani weaving group, she represented her weaving friends and Bolivia when she traveled to the Tinkuy in Peru last November. Antonia contributed a band too. She and her daughter wove with me at Dorinda’s place during my visit.

And then there are Felicidad and Casimira as well as a new name I haven’t seen before – Cerila. Her band has a lighter touch and I wonder if she is one of the much older ladies.

As for my own weaving, I drew and erased and wove and un-wove, drew and erased and wove some more. I like sampling and I almost always make something useful from the samples. That was not so much the case this time as I kind of lost the plot along the way and some of the samples are already in the trash. I told you about that in my last blog post.

Sometimes I would go to bed completely dissatisfied with what I had created only to wake up the next morning to be almost completely happy with it. I decided that I needed some feedback and so I put a picture on Instagram. The response was favorable and very supportive and confirmed that I was headed in the right direction…thank you, guys… and so I felt that I was at the point where I could tackle the ”real” project and put the sampling aside.

This is warp-faced double weave in 60/2 silk. My paisley-like shapes don’t have the curled tails that you often see in classic Paisley shapes. That is a further challenge that I will leave for another time!

This is the one sample that I will continue to weave and keep so that I can make it into one of my little conference neck pouches. But for now, I am putting it aside while I return to my chart. I need to convert it so that it is suitable for the supplementary-weft technique that I want to use for my silk scarf project. Here is my blank palette awaiting its pattern…

The parts of the pattern in my sample that have long horizontal stretches of solid white won’t work if they are woven using supplemental weft. They will result in exceedingly long weft-floats. Floats of that length are impractical. They can easily get caught on things and pulled. I needed to break up the long white solid sections into smaller ones. For example, look at the solid white paisley shape that sits within the larger one at the bottom left of the design on my sample. I would need to fill that shape with circles and spots to break up the long horizontal lines of white into shorter floats.

So, here is the scarf warp underway. The start and end of the scarf will have its busy pattern and I will keep things much simpler along its length. I might double the large design for the center of the scarf or I might even repeat it at every quarter. We’ll see how it goes. I used multiple strands of 120/2 silk in three different colors for the supplementary weft….a deep red and two tones of purple. What’s fun is that the colors of the pattern look quite different depending on how the light hits the cloth.

Now I think I will pick up my drop spindle and finish plying the wool I spun for the Tour de Fleece many years ago. It has just been sitting there and I would like to use it to weave just one more cuff for our Bracelets and Cuff Weave-along on Ravelry. I might be able to squeeze this in before the end of the month. This is yarn I spun from a bag of random fiber that I won in a little Ashford online competition and I think the colors might go well enough together for a cuff project. The blue, red and white are wool. Both the red and blue are variegated but you can hardly tell. The red fiber was a weird red and brown combination that I didn’t like at all. But the spun thread looks quite nice.

The cuff in the picture is one I wove from my handspun llama fiber a few years ago. It’s one of my favorites. I used spearmint leaves and cochineal (for the beige and red) as dye. I want to weave something similar with this new batch of handspun and add a tubular edging.

Here’s a nice collage of some of the weave-along bands. I am really happy to see how people are using the patterns and technique from my latest book on complementary-warp pick-up.

Katherine’s latest one looks lovely on her backstrap loom…

I provide quite a few very narrow patterns in my book and it is great to see them being used as borders alongside larger ones as Katherine has done. I love brown and indigo blue together as well as a buttery yellow and blue combination. She also turned the blue bands I showed in my last blog post into bracelets…

The bars that she has at the ends of her band are really pretty. Three small metal loops are sewn to the edge of the band. You can see it better in this next shot of her pink band on which she has added a safety chain…

One thing that KEOG discovered when she added a safety chain to her bracelet is that if the clasp is magnetic it is better to find a chain that won’t be attracted to it. That hadn’t even occurred to me. If you are considering this kind of closure for a bracelet, you should keep that in mind. I have a couple of cheap clasps that came with chains and it just so happens that they are not attracted to magnets.

