finnweave – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – An Artist’s Residency

I joined a team for this year’s Tour de Fleece event. This is a spinning event that always runs at the same time as the Tour de France. It’s a chance to set yourself a goal and spin along with others, watching their progress, celebrating the completion of their goals, proudly showing off your own work, and learning a heck of a lot about the spinning of all kinds of fiber along the way. There are prizes but I would say that not all that many people are interested in or motivated by that particular aspect. I have made two attempts to play along in a team in the past and have never lasted more than a week, I am embarrassed to say. I got bored!

I enjoy the quietness of spinning in this re-purposed wooden mortar compared to on the pretty plate that a friend gave me. The sound of the metal shaft of the takli against the plate got on my nerves after a while! Still, I treasure the lovely plate and am sure I will find another use for it.

This year, I am trying to spin all the Sea Island cotton that I was given by my friend Betty. I spin a little on my takli spindle after breakfast every day. I feel very motivated and I think it’s because I have specific uses in mind for this cotton thread. That, and the fact that I am pretty new to spinning cotton and am constantly learning, make it more interesting. I also don’t have that nagging need to get as much weaving done as I possibly can, as I used to do, when I would have to drop everything to prepare workshop materials and pack to leave for an extended trip away. Don’t get me wrong…I LOVED those trips away.

**This is all pre Tour de Fleece product.**

Life has slowed down. I pretend that I am one of those lucky people that go away to escape distractions so that they can spend an extended amount of time focusing on their art. They choose a peaceful or exotic place and do an artist’s residency, drawing inspiration from their new natural and cultural surroundings. That’s me, except that I get to do it in the comfort of my own home and draw inspiration from the internet, lol. I followed along during the several weeks that a Facebook acquaintance recently spent painting in the Shetland Islands on such a residency.

The projects that I have in mind for the spun cotton thread are also “firsts” which I think is another motivating factor. While I spin, my mind runs through the steps that I will take to get those projects off the ground. I try to imagine all the things that could possibly go wrong in the hope that I can avoid them. I am pretty sure that all this will have me sticking with the Tour de Fleece for its entire duration this time. I write down the steps for the new projects in my Weaver’s Journal only to erase or amend them the following day when I figure out a better way.

I had come to the conclusion that I cared very little for the process of spinning and that I am one hundred percent motivated by the product. Now I am not so sure. I have a dismantled Ashford Traditional wheel in my closet that would enable me to spin a whole lot faster, yet I ignore it and stick with my takli for cotton and my good ol’ Cusco drop spindle for wool and alpaca. They somehow just seem to be more “me”. I guess that there are some aspects of the process that I really love after all. I am certainly not purely after finished product as I had once thought.

I had the experience of buying raw cotton, de-seeding it, fluffing it by hand, and then beating it on a sack of grain to prepare it for spinning when I stayed with a family of spinners and weavers in coastal Ecuador. I do understand that all of that is really the most essential part of the process. Being given a large coil of beautifully prepared Sea island sliver to spin is not quite the same, is it?

**A photo of one of my prints from Ecuador, 2007. De-seeding the cotton was a typical evening activity in which all family members participated.**

**Beating the natural brown cotton that the locals call “mico” on a sack of grain.**

The method for spinning cotton in this part of coastal Ecuador involves a horizontally held spindle and a distaff. In this picture Luz (R.I.P) uses two fingers to draft while the others regulate the movement of the twist into the drafted area.

As a clumsy beginner, I found it very difficult to get a good rate of spin from the horizontally-held spindle and the positioning and action of the drafting fingers was tough too! I have since been spoiled by the takli.

Afternoons and evenings are for weaving and this is what has been keeping me occupied in my “artist’s residency”. The weaving part of the Finnweave piece with its foliage pattern is finished . I have yet to wet-finish it. If this works as something that I can use to keep my neck covered, I will be pleased. As I mentioned in a past post, I don’t really enjoy wearing the scarves that I have woven. The length and ends and fringe annoy me. I just want something that I can button around my neck (I love the pieces that I knitted that I can just stretch and pull over my head but that doesn’t work so well for woven cloth).

**This is the view as I peek over the edge of my bed in the morning. As soon as my feet hit the floor, I am in my weaving studio.**

My sampling paid off (it always does). It enabled me to maintain the eight-inch width effortlessly the whole way. This is something that I find challenging when doing a balanced structure without a reed. The sett varies, though! The warp threads between the motifs get a bit a crowded sometimes but then open up again as the positions of the motifs change. I learned from a previous project not to weave motifs in columns because of that crowding problem. I am interested to see how things change after wet-finishing.

