Tag: finnweave

Backstrap Weaving – The Seed of an Idea

I would say that many of my ideas for my weaving projects are born from having found something of interest in woven cloth that I have seen in books or online or in-person in my travels. It may be a particular pattern, a certain color combination or a technique. An example would be my wanting to experiment with the ikat technique again after having seen how it is used in many of the beautiful textiles of Indonesia.

Other times the idea for a project might be based on wanting to use a structure that I have learned with my indigenous weaving teachers to produce motifs and patterns that are not at all like the ones that my teachers use.

Or, they could be about practicing a method of construction, like cloth that has four selvedges or cloth that has a built-in pocket. (at left)

Some projects are just about challenging myself to weave on my backstrap loom using the finest threads that are available to me and/or to weave something wider or longer than I have managed before.

I rarely weave anything simply because I have a real need for the finished product. I have something on the loom now that I am enjoying weaving but I have no idea what it will be when it is finished.

There have been times when ideas have come out of the blue from the strangest of places. One such time was when I was traveling on an American Airlines flight and spotted this in the in-flight magazine…

This gave me the idea of creating shapes on a warp using the ikat technique and then filling in the shapes with pick-up patterns. I started with a small circle to test the idea….

…but didn’t have the confidence at that point to go from there directly to large curved shapes. What if successfully creating this first circle was just a fluke? I played it safe and continued with something very angular….

The horizontal lines are outlined with  cross-knit loop stitch.

And then came the bigger circles….

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

It’s funny that these projects grew from that chance encounter with an ad as I flicked through the in-flight magazine. I still have that ripped-out page pinned to my notice board in the kitchen. It reminds me that one day I will return to this particular challenge.

Another unusual thing that pushed me towards returning to ikat on a different occasion was the appearance of these ikat-like patterns in the way the layers of dark and light threads were interacting in a fresh warp on my loom…

And I remember another time when light was having an effect on the shapes that appeared on my fresh warp. That time I was seeing fine swirling lines that reminded me of the lines on Shipibo textiles and pottery. I didn’t manage to photograph that.

That led to this big double-weave project in which I enclosed fine curve-like lines within heavier angular shapes….

I haven’t had any visions on my fresh warp threads lately! And so, I draw inspiration from more conventional sources. My latest project involves using a balanced double-weave pick-up structure.

I have chosen to use the Finnweave structure because this particular balanced double-weave pick-up structure was used in fabric in old Peru. I was fortunate to find a couple of fragments of pre-columbian cloth that were woven using this structure. They were stitched to dolls that are sometimes sold in the various tourist markets in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. These dolls are modeled on cloth figures that were buried with members of the Chancay culture in the arid coastal regions of Peru about six hundred years ago. Some of them have even made their way all the way over to Santa Cruz Bolivia where I live. I found these in one of the typical kitschy souvenir stores in the center of the city.

The large doll in the center has a fragment of this balanced double-weave cloth. The easiest way for me to distinguish finnweave from other kinds of balanced double-weave pick-up structures is by looking at the back of the fabric. Finnweave does not produce two identical faces. Some shapes on the back resemble the corresponding shape on the front more closely than others. The back always looks a little strange.

I tried to chart a replica of the pattern of the cloth that was sewn to the largest doll. I think I got a lot of it right. Some bits need adjustment. Then I was able to weave it and compare the back of the two pieces of fabric. I made it a bit confusing for myself by arranging the dark and light colors in my piece opposite to the way they are arranged on the fragment.

Now, I would like to leave replicas aside and just play with the structure. The motifs that can be created with it are based on vertical and horizontal lines and so it is quite different to some of the other patterning structures that I use, like Andean Pebble Weave, in which pattern shapes are very much based on diagonals. Finnweave allows me to create true vertical lines of any length, rather than the slightly wavy ones that other structures I use produce.

So, I showed you in my last blog post the sampler that I have been weaving. My piece is not truly balanced. It is definitely warp dominant and I don’t like the fact that I am not getting some of the square shapes that I have created on my pattern charts. My charted square shapes come out as oblongs on the cloth. I will figure out how to use one of my bamboo reeds for the next attempt and hopefully get everything squared off. I had managed quite well without a reed when my projects had been in 8/2 cotton (the replica piece above is in 8/2 cotton). The 20/2 cotton that I am now using is proving to be more challenging in that regard.