Rosemary got four bracelets out of the circular warp she put on her backstrap loom. She was also kind enough to show us several pictures of her set-up. When you use a circular warp, you need to clamp the warp in such a way that it doesn’t just slide around the end beams every time you beat. I was taught to clamp it at the end closest to my body. Then I have to un-clamp and un-roll each time I need to advance the warp. Rosemary has come up with an ingenious way of securing it at the far end which allows her to advance the warp without touching anything…

In her own words….

…..”when I apply tension and beat with my beater, the band does not move. However, if I release tension, just a bit, and put the beater in the shed, and pull towards myself, then the whole warp shifts forward. In this way, I never have to rearrange anything – I keep the fell about two inches beyond the bar at my belly, and I can weave and weave and weave, without having to stop and rearrange, and this fills me with joy.”

I love it!

Katycat placed her crimps and clasps on her finished band to create her bracelet…

This is Julie B’s work using a complementary-warp pattern from my second book, the one I like to call the Rolling River. I love seeing how people use various kinds of looms to enjoy these techniques and patterns.

I will finish this post here with a celebration of Taproot Video’s one-year anniversary. I am one of the founding-year members of the cooperative and we celebrated the anniversary via email recently. I won’t be seeing the other members until April when we’ll be able to clink mugs and celebrate again.

What is even more meaningful to me personally, is that Taproot’s launch also marked the release of my first ever instructional video. It was a scary trip at first, but it has been fun and heart-warming seeing my dvd make its way to countries all over the world and receiving such favorable feedback.

The video can be purchased as a dvd or you can buy lifetime streaming.

People very often ask me if it is hard to learn backstrap weaving on one’s own. Most often this question is more about the weaving techniques rather than about the loom itself. The kind of weaving I do on my backstrap loom can be done on many other kinds of looms and I have written tutorials and books about these techniques and plan to keep adding to those with more books, photo tutorials and dvds. My new pattern book is coming along nicely.

What about learning to use the loom? That is a little trickier because the weaver’s body movements are so much a part of the smooth operation of the loom and that can sometimes be hard to understand on your own. It is a lot about ”feel” and that is something that I wanted to be be able to convey via my video class. Many people have told me that they feel that I am in the room with them as they watch the video class. That is exactly what I was hoping to achieve! Even those who were already up and running and using a backstrap loom speak of having had several ”aha” moments while watching.

It has been a great first year with Taproot and I would like to thank everyone who has bought the video so far. There will be more video classes coming.

See you next time with, hopefully, a whole lot more to tell about the paisley progress.

Backstrap Weaving – Curves

It’s been all about charting these last couple of weeks. I have been drawing and sampling those Paisley shapes that I mentioned in my last post. It hasn’t been as straightforward as most things that I chart as Paisley patterns are all about curves. It is helpful that I will be using very fine thread. I have found that the finer the thread and the higher the number of ends, the closer I can get to creating patterns that look less angular and more curvy in warp-faced double weave. I love double weave so much I have made it the topic of my next instructional dvd.

In the piece above, I had originally wanted all the lines to be curvy but simply couldn’t get the thicker outlines to look good in the 20/2 cotton. So, I settled on heavy, hard angular lines enclosing fine curves and was really happy with the result. But, it took a lot of time with paper and pencil and several woven test pieces to get there.

Warp-faced double weave is so versatile. I can create hard angular designs with varying degrees of diagonals as well as softer more curvaceous ones.

This was my very first experiment with curves many years ago. I wove this sample in a #10 crochet cotton and I know that it will look much nicer in finer thread. It is calling out to me to be woven.

I guess the only limitation on freedom of patterning in warp-faced double weave is the fact that it is not ideal to leave large areas of open space. In open spaces the two layers of the double weave do not connect and that can sometimes lead to a sort of ballooning effect between motifs. I don’t think I will have any problem with open space in my Paisley pattern. They are such dazzlingly busy designs!

In my last post I showed you the warp that I had wound for a 60/2 silk wrist cuff. It was a sample for a larger scarf project that I had in mind in warp-faced double weave decorated with the Paisely motifs that I have been charting.