I find the pick-up super easy in this technique. Once the first row of a motif has been woven, there’s no more counting to do . It’s very easy to see exactly which threads need to be selected for subsequent rows.

I got the basic idea for the irregular leaf shapes from one of Svetlana Rogatykh’s crochet patterns. The lines in her designs are particularly suitable for Finnweave. The proportions, however, will be quite different and need adjustment. I just took her idea of irregular leaf shapes and went on my own from there. I think that any shape pretty much works. I don’t think that there’s a single “leaf” shape there that actually looks like a leaf on its own. I added butterflies along the way to connect the two layers of the double weave and chose to make them solid rather than outlined shapes. The poor butterflies are flitting about looking for something colorful in that flower-less garden.

Finished and still on the loom. I wove a length that I thought would work well wrapped around my neck, and then some. One thing I didn’t do in my sampling was take before and after wet-finishing measurements. Hopefully not too much of it will be wasted.

And so, while I continue spinning cotton, another project has come to mind. I am really enjoying this exercise of picking through my stash and coming up with projects as opposed to coming up with projects and then shopping for yarn. Years ago, I bought a cone of 20/2 white UKI cotton. I have just finished scouring a good amount of it (I learned the hard way some years ago, that this needed to be done before attempting to dye it) and am planning a warp-ikat project. I want to use the finished fabric to construct something this time…so, no wall hangings, scarves or neck wraps…there will be cutting and hand-sewing involved. Maybe I have become cocky after my successful bag project! It’s been many years since I created an ikat piece with cotton.

**The last ikat I did in this same 20/2 cotton became a drawstring bag for my Kindle.**

My goodness, the water was soupy after scouring the UKI cotton. Any of you that have UKI in your stash will know about the spinning oil that it carries. I suppose all thread has it but I seem to be more aware of its presence in this particular brand.

**Now I have to come up with the motif that I want to create in ikat. I am hoping to use two colors.**

In my last post, I said that I was gong to talk more about the backstrap loom in this one. I got carried away talking about other stuff. Let’s see if I can manage it next time 🙂

Backstrap Weaving – Process and Product and all that Lies Between

In my last post, I showed you what happens when I become way too immersed in the process and forget about the product. I ended up with a new strap for my camera in the lovely reversible three-color pebble weave on which the hummingbirds were upside down on one end! Friends told me that this was done on purpose so that I could see them the right way up when I looked down. I have some very nice friends :-).

I am trying to think of a time when the reverse was true and product may have overtaken my thoughts about process. I guess there was this example where I needed a wool band fast-fast for a work shop I was teaching in which way more people signed up than expected. I forgot all about my backstrap loom and jumped onto my friend Pam’s floor loom. Pam offered to set up the loom. After all, she would do it far more quickly than I would have been able to given my limited experience. Then I took over to weave.

**The message on my top was appropriate for the task. I needed to put my head down and weave!**

In my latest project, I find myself slipping back into process mode. I guess my focus is on designing and structure for this one as I am using a structure that I don’t often use….Finnweave. The product? I’ll make one up along the way.

I didn’t learn this one from any of my indigenous weaving teachers. That and the fact that I seldom use this structure, had me pulling out my notes to remember how it all works. Learning it from a teacher in Mexico, for example, where it is still practiced, would have involved days, if not weeks of study. Prior to that, there would have been days spent looking for teachers, more days spent waiting for them to discuss with family and/or friends the price they should charge, time spent preparing yarn if there wasn’t any on hand, and possibly even more time spent scratching about for loom parts which were perhaps long since out of use and maybe even re-purposed. One of my teachers in the highlands was using one of her warping beams as a fence rail.

And then there would be the days or weeks of interaction with my teacher as I watched and tried to imitate her movements at the loom. I can only describe some of my earlier learning experiences as a real struggle when no verbal explanations were being given or patterns provided on paper. Of course, there is more than one way to impart knowledge and skills and I learned to adapt. All that combines to implant some pretty firm memories which make it much easier to just pick-up a technique that I haven’t used in a long time and slip easily back into it. Obviously it’s not the same as learning something from a book.

It annoys me having to study a structure all over again! Why won’t it sink in and stay there?! In the process I improve my notes so that it will be easier and quicker the next time. And yes, it does get faster each time. My notes include tips that I have come up with myself for remembering, for example, the home position of the two shuttles, which color comes next, and the changes I make to the basic loom set-up depending on whether I am weaving a narrow or wide piece. These are things about which I need to be reminded when I first get back into it.

**A very narrow sampling warp in 20/2 cotton that I used in the past to test the proportions of basic shapes.**

This time I am using 20/2 wool for the first time in Finnweave. I needed to sample again for a width gauge and to see if the proportions of my motifs in this material matched those of the figures on my old charts.