I think I mentioned in my last post that thoughts of the wrought-iron work that I saw on Victorian-era terraced houses in the inner city suburbs of Melbourne keep coming to mind as I weave this piece. The problem is that those patterns are for the most part curved! Why would I be thinking of those when I am limited to verticals and horizontals when using this structure?

And then came some inspiration in the form of ….crochet! I honestly can’t remember when I first saw the work of crochet and knit designer and artist Svetlana Rogatykh on Instagram. I don’t even know why I would have been looking at pages associated with these two crafts.  Is it just a coincidence that she is using black and gold in some of her work and that I am too, or did I see her work a long time ago and have it somehow sew the seed of an idea without my even realizing? The only colors I have in this 20/2 cotton are black, gold and bleached white so it’s not like I have much choice.

Here is one of Svetlana’s pieces….

When I first saw this image on the tiny screen of my iPod, I thought…oh, cool…finnweave! I was struck by the way she had used vertical and horizontal lines to create the impression of curves in one of these motifs. The accompanying description was in Russian and it was only when I started looking at Svetlana’s other photos and video clips that I realized that this was in fact crochet. Maybe this technique is well known in the crochet world but I had never seen it before. Apparently, it goes by several names, a couple of which are Interlocking Crochet and Double Filet Crochet. From what I can tell, it is two independent layers of filet crochet, one in black and one in gold, that connect when there is an exchange of colors between the two layers…just like the double weave I am doing.

Here’s another image of Svetlana’s project. Look at those circles!

I think that Svetlana’s designs are amazing. These patterns can be translated directly to the finnweave charting paper that I am using. However, on my cloth they would come out very elongated because my work is warp-dominant. You will be able to see my attempt at Svetlana’s round motif in the photo I posted earlier. I had to alter it to make it shorter but even so, I ended up with an oval shape. This is very good incentive for me to get out my reeds and aim for a better balance in my epi and ppi. I think that I might still have to adapt just a little depending on how my cloth changes after wet-finishing.

You can find Svetlana on Ravelry as SvetaRo and see more of her work in crochet and machine-knitting. As mentioned, she is also on Instagram as svetalna_svero. Many thanks to Kate Dudman who introduced us on Ravelry.

So, maybe I can apply some of Svetlana’s tricks for creating an illusion of curves to the wrought-iron patterns I hope to represent. If not, oh well…there are always lots of leaf patterns  to design!

I have only woven one more motif on the finnweave piece in the two weeks since I last posted. Where did the time go? Well, I was working for the most part on my Zoom presentations and workshops as well as combing through years of old photos to choose the best ones to accompany an article that I was asked to write. That sort of thing always tends to lead one down memory lane. Just like I got lost in my tool drawers recently, I got lost in pictures on discs and thumb drives.

And then I went back further in time to my pre-digital days when my weaving pictures would get printed and then pasted into my hand-made books. I originally pulled out the books because I had wanted to photograph some of  my bone and wooden weaving tools and I thought that covers of the books would make a good backdrop. But then I went and opened one of the books and that was the end of that…the rest of the day was devoted to reading and remembering!

I would make a book every time I learned something new with my indigenous teachers here in South America and Guatemala and would wait excitedly for the rolls of film to be processed so that I could document everything I had learned. These books are full of my little woven samples, drawings, diagrams, photos and yarn and fiber samples….lots of textures…dating back to the mid 1990’s.

Getting a digital camera that allowed me to record video kind of put an end to all that. I did weave what was to be the cover of the book (see below) on the techniques I had learned with my teachers from the Vietnamese hill tribes in 2010  but that was as far as I got with that. By that time I was already writing about my travels on this blog and putting together instructions in pdfs to teach others.

I still have some Zoom presentation work to do but I hope to spend more time at the loom in these next weeks. I am keeping busy and staying home despite the fact that restrictions here are gradually being eased.

Take care and stay safe, please.

 

 

 

 

Backstrap Weaving – The Third Drawer

You may recall from my last post that I have been allowing myself the luxury of taking the time to go through the four-drawer chest that holds my backstrap weaving tools and other weaving-related stuff. It’s not about organizing or down-sizing. It’s simply about enjoying touching and looking at the individual pieces and remembering how I had acquired them.