I finished the cuff and it gave me the measurements I needed to plan the wider project. I am particularly happy with the way the border turned out with the three tones of blue. I wanted it to have a washed-out uneven-indigo-dye look. It was hard to tell if that would work or if it would just end up looking like stripes.

The two ends of the band overlap and I used clear plastic snaps to secure them. I placed a button at the overlap purely for decoration. I like wearing it with the wool ñawi awapa tubular band that I wove as a necklace some time ago. I prefer wearing that as a tripled bracelet and the colors match the new silk cuff nicely.

The sample taught me two things about my scarf project….warp-faced double weave fabric, even in fine thread like 60/2 silk, does not have enough drape to make a nice scarf. The other thing, that was more reinforced than learned, was that the density of the warp-faced double weave structure creates more abrasion than usual on the threads on my backstrap loom. Some of the colors I used were doubled strands of 120/2 silk and I simply could not see those threads standing up to the abrasion of double weave along the length of a scarf project, even if they were doubled.

So, I have gone another way with the scarf project.

First, I will weave a shorter, simpler piece in the 60/2 silk with my double weave Paisley motifs. Then, I will adapt the Paisley charts to a supplementary weft technique for a plain-weave silk scarf. Paisley is such a busy kind of pattern….lots of swirls and spots and circles and dots…that I am sure that I will be able to break up excessively long weft floats with added design elements. In fact, I got quite overwhelmed looking at the busy patterns online. Some of them were so over-the-top! I struggled with the lack of symmetry and the lack of repeats but I was finally able to lay out something that I liked. And, I have managed to make it repeat.

I wound and set up the scarf warp. I am still loving the way those blues look together! However, I will put this warp aside until I have thoroughly sampled the motifs in double weave.

I have made it a circular warp so that it will fit in my bedroom.

I am so used to weaving from end to end that circular warps always feel strange to me at first. I could have used an end-to-end warp and then simply rolled up the excess warp at the far end of the loom so that it would fit in my weaving space as I often done in the past. You can see my long yellow scarf warp rolled up below.

However, I decided that I’d like to get more used to the ins and outs of circular warps as I look forward to doing longer projects in the future. One thing about the circular warp set-up that I use is that the circle is not open. The warp stretches out like a long flat loop. Here’s my Vietnamese weaving teacher’s warp followed by one of my own…

Sometimes all the unwoven warp that lies under the top layer on which I am working feels like it is getting in my way especially when the warp is wider. That’s why I was very interested when watching a video of a backstrap weaver in India who is using a circular warp. I could see what she does with all the unwoven warp below her work space. Here’s a screen shot from the video. She has tied off the lower layer and has what I am guessing is a weighted bag dangling from it. That is the first time I have seen that. I am not sure if I will try it…we will see.

Band weavers in Salasaca, Ecuador set up their circular warps in a triangular shape. These allow long pieces to occupy even less room and keeps the unwoven warp well out of the way. You can see how my teacher Felipe, below, can fit his long warp on his narrow porch.

Before I go, I’d like to tell you about some interesting web pages that I have been looking at lately.

The Kindcraft Brief describes itself as being for people who care about how things are made. Subscribe and you will receive a twice-monthly newsletter with articles on such topics as Indigo-dyed Washi Paper, the process behind Miao pleated skirts and the Handmade Textiles of Bangladesh.
Asian Textile Studies: Asian Textile Studies is a new website written by David and Sue Richardson. It is aimed at people with a serious interest in traditional hand-woven textiles from Asia, especially those from Eastern Indonesia.It will initially cover the foundation subjects, such as fibres, natural dyes, production techniques and the origins and history of the Austronesian people. We will later add pages focusing on specific regions and islands. Please contact us if you would like to be notified when new material is added.
The website already contains pages and pages of detailed information on natural dye sources and techniques as well as weaving techniques of various regions of Indonesia, all accompanied by stunning photographs. You can get happily lost in that site for days and will find yourself returning again and again.
Threads of Life: Threads of Life is a fair trade business that works with culture and conservation to alleviate poverty in rural Indonesia. The heirloom-quality textiles and baskets we commission are made with local materials and natural dyes to an exquisite standard usually only seen in museums.