I have to figure out all over again just how hard to beat. You can see how different the two figures look when I change beat. After wet-finishing the sample, I could see that the firmer beat had produced the better cloth.

Those figures are adapted from a crochet pattern by Svetlana Rogatykh (she does amazing work in crochet!). This is a smaller version that I drew of the much larger one I showed earlier. The larger one is much closer to Svetlana’s creation for crochet.

I had decided that I wanted to weave a foliage pattern and set about creating leaf patterns….my usual thing…basic oval-like shapes with veins. They were all too large and also difficult to position at different angles. I wanted something more delicate that would climb and twist its way up the warp and not something static and repetitive. This structure allows horizontal and vertical lines. Diagonals are harshly stepped. I was about to give up until I decided to look at Svetlana’s work again. She offers a free foliage pattern and that gave me the spark that I needed to get this going. Her leaves are also in horizontal and vertical lines and in all kinds of hard blocky shapes that alone would not be recognizable as leaves at all. However, place them all on a stem and make them all just a little bit different, and suddenly you have a lovely pattern of flowing foliage, somewhat delicate despite the hard stepped diagonals and block-like shapes…..at least to my eye.

So, I had to create another sampling warp.

I would have loved to have designed some hummingbirds but that just wasn’t going to work. I went for tiny butterflies instead…simple enough, just two triangles. I was thinking that if I swapped those butterflies for fish, this could also make a nice aquatic scene.

This second sample gave me another opportunity to test the proportions of my woven figures against my charted ones and confirm the width information that the first sample had provided. I added my large leaves to compare….nope, they really are too big.

Then it was onward to the real project. The samples finished off my supply of black 20/2 wool but there is still a lot of green…perfect.

**This 20/2 cotton Finnweave piece works nicely as a “neck wrap”. Maybe this wool one will too.**

Almost ready to go. I still had to remove the original cross sticks and insert a coil rod. As I am not using a reed to help maintain sett in this balanced weave, I find that the coil rod is particularly helpful for maintaining the established width beyond the shed rod.

I took a lot of time at the start settling the threads and trying to make sure that the spacing between the warp threads is as consistent as possible across the eight inches of warp. I find it handy to be able to divide the warp in half and then in quarters with my lashing cable ties. I count out the threads to make sure that I place the ties in the right places. I can then focus on one section at a time making sure that each half measures four inches and each smaller section two. I check that the threads are as evenly spaced as possible within those sections.

Maintaining that sett without a reed is much easier for me to do in this double-weave structure as opposed to plain weave. Something about the exchange of colors between the two layers of the double weave seems to help. As soon as I stop weaving patterns and the layers separate, I risk losing control of the sett.

**Coil rod in place and weaving underway.**

Of the course, the last ten or so edge warp-ends are the ones that most want to snuggle together and hide the weft. I don’t usually weave patterns all the way to the very edge and so those warp threads are left free to misbehave. I was watching a weaver in Mexico weaving plain balanced weave on her backstrap loom in a video and noticed that after every four weft shots or so, she would take a pointed stick from where it had been parked in her hair and strum the warp threads in the last inch at the selvedges. She would strum outward. I figure that she must be coaxing those problem threads apart. I must remember to do that too.

I feel like I have been neglecting my loom’s role in this whole process. I seem to be taking my beloved backstrap loom for granted and I think that I will devote my next post to more about the loom and how it works in my hands. I guess I just see it more and more as a part of my body when I am weaving in the same way that I used to feel that skis were just an extension of my feet!

**I love the way the warp extends from my body.**

Until next time.

Backstrap Weaving – A Bit of This and That

I’ve been spending a couple of weeks finishing things off, sampling, researching, soaking up some online inspiration and planning while I build up to getting into some meatier projects.

First I added the loops to my cuffs so that I could call them well and truly finished. I made simple three-strand braids from some of my hand spun wool, threaded them through the bands and knotted them on the other side. These slip over the buttons that have been sewn to the other end and secure the cuffs nicely around my wrist.

Next, I decided that I really needed to add a Finnweave cuff to the collection. It was fun planning and weaving this small Finnweave project after the larger one that I had recently completed. I used rows of curl patterns that are often found on Huichol double weave pieces and designed a pattern that I thought had a Mexican flavor to sit between them.

You can see the difference in the gold color in my Finnweave cuff and the cowl on the left. So much of the gold color came out when I wet-finished the fabric for the cowl! Not a bit of black came out and my Color Catcher cloth turned a deep gold color, almost orange. The cuff fabric in 20/2 cotton was light enough to allow me to turn a hem at the two ends without adding too much bulk. I used two black plastic snaps to secure it.