We work directly with over 1,000 women on 11 islands across Indonesia, helping weavers to form independent cooperatives, to recover the skills of their ancestors, to manage their resources sustainably, and to express their culture identity while building their financial security.

Threads of Life recently started offering workshops in batik, natural dyeing and weaving. You can find their 2018 schedule on the website. Sign up for their newsletter.

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Here are a couple of projects from weaving friends…

Elinor finished an Andean Pebble Weave belt for her husband using a pattern from my second book.

Chris is ready to get back into some backstrap weaving now that she has woven her own beautifully finished backstrap in rep weave on her floor loom. What a great idea for nice sturdy strap…

I am saving the cuff projects of our Ravelry Weave-Along-ers for next time.

Now it’s back to the charting paper and the warping board and some more head-spinning Paisley patterns.

Backstrap Weaving – A New Year and New Ideas

A New Year and New Ideas…. but let’s look at the end of the old one first. There were projects to finish before diving into the new ones and a couple that got carried over into the new year.

There were the little journals that needed to be covered with my silk fabric and lined with the pretty paper that John had given me over a year ago.

It was fantastic seeing this project finally come to its end. It must be almost two years since I was first given the gorgeous collection of little naturally-dyed silk skeins that I used to weave these pieces of fabric. Now I just have to make myself use the little books. I don’t want them sitting on the shelf as ornaments.

Here’s what the insides of the covers look like with the decorative paper that I was given. I really am very pleased with the way the books turned out.

The next project that needed finishing was Marilyn’s tool bag. I had been wondering what to do with the finished fabric and had only come up with the idea of a tool bag. Marilyn read my last blog post and assured me in her comment that she would be more than happy to have one.

It has been ages since I sewed in a zipper. I sew by hand and I was not looking forward to the trial-and-error process that is usually a part of my efforts to sew anything. Luckily, I got the zip positioned correctly first go. And then I sewed a patterned tubular band, a nawi awapa, to the edges and flap of the bag. I managed to find colors that would match the bag and went ahead with the edging even though I would rather have used thread that was a wee bit heavier.

So, there’s Marilyn’s bag holding a nice assortment of tools. I am sure that she will have plenty of tools with which to fill her new pouch.

The little balls of thread that you see next to bag are the ones that I plan to use in the Weave-Along (WAL) that we are running in the Ravelry Backstrap Weaving Group starting this Saturday January 6th. It is a ”Cuff and Bracelet” weave-along which people can join at any time. I expect it will run until the end of the month. You can never tell just how many people will participate and how long there will be interest.

Some people have already started making the cuffs from bands they wove some time ago. It’s just a matter of getting the right findings…clasps and jump rings, ribbon crimps etc or buttons, snaps and braids…deciding on a structure (plain weave is also very much encouraged!) winding a short warp, dressing it and weaving.

Hopefully, many bands will be made giving participants a chance to really get comfortable with the warping and heddle-making process. I hope that my Basic Warping for Backstrap Looms video, which wasn’t around for the last WAL, will be useful for new participants.

We had some amazing plain weave contributions to the last Weave-Along we ran back in 2015 (gasp!…really? Was it that long ago?) where we wove bands that were made into key fobs.

Here are Julia T’s fruit-inspired patterns in plain weave. We had all kinds of structures represented in that Weave-Along but I particularly enjoyed the creativity that went into layout of the plain weave ones.

Any kind of loom can be used in the WAL. Julie is using a Gilmore MiniWave loom. Others will use backstrap looms and I am sure we will have a few people using inkle looms. Who knows who might drop by and what equipment they will use?

There have already been some interesting ideas thrown out there, such as this one from Katherine: starting and ending a band as a tube and then inserting the tubes into barrel clasps to connect the two ends. It would be better suited to a bracelet rather than a cuff and I can’t wait to try it!

Here’s a band with pick-up patterning that Julie made a short time ago and has turned into a cuff.

I love Claire’s braided loop and the earthy look of this cuff…

Wendy has shown us the yarn that she plans to use. She is interested in further exploring the use of variegated thread. Those jewel colors will look fabulous with the black in pebble weave. She also found ribbon crimps that are just the right size for an Andean Pebble Weave band that she recently wove.

As for me, I plan to use the thread pictured next to Marilyn’s bag to start with. There I have some Valdani cotton (on the left) and some DMC #12 on the right. I have fond memories of buying that Valdani cotton while at the Seattle Folk Life Festival with Marilyn a couple of years ago and I was out and about with Ruth and Lise when I got the DMC at Lacis in the Bay area.

Julie continues her exploration of complementary-warp pick-up on her MiniWave loom and has just woven one of my favorite patterns from my second book, the one I like to call the Rolling River…

One of my favorite parts of making jewelry from my woven bands is this…

I found these plastic containers at my local supermarket. I am such a sucker for containers with small compartments into which I can put all my bits and pieces all neat and tidy! Unfortunately the tools that I use to open the jump rings don’t fit. I love poking around in the one that holds all the buttons and pendants.

As for my large silk project….that one has spilled over into the new year and hasn’t moved very far since. I did wind most of the silk from the skeins into balls. I love that I am still using some of the silk I bought in London back in 2012 along with the silk I bought this year from Redfish. Ball-winding was a nice mindless activity to do while enjoying my faster internet and listening to podcasts. Getting this faster and more stable internet has been kind of life-changing!

The original plan was to weave a longer and wider 60/2 silk version of this piece….

This short piece became one of the journal covers. I wanted to weave a scarf using this same idea but with the main color theme being blue rather than purple. I had the leaf chart already drawn up and was good to go. I had a double weave sample in 60/2 silk from which to take my measurements. It was just a matter of figuring out how to arrange the colors and then going ahead and winding the warp.

However, a new year rolled over and I suddenly felt the need to create something new.

I do consider my leaf motif to be one of my ”signature” patterns but I have woven it a good number of times already. There’s no real challenge there. Putting together a nice combination of colors would have been the real challenge but I wanted something more.

So, I won’t be winding this warp until I have come up with the new motif.

I love the haphazardly floating leaves and wanted to weave something that had that same sort of feel.

Feathers? No…too much like leaves. Sea shells? Pretty shapes but not at all ”floaty”.

And then I remembered a brief discussion in one of the online groups recently about weaving paisley motifs.

Paisley motifs have always seemed to me to have lots of movement…twisting and turning their way across the cloth. I had played around with that idea some years ago. I had wanted to weave paisley shapes using supplementary weft but had found it quite difficult to come up with a pattern in which the weft-floats weren’t too long.

You can see one of my solutions in the red band above… to break up the long weft-floats into smaller ones in some sort of consistent manner. I didn’t make a paisley shape but I did weave something approaching that. I wasn’t one hundred per cent happy with the result. I then apparently got distracted and moved on to something else!

The good news is that I plan to weave the motifs in this latest silk project in double weave, not with supplementary weft, and so I do not need to consider either warp or weft-float length. Ah, the freedom! So, I imagine I will be armed with pencil and eraser for some time figuring out how to chart a paisley motif. And it seems that just one paisley motif is not enough! I’ll need various sizes and alignments. My goodness, some of the examples that I have seen online are busy! Not that I am contemplating anything like this for this current project, but the next picture will show you what I mean by ”busy”.

And now for the charting….

Step One: Figure out how large I want my motif to be and then, using my silk width sample, figure out how many warp ends I will need for the motif.

My notes on this double weave 60/2 silk lanyard helped me plan the number of warp ends I would need for my paisley motif.

Step Two: Create a chart with the right number of cells.

Step Three: Draw the outline of the shape, cut it out and transfer the shape to the chart .

That is where I am at so far. You can see my cut-out shape below. The large chart I made is not in the picture but you can see the chart of staggered oval cells that I use for these kinds of motifs. You can download this kind of charting paper from my blog on this page.