Apparently there is some golden yellow inspiration out on the streets these last weeks. I haven’t been out to see them, but the Bolivia 360 page on Facebook tells me that the yellow tajibos have been blooming. This is one of their photos…

So all three of the latest cuffs are finished and are ready for an outing one of these days!

I would love to also make a cuff from my three-color pebble weave sample in 8/2 tencel on the left but it is just that little bit too wide for any of my ribbon crimps and too thick to hem. It can sit in the sample drawer until I come up with an idea for it.

Next on the list was a return to something I had been playing around with back in early 2015. Back then, I was in one of my ikat phases and wanted to create shapes in ikat and fill them with pick-up patterns. I was heading in the direction of creating curved shapes in ikat to fill with pick-up and was working with 8/2 cotton at the time. I wove a wall hanging with angular shapes…two bird figures that I had seen in a book on a large piece of pre-columbian cloth…I ended up making three pieces in this series of birds. They currently live in my closet. Hopefully one day they will hang on my walls.

That project of angular shapes was followed by ikat circles which I also wanted to fill with pebble weave pick-up. It was successful except for the fact that I had forgotten to account for take-up. when I first tied the shapes into the warp. When I wove the cloth, I ended up with shapes that were certainly curved, but not quite circles.

Now I am taking the same idea to my 60/2 silk and starting off once again with the somewhat safer angular shapes in order to ease myself back into this. But, I am not making anything nearly as large as a wall hanging! In fact, I thought that I might make this practice piece into a wrist cuff at first but decided that something a bit wider would be more helpful as a sample for future projects.

I used some red silk as the base color, tied it with ikat tape and dyed it black. I really shouldn’t take photos late at night as they are always pretty awful, but I wanted to get a quick picture of this so that it could go into the tub to soak overnight and be ready for dyeing the following afternoon.

I should mention that tying red warp with pink ikat tape is not fun! The colors are too similar and it was very hard to tell if the tape was reaching all the way to the margins of the pattern.

The pattern is a very simple one…horizontal and vertical bars that are supposed to look as if they are interwoven as warp and weft. I may have mentioned in other posts about ikat that I find creating straight horizontal lines particularly challenging. My bundles were pretty small. I find it much easier to wrap a thick bundle rather than a thin one.

Here it is on the loom with some of the shapes filled with Andean Pebble Weave pick-up….

I had by-passed my folders of charts and gone straight to the shelf and taken down my own pattern books to leaf through and choose a pattern. I used one from one of my pattern books after having modified it to suit these small strips of weaving. I wanted a fairly busy Andean Pebble Weave pattern but not one that had horizontal lines because I didn’t feel like fussing with the necessary modifications while weaving with this fine silk.

So far, the threads are behaving quite well. I think the interwoven effect would be more pronounced if there was less space between the vertical and horizontal bars. I was concerned that if I left too little space and if the shapes blurred along their upper and lower edges, one shape might end up merging with the next. You watch….next time I’ll leave less space and that is precisely what will happen!

I don’t often look at my own books because I have folders and folders of pattern charts with all the patterns that are found in my books along with so many more that haven’t yet been published. And so, it was kind of fun looking through my Complementary-warp Pattern Book and remembering the time when I was putting this book together. I spent something like six weeks at my brother’s home in Australia drawing charts and weaving the samples. That visit to Australia was supposed to be about visiting family and then popping over to Bali to take a workshop on weft ikat. You may remember my tale about being five hours into the six-hour flight to Denpasar when a volcano on the island of Bali erupted. That forced us to turn back and all flights from Australia to Bali got canceled for a week or so after that. Of course, the workshop went ahead without me.

And so I stayed in Sydney with my family instead and work on the book continued.

Starting the collection of sample bands.

The book was finished something like four months later and it has been wonderful seeing these patterns being woven around the world ever since….

By Gonit Poratin Israel (right) using a backstrap loom and one of her students using the frame of a rigid heddle loom.

Frances Lewis used the fish charts from the Rivers and Oceans set to weave a band of fish, but using tablets instead of heddles. She filled in some of the fish outlines with her own pattern ideas.

Julie B liked the set of four cats in the animal section. I love weaving these too and wove them into a silk wrist cuff along with some of the paw prints that are also charted in this book. There are three different kinds of paw prints in the book.

Wendy made this beautiful hat band for her fisherman husband using the fish and other watery patterns from the Oceans and Rivers set…

Bees get a section all of their own in the book as there are four of them to choose from. Here is Carlos’ backstrap-woven bee piece…

Carlos was one of the designers who made a contribution to this book. You can see his own bee design (below) flanked by some of the patterns from the Borders and Dividers set.