I think it will be fun figuring out how I want to fill the shape. There are so many options that I have seen in the paisley images online. And then I will need to decide just how open or busy I want to overall pattern to be. Then, of course, I will need to weave a sample to check proportions. So, it might be some time before all that lovely silk makes it onto my backstrap loom bars. That will give me more time to think about the color arrangement, my ideas for which change from day to day!

By the way, I go through all the steps I typically follow to create a double weave motif in a tutorial I wrote some time ago.

Between all that action, I shall continue to put together my new complementary-warp pattern book. The charts are nicely taking shape and I am slowly photographing the samples. There’ll be some filming going on too plus I’ll be weaving bands for the Cuffs and Bracelets Weave-Along and soaking up all the inspiration there. I hope you will join us!

Backstrap Weaving – Racking up the Miles

From sunset in Phoenix….

to Jacaranda season in Sydney…

I am back in Australia after visiting with backstrap weaving friends in the USA. Why am I back here again? Well, I did something quite mad when I was last here in August…I went and booked a weft ikat workshop in Bali at the end of this month!

As you know, I have been dabbling on and off in warp ikat with varying degrees of success these last few years.

I started with these first tiny strips on a piece which got turned into handbag…

I used small strips of warp ikat in this piece to learn about the technique.

Then I started to get more adventurous with these pre-columbian bird figures.

After dyeing the warp black, I wove and filled in the white ikat shapes with pick-up patterns.

Some more experiments with pretty pleasing results.

I love it when my experiments can be turned into useful things. This is the draw-string bag for my Kindle.

An attempt to create a circle in ikat and fill it with pick-up pattern. Due to take-up, my circle got flattened as I wove it!

The workshop in Bali seems like the perfect chance to learn about weft ikat so that I can perhaps start putting warp and weft ikat together to create double ikat pieces. We will be using natural substances for the dyeing and combining two colors…exciting! I have done one experiment with ikat in two colors in which I over-dyed parts of the first dyeing in terracotta with dark blue. I didn’t end up with dark blue as you can see. It turned out blue-ish dark chocolate brown. The blue part in the middle was spot dyeing damage control!

The two-color sample made a nice book cover.

There is a community on the island of Bali that specializes in double ikat and I hope that I can also spend some time with the weavers there. The other interesting thing about weft ikat is that the cloth must be balanced and I am always curious to know how backstrap weavers create balanced cloth on their looms. Do they use a reed? If so, I hope that I will be able to buy one for myself. I already have some bamboo reeds but would be very happy to acquire another of a different sett.

On the other hand, if they don’t use a reed, I would love to learn how they manage to maintain an even sett without one. I am not sure how weft ikat will look in balanced cloth…quite sketchy, I should think…but I really want to learn how to plan and lay out a pattern and then place the weft in sheds for a minimum of blurring. I want to use what I learn to help me create some very simple double ikat one day.

It’s a beautiful mild spring here in Sydney and the jacarandas are putting on a glorious show. I think I will have to rename the color in my bracelet after these pretty flowers and weave something new that the color has inspired…

My last days in the USA were fun times spent with weaving friends. I got to see what some of them have been doing since my last visit.. Here are some of the pieces that my friends in Phoenix were working on using some of the finishing techniques that we had studied…tubular edgings, cross-knit looped edgings, braids and coil stitches. The pouch on the left has plain-weave tubular edging and coil stitches along the flap. The one on the right is edged with a patterned tubular band and has coil stitches along the bottom and cross-knit looped stitches along the top. The strap is a square braid.

The pieces are sitting on a beautiful piece of Bedouin weaving that Nicole brought to show.

Here’s Collyer’s pouch under construction…

The fabric for the little pouches is from my weaving friends in Bolivia. They are woven from naturally-dyed hand spun wool. Several people in this group ordered more fabric in varying widths from the ladies in Bolivia. This is the gorgeous piece that arrived for Diane…

One of my weaving teachers, Maxima, heads the co-op that produces these beautiful pieces of cloth. She is headed with fellow co-op member Justina and Dorinda to Peru this week to attend the Tinkuy in Cusco, the gathering of weavers of the Americas, that is run by Nilda Callañaupa’s Center for Traditional Textiles.. Maxima and Justina will give one of the presentations at the conference. With Dorinda’s help Max and Justina have put together a Power Point presentation…such a big step outside their comfort zone. I know Max as a very shy lady. I hope they get to present early on the first day so that they can put away their nerves and enjoy the rest of the conference. You can see Justina, at left, with the ch’uspa she wove to wear in the opening parade.

Many of my weaving friends have gone to the Tinkuy including one of the ladies with whom I wove last August here in Australia. I can’t wait to hear how it goes. I opted to take the workshop in Bali instead and it is hard not being there in Peru this time.

This picture came up in my Facebook Memories this morning…

This young fellow was only 10 years old when I watched him weave at the first Tinkuy in 2010….7 years ago! I wonder where he is at with his weaving now at 17 years of age. I wonder if he will be there at this year’s Timkuy.

I met with other weavers on my recent trip to the USA and once again we worked with some of the beautiful Bolivian cloth…

Here is a piece of the cloth next to some hair braids that Janet made using a crossed-warp technique. The yarn is her own handspun.

We played with tubular bands and decorative stitching to finish and embellish pieces of weaving.

We wove the ñawi awapa pattern into tubular bands and Catherine mistakenly wove one orange eye on top of another connecting the two into ”cat’s eyes”. Rather than unweave it, she decided to weave the whole band that way weaving pairs of eyes instead of single eyes as is the traditional pattern.

I love it and have named the new pattern ”michi ñawi” because the word for cat in Quechua is michi (and cat can be a short form of the name Catherine) :-).

I have started wearing this ñawi awapa necklace as a tripled bracelet and much prefer it that way. It is really sweet in 20/2 wool…

One of the Phoenix gatherings was all about double weave and we wove Andean Pebble Weave together in the other.

Here I am demonstrating embedded double weave. I really like the colors in this warp (influenced by my friend, Lori!)…

Nicole got into charting quickly and started weaving some of the little bird figures that I had learned in my first ever experience with double weave with my teachers in Potosi, Bolivia back in 1997…

The little llama figure was popular.

We wove at Sarah’s place where she showed us a beautiful vest made from Shipibo painted cloth and handwoven panels that her husband had bought in his travels in Peru in the 70’s. What we couldn’t figure out was what the little wooden implements, which were acquired at the same time, could have been used for. Any ideas? We thought that they could be inked and then rolled to print a pattern.

Here’s some double weave work from my friends Cynthia and Kate in northern California…

Hopefully the weaving provided a nice break from all the worry and concern over the fires that had ravaged the area. We couldn’t help but pass one of the affected areas on the way to Sonoma to shop one day…no words :-(.

I bought a device that allows to me to post to Instagram…I feel so modern! So, if you are into Instagram, please look for me 🙂

The air had cleared of the terrible smoke by the time I got to the area and we enjoyed a couple of days out at the barn weaving….

Lori’s 8-year old daughter Lily was there as a fully participating group member. I just love watching those little fingers manipulating the threads, picking up patterns and expertly making string heddles on a stick…

If you have been following my blog for some time, you will know Lily well. I have been watching her learning to weave at a backstrap loom with her mother’s instruction and then with some of mine since she was five.

I got to accompany the family to Lily’s Feis (Irish dancing competition) in the bay area the following Sunday. She entered nine dance categories and won first place in eight of them…what a day!

Lori had a new Huichol bag that she had bought to show me . The jaguar is brilliant in orange on the purple background. This is the Finnweave version of double weave pick-up in which certain shapes are slightly altered on the ”back” side of the cloth.

While in Phoenix, my friends Annie MacHale (aka Aspinnerweaver) and husband Rick drove over from New Mexico to visit.

We spent the day at the MIM, the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix. It’s awesome but probably needs three separate visits to take it all in. There was lots to inspire in terms of patterns on the musical instruments and folk costumes. The headsets we were given tuned in and out of each display as you moved around and allowed you to drift between exhibits at will, lingering at each one for as long as you chose. There were lots of people standing around tapping their toes to the various rhythms at each display.