Original patterns contributed by Maja Burger, Laura McCarty and Carlos Vargas.

Nora included one of the bees and its hive in her band of patterns from the Garden-themed set…

I chose some patterns from this book (along with a couple from another one of my books) for the Christmas tree hangers that I made last year…

Could this be my favorite among my books? I’m not sure. I certainly had fun sitting down and looking through it while planning my latest ikat experiment and there are certainly some nice memories associated with weaving the samples (despite the disappointment of the failed Bali trip).

I guess one of the things I like the most about this book is the fact that there were so many contributions from people who had bought my earlier instructional books and then gone on to create their own awesome original patterns. Within the book itself, it’s impossible to pick favorites from the one hundred options. Julia transferred Sashiko sewing patterns to the Andean Pebble Weave structure. I love those. They are charted in the Geometric set.

I have woven my slightly adapted version of Maja’s weaving woman quite a few times. Yes, she might be my favorite….my current favorite in any case! She appears on the cover of the book. The cheeky viscachas (Andean chinchilla-like animals) also appear on the cover. I charted this pattern from a pre-columbian textile fragment.

I hope that if you own this book, you may now feel inspired to take it out and browse through the patterns as I have done. And, if you don’t yet own it, perhaps you will put it on your Christmas Wish List. Complementary-warp Pattern Book. And, if you haven’t learned how to weave Andean Pebble Weave yet, both my Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms and Complementary-warp Pick-up (for inkle and any other kind of loom that allows you to weave warp-faced bands) books show you how.

Our national election here in Bolivia is this Sunday. I hope it passes peacefully. I have re-stocked my pantry in case it doesn’t but let’s hope that there isn’t a repeat of last year’s upheaval.

Take care and stay safe, please.

Backstrap Weaving – The Flip Side

Lots of people ask me about how the pandemic is affecting me here in Bolivia and there is plenty to say about all the negative ways in which lives have been changed. But, there’s also a flip side…at least there is in my case…and there are some positive things going on as well as a direct result of not being able to travel and being obliged to stay in one place. I was thinking about it and this is the longest period of time I have stayed here in Bolivia since 2005! There was a period prior to that during which I hadn’t left South America for nine years but, after 2005, I seemed to be regularly picking up and flying away.

This long period at home has my Ideas Notebook crammed with planned projects and leaves me with plenty of time to play with those things that do require more sampling, planning, charting and trial-and-error which, for me, is best done over one long uninterrupted period of time. I have lots of uninterrupted time.

I showed my finished Finnweave sampler in my last post and am pleased to tell you that I found a use for it beyond just being a sample to which I can refer for future projects. It makes a wonderful cowl. Having worn my hair long for most of my adult life, I am very much aware of my bare neck and how cold it can get now that I have cut my hair short. I was very conscious of that on my winter visits to Australia and New Zealand last year.

Yes, I had a moment of frustration the other day and took it out on my hair in the form of yet another DIY haircut. At 10:30 pm with toothbrush in mouth this suddenly seemed like a good idea. While we are certainly not in cowl-wearing weather here south of the equator, the time will come when I can be back visiting the USA in the spring and fall, and hopefully Australia in the winter months, when the air can get a little nippy.

Quite a few people have been curious about the Finnweave I have been doing. I explain that I chose this structure simply because the pre-columbian textile fragments that I have were woven this way. There are of course other kinds of double weave pick-up structures that can be used to weave figures and the figures will have a certain appearance on the front and back of the cloth. Weavers can choose the look that they prefer. As always, I refer to the Doramay Keasbey article in Handwoven Jan/Feb 2011 in which she compares the front and back of bookmarks that she wove using five different doubleweave pick-up structures.

So, what about the flip side of my Finnweave? The Keasbey article includes Finnweave and I can show you the two sides of a motif on a piece that I wove some years ago using 8/2 cotton which I think is much clearer than trying to show you the example in the finer 20/2 cotton that I just wove.

You can see that smooth horizontal lines on one face look like toothy lines on the other . This particular motif does not have any fine vertical lines but a fine vertical line on the “good’ face looks like a column of small disconnected horizontal dashes on the back. Occasionally, I prefer the way a particular motif looks on the back in that from a distance it resembles blurry ikat with those toothy edges. It’s a softer look. The upper face has a much smoother and sharper appearance.

So, I will keep my Finnweave cowl on hand as I think about my next project using this structure. There’s not much chance of it being used as a cowl any time soon as we have temperatures in the high 90s with one day at 100 degrees forecast for the next eight days. The tropical “winter” is over!

What has been keeping me busy lately is refreshing my memory on three-color reversible pebble weave. It’s another one of those things that grabs my attention every few years. I showed you in my last post the sample I wove in tencel using this technique some years ago in which I used yellow and white on a blueberry background.

I can’t find that sample anywhere now but, thank goodness, I am better at keeping tabs on my notes. However, my notes could have been better and it was frustration with trying to interpret them that led to the late night hair-cutting incident! After a good night’s sleep, I got the notes all sorted and I chose primary colors in 8/2 tencel once again to test whether I had indeed understood the steps.

Examples from Peru shared with me by Mary Spanos with the red, green and yellow sections of three-color pebble..

I am using my backstrap loom with string heddles as you know. If you are a tablet-weaver, three-color double-faced pebble weave is apparently quite straightforward. I have read about people doing it by using triangular tablets but also square tablets that have holes in the sides. So, if you are in a great hurry to learn this, you might want to go with tablets. I’ll leave you to investigate that further.

I will be writing a tutorial on this eventually for those who use string heddles. “Why don’t you just use tablets?” you might ask… I am more interested in the string heddle process as that is the way the technique is woven here in South America.

I have examples of three-color pebble weave in pieces I bought in Peru on my very first visit in 1996. These particular pieces were relatively expensive and I had to think long and hard about investing in them back in my do-it-on-a-shoestring backpacking days. They blew my budget for the following ten days. I am so glad I bought them, though. My weaving friend Mary also sent me pictures of some similar pieces that she owns.

The three-color pebble weave figures in these particular pieces are not identical in appearance on the back of the cloth.

Here you can see the back of one that I wove myself many years ago in a non-reversible technique….

I haven’t yet had the chance to sit with a weaver who knows how to do the double-faced version and so my efforts have been guided by the writings of Adele Cahlander and Marjorie Cason in The Art of Bolivian Highland Weaving and a lot of trial-and-error of my own. Just by chance I was able to pick up a small piece of cloth that was woven using the double-faced three-color version. It was being used as the cover of a small photo album that I found in a souvenir store right here in Santa Cruz. I grabbed it! Thankfully, it had only been glued to the photo album along its edges and I could easily remove the cloth.

Bolivian cloth with pattern in double-faced three-color pebble.

The cloth is so very tightly woven as is the way here in Bolivia, that it is impossible to separate the warp threads to perhaps get some clues about how it was woven. In any case, I am using a series of steps for my own experiments and am getting the results I want. I feel that I could replicate the pattern on this cloth if I wanted to.

I would, however, love to be able to spend time with the Bolivian weaver of this piece of cloth and see if she has some other less laborious and more efficient way of achieving this which will no doubt have me slapping my forehead and exclaiming “Of course!” On the other hand, perhaps I am doing it just the way she does….I would love to know! Bolivian weavers think nothing of what may appear to us as extremely laborious weaving tasks….think of what they go through every time they finish a piece of warp-faced cloth with four selvedges, or the thread-by-thread pick-up that goes into weaving pieces like the red and black one you see here….

A weaving of the Jalq’a people of Potolo, Bolivia.

So, here is the piece in tencel that I wove to practice creating patterns using all three colors as outlines, background and fillers. My sample motifs got smaller and smaller as I gradually centered my focus on just some very specific aspects. These patterns are charted in my Complementary-warp Pattern Book.

The idea was to refresh my memory about this technique and, as it turned out, improve my notes for next time. But it was also about wanting to weave something using the wool I had started spinning during the Tour de Fleece. My spinning output is quite sad. I simply can’t manage to motivate make myself to devote that much time to it. I am more interested in charting and weaving. In any case, I have some yarn to use and after sampling in tencel, I was ready. I had originally planned to sample in some industrially spun wool but everything I found in the closet was either too heavy or too stretchy. I do have some Knit Picks Palette but I didn’t want to push my luck with that. The method I use has a lot of heddle action and I wasn’t sure how well the Palette would stand up to it.

A couple of wrist cuff projects seemed like a good way to start….

I used a little leaf motif that I had created for my Complementary-warp Pattern Book (slightly modified here) as well as part of a larger flower motif that I had created for the same book in the Garden-themed section.

One of the challenges for me when using this three-color technique is finding three colors that will work well together on both faces. I have a light color -white, a very dark color – black and a medium color- let’s call it tan. These three work well together. Other combinations may not. If, for example, I use two medium colors like purple and green, I can have them sit on either side of the lightest color on one face, but they will have to sit right next to each other on the other face. In that case there may not be enough contrast between the two for the pattern to be easily distinguishable.