Because the decoration of musical instruments is often closely linked to a culture’s broader sense of aesthetics, it was sometimes possible to guess the origin of a piece from its ornamentation. It was fun trying to do that. The pattern on a gourd percussion instrument looked familiar and when I learned that it was from Panama, I remembered that I had seen similar Mola patterns.

It was entertaining recognizing familiar textile patterns in many of the instruments and costumes.

A Sami framed drum with beater, a goblet drum from Iran, a plucked lute from Saudi Arabia and a dancer’s dress with nanduti lace from Paraguay.

I found the lowland Bolivian instruments, in the picture below, fascinating. I have yet to see or hear one of these bajunes being played n Santa Cruz. They belong to the unique Baroque-mestizo music that is part of the history of the Jesuit missions that were established in the second half of the seventeenth century in the jungle areas of Santa Cruz where I live. They are made from ”Kusi palm leaves, wood and leather”. While I have been to several of the Baroque music concerts in the city during The International Festival of American Renaissance and Baroque Music that is held in Santa Cruz every two years, I haven’t managed to see one of these being played. I need to get myself out to the jungle towns instead of racking up miles across the globe! They are a mere 90 km away from my home…a mere 2-hour drive in red dust…but that can turn into 14 hours if it rains!

I can imagine being in one of the Jesuit Mission churches at night listening to one of these concerts accompanied by the sounds of the deep jungle…

In this Youtube video you can see a performance of one of the Bolivian groups that performs at the Festival. The bajunes are there but I can’t distinguish their sound at all in the first piece but then…yes, in the second one, I think I can!…

Meanwhile….my inbox and various online groups have shown me what some of my online backstrap weaving friends have been up to…Carlos Vargas in France wove a belt using the intermesh technique that I teach in my second book. This structure produces a really sturdy band and allows faces with two different solid colors. Carlos could have woven red motifs on a blue background and vice versa using this technique, if he had wanted to.

Bob Seymour in the USA sent me this picture of various structures he has been studying using tutorials on this blog as well as in my books.

Christine in South Africa wove another project on her inkle loom using my new book on Complementary-warp Pick-up. She used the 4-thread patterns as attractive borders for the 8-thread hook motif and made a belt.

Julie wove this 18-thread pattern on her Gilmore MiniWave loom using a pattern and instructions in my latest book as well as this lovely wide piece with two columns of a 9-thread pattern. By flipping the pattern, as she has, you can create nice ”ram’s horns”.

KatyCat on Ravelry wove one of the 6-thread patterns. I can see that she is using some of my friend Terri’s lovely swords from her MagicalMoons etsy store. Contact Terri if you would like swords made in any size you like.

Wendy in Australia has been weaving some patterns from my second book. Here we see her set-up which involves attaching her warp to her floor loom. That’s a nice sturdy anchor for a backstrap warp.

I hit the ground running when I got to Australia last week…no sign of jet lag! We were out and about the next day at the Sculptures by the Sea exhibit at Sydney’s beautiful Bondi Beach. There is lots to show you about that but I will leave you with just a couple of pictures. This first one is of a sculpture that took my fancy simply because the large wooden Y shapes made me think of backstrap looms and the forked tankas that are used in some warps in Peru to hold the cross. Seems I always have backstrap looms and weaving on my mind!

This next one just captures the feel and sparkle of that gorgeous sunny day at the beach! Luckily I was small enough to be able to crawl inside this sculpture along with the kids and look out and up…

I also found some time to put together a little slide show promotion for my new book on Complementary-warp Pick-up. I want to thank everyone who has bought it so far and tell you that I so appreciate all the feedback I have been receiving, especially the feedback that comes in the form of pictures of bands on looms!

If you have already bought the book you might enjoy this little slide show anyway for the zippy music I chose. Plus, it might remind you that the file is on your desktop and nudge you in the direction of your loom :-)! Thanks, everyone! Sending hugs to all my friends who are at Tinkuy 2017. It’s weird being on this side of the world while you are all over there!