You can see that tan and black sit right next to each other in the leaf motifs on the upper face and are separated by white on the lower face. I played with the outline color in the flower motif using both white and black as shape outlines and tan and white as the fillers.

My hand spun yarn stood up well. Admittedly, this is only a very short and narrow piece but I can tell thatf it will do well even in something much larger.

I added an eye-patterned tubular band in the same colors and then played around with different buttons for the button-and-loop closure. I love this cuff!

Next on the loom, was another cuff project using the green and purple that I mentioned above. I didn’t do any outline color-flipping in this one. Here it is getting its tubular edging. I love weaving and sewing that edging! (Check out my book if you would like to learn how to weave this patterned tubular band to use independently as jewelry, for example, as well as weave and sew it as an edging).

These are the buttons that I eventually chose…a flower one for the garden-theme and an interlocking shape to match the interlocked motifs which are charted in my pattern books.

The last thing is to braid and sew on the loops that go around the buttons to close the cuffs.

So, what’s next? While I am in wrist-cuff mode, I might make one in Finnweave. I do like to have examples of the various structures that I use in my wrist-cuff collection. I also feel motivated to spin some of the colors that I am least likely to use and then dye them so I that I can continue to play with three-color pebble. If you have suggestions for three colors that would work well together no matter how they sit in relation to each other, please let me know. I wove this wool three-color pebble some years ago in which the orange and green played well together when placed right next to each other….….and look just as good on the other face where they are separated by white.

Finally, I would like to promote my publications…in this case, the one I produced on the eye-pattern tubular band which you have seen along the edge of the cuffs I made. My ability to earn has been greatly reduced with my inability to travel to teach and book sales help to keep me afloat. Perhaps you would like to try weaving an eye-pattern tubular band. I have two versions of the book. One, which is only available as a pdf, teaches how to weave the band as an independent tube which can be used in jewelry and other accessories. Ideas are given in the book.

In addition to this, the other extended version shows you how to weave and sew the band to the edge of cloth as I have done. It also goes on to teach two other decorative finishing techniques that are used by some of my Bolivian weaving teachers. This extended version is available as a pdf and as a spiral-bound book.

Both the short and extended versions, in either pdf or book form, give access to supplementary instructional video clips and are available at Taproot Video.

I’ll be donning my masks and venturing out a bit more in the next week or so as I need to re-stock the pantry before our national elections this month. I plan on staying in and well out of the way during and after that event.

Take care and please stay safe.

Backstrap Weaving – Round and Round it Goes

‘Round and ’round it goes…..I seem to work in these sort of cycles. For example, every four years or so there’s an ikat phase. And now the Finnweave phase has come around again. I won’t be waiting four more years to get back to my ikat, though. I am just having a short Finnweave interlude while I analyze my stash. The dwindling stash situation is obliging me to think very carefully about the next Finnweave project as I only have enough of the black 20/2 thread for one more. I have tons of the gold!

So, I am thinking of having a brief three-color-reversible-Andean Pebble Weave interlude while I ponder and draw charts for my next Finnweave and ikat projects. Andean Pebble Weave is more commonly found in two colors. Having three colors appear at the same time on both faces of the cloth is a bit more challenging. This is another technique that seems to come upon me in cycles. Some years ago I wove a few trial pieces in this reversible three-color structure in 8/2 tencel. Here’s a very subtle one with yellow and light-blue figures on a blueberry background. The back has blueberry and light-blue figures on a yellow background.

And then I went to finer thread and used it in 60/2 silk in my Big Silk Wrap project combining red, brown and gold in a Celtic-knot pattern.

I even used it in an ikat project. I created these bird shapes, that I had seen in a pre-columbian textile, in ikat and then filled them in with the three-color pebble weave structure. This is 8/2 cotton.

Now I would like to weave something using my hand spun wool. I finally finished spinning the yarn that was supposed to be my Tour de Fleece challenge and I would like to use that in a three-color pebble weave project having never used my own hand spun for that structure before. It will be just something small. I am thinking about another pouch for my IPod…one I can use when the one I have now is being washed. That pouch gets SO much use!

Don’t ask me what kind of wool it is! I got some variety packs that had been put together for felters when I was visiting the guild in Melbourne. The large balls are the result of spinning the fiber from three of those packs. I guess there’s enough there for a few small projects.

But first, I will weave the structure using some commercial wool or maybe tencel so that I can get my head and hands back into this technique.

It was the same story with the Finnweave. After not having woven it for so long, it was like starting from scratch. I was just going along mechanically following the instructions I had carefully written down until a friend asked me to explain it to him. I am so glad he did because now I am able to make sense of it and understand many of the whys and wherefores. I am sure that having this will help me retain it better so that next time I won’t I have to fish out and study the written instructions to get started again.

In my last post I told you about the double filet crochet patterns that I was using for ideas in this sampler. I was disappointed that I hadn’t been able to get the lovely round shapes that the designer of those patterns was able to achieve in her work in double filet crochet.

Well, I finally managed to get that sorted out. That involved doing some serious sampling rather than just fooling around with trial and error. I was running out of warp! So I wove a pattern that would give me the opportunity to test some square shapes which then enabled me to adjust the proportions of the squares on my pattern chart. In doing so, I came up with what, to me at least, is an easier way to record and read the patterns on paper…..and….I got to weave the circle at last. I just managed to squeeze it in at the end.

What this also confirmed (and I knew this from previous pieces I had woven) is that it is not a good idea to weave large areas of solid color as the layers do not connect in those parts. It makes the finished fabric feel unstable and, as I was not using a reed to maintain sett, I found that I lost a little control of the sett in the vast area of solid black. Some warp threads started to wander out of position and way too close to their neighbors. It all seems to hold together very well as long as I am weaving pick-up patterns.

So, it is off the loom and wet-finished now. I just did some weft-twining at the ends because it is after all just a sampler and I’ll leave the fringe in its wild state. I call it a successful experiment!

Just before the circle motif you can see the pattern I wove as a study of squares and thick and thin vertical lines. I found this pattern as I was looking around online. First it showed up as a filet crochet pattern and then I found it as a cross stitch pattern. The addresses of the websites are on the photos…..

‘Round and ’round it goes….this pattern gets to live a new life as a Finnweave pattern! I made some small changes to it for the purpose of my study.

While on the topic of circles….this time along the lines of the “circle of life”, I have some news to share via my friend Dorinda on little Zuni and young Veronica up in the highlands of Cochabamba. Back in 2011 when I visited and wove with Maxima, her little granddaughter Zuni kept us company. Her voice is a part of almost all the videos I shot on that visit!

In this photo from that 2011 visit, I am watching Maxima weave a on a warp she has suspended on her toe while, Zuni plays at spinning, imitating the motions that she has seen played out around her during her entire young life.

Dorinda tells me that Zuni is now learning to weave…

As for Veronica…. you may remember her from my last visit when she completed her second band on the finger-and-toe warp…

She is now learning to weave on the leaning frame loom on which the weavers in this area of Bolivia weave their wide pieces. Maybe she will be able to join the co-op producing yoga-mat straps and earn a little money along the way.

Both Dorinda and I wonder when we will be able to safely travel to visit these ladies again. Apart from the obvious problem with Covid, we have national elections here next month. You may remember that the attempt to hold them in October 2019 was a disaster which resulted in Evo Morales fleeing into exile. With the pandemic happening in the middle of all that political turmoil, the new election date has been postponed twice. Another postponement won’t be tolerated and so we will see how it goes in a country where voting is mandatory and there is no such thing as a mail-in ballot.

And here’s a reminder to take a look at the blog that Dorinda writes on all that is happening in weaving, spinning and dyeing in the lives of these ladies up the Cochabamba highlands. The first week of October is Spinning Week and Dorinda has written about their preparations.

I’d like to show you some projects from my inbox to finish this post…

KathyO is weaving the viscacha pattern that is in my Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms book. This book teaches the technique via step-by-step pictures, detailed explanations and video clips and includes a collection of pattern charts. The viscacha is a chinchilla-like animal that is found in the Andes and it shows up in various forms on the textiles that are woven here. I just found an image of a pre-columbian textile that has a viscacha figure in the Finnweave structure that I am currently studying.

One of the things I emphasize in my Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms book is how easy it is to design your own patterns in this structure. Terry Martin’s 9-year old granddaughter sat by her side as she wove and created these butterfly patterns. Then she sat by and called out the pick-up numbers as Terry wove!

Nancy Ayton has also been designing and has moved on to wider warps to weave her original pattern of diamonds in warp-faced double weave. This is another book that comes accompanied by instructional video clips.

Here’s another Andean Pebble Weave band by KathyO using 12-thread patterns from the Inkle Loom book as well as a few from some of my other pattern books. I like her use of black weft which places decorative black dots along the red edges of her band.

Lori Gayle is weaving from the double weave book and is making a nice sampler of the 12-thread patterns.

As for backstrap-loom weavers, Kristen showed us the kaku obi that she wove using her own handspun linen and hemp. Too beautiful for words! She is wearing it around a vintage kimono.

I’ll leave you with a close-up of this beautiful cloth and the feeling of space and calm that it brings. Please stay safe and well.