The top drawer with all the rods is the fullest and I had been congratulating myself on my brilliant idea of buying this chest of drawers and how well everything had fit inside when I suddenly remembered that I have at least seventeen more loom rods in the bag that I take traveling with me when I teach. If I have ever crossed paths with you in my travels, you may remember the big green monster of a wheely bag that I drag around with all my weaving stuff inside. Oh well, those rods can just stay where they are in the hope that it won’t be too, too long before that bag and I get to hit the road again. 

The third drawer in the chest ended up being almost as absorbing as the first two. That drawer is where all my samples and many of my finished pieces come to rest. Some of the samples are actually still on their little loom as there is always the vague idea that one day I’ll continue the piece and make it into something.

For example, there’s the sample of the paisley pattern that I designed in warp-faced double weave. I am certainly not going to toss that out! There’s enough unwoven warp to continue this and make some sort of little pouch. It’s woven in 60/2 silk. It is kind of a gift for those times when I am between projects and at the charting and planning stage but still would like to weave something. This warp is all set up and heddled and ready to go! 

I fished out some of my black wrist cuffs from the bags of finished objects. where they sit waiting for me to go out some place and wear them…

My left arm has a warp-faced double-weave piece in size 3 crochet cotton. If you like the look of that and the pattern, it is included in my book Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms. Next to it is an Andean Pebble Weave pattern in 60/2 silk. That pattern appears in my More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns book. The one nearest my wrist on my right arm is a leaf pattern I designed and wove in DMC #12 thread (pattern from my Complementary-warp Pattern Book). It’s edged with an eye-pattern tubular band (from the book of the same name). Last of all is a cuff woven in Mora wool. It’s  20/2 worsted-spun yarn that is fabulous for bands (pattern from Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms). That cuff is also edged with an eye-pattern tubular band.

Sometimes, a piece that was meant purely as a sample will totally take hold of my imagination and be transformed into something truly useful. I remember taking some of my first timid steps in ikat about ten years ago. I had tried ikat some years before this on a larger scale and had not been too happy with the results. On this occasion I was not willing to invest a lot of time and materials in something that most likely wouldn’t work out and so I just tied a very simple ikat motif along the length of two narrow strips of warp to give me white on brick-red motifs. Then I included them in a wider warp.

I figured that the ikat might fail and that, in any case, the piece would be really plain and uninteresting and not worth keeping. For that reason, I planned to include some figures in supplementary weft. That would give me a chance to weave some motifs that I had photographed on a piece that a friend of mine had bought in Bhutan. The piece would have a dual purpose as a sample in that case. If the ikat failed, I would still have the information on the supplementary-weft motifs that I could use in a future project. I used a single-faced supplementary-weft technique as you can see above.

The ikat was just “okay” in my book. There was a bit too much of the “railroad track” shifting that I don’t much like. However, the large supplementary-weft motifs really shifted focus away from that and I was really happy with the silky smoothness of those. I was left wishing that I had woven something larger that could have been made into something. You could tell that I had had very little faith in this being successful as I had only wound a warp that gave me around 16′ of cloth. So, I wove another piece of similar length in all-black, a long narrow strap with more supplementary-weft motifs and yet another short piece that I was able to cut into a curve and edge with a tubular band. Pieced together by hand and with an added zip, all those pieces became a bag. I really don’t know much about sewing and just make it up as I go along. It worked.

So, I guess all the bits and pieces of sample cloth that I have stuffed into that drawer could very well become something if I put my mind to it. The failed samples were tossed out after I took notes on what had gone wrong. It seems to me that when one’s stash is dwindling, one needs to use some imagination in order to continue being creative. No need to worry yet….I do actually still have a lot of yarn to play with. By the time my supplies get really low, I am sure that my local yarn store will be open and operating again. 

Another example was the gorgeous hand-dyed reeled silk warp that Sara Lamb had given me to play with. I enjoyed weaving it. I loved seeing and feeling how it transformed after wet-finishing and I highly valued the fact that it had come to me from Sara……but, then what?

How could this just be left neglected at the bottom of the sample drawer? I cut into it, all the while with my heart in my mouth, and made a quirky yurt-shaped bag. The round base that I cut out is edged with a plain-weave tubular band.

I even wove some accessories using some 60/2 spun silk that I had in similar colors. It’s funny how a sample can just keep growing and growing into a much larger production.

So, let’s see now what that double-weave paisley piece that I showed earlier grows into.

So, if the wheely bag and I can’t leave and go visiting  weaving friends, it is probably time to take some steps to see if we can bring the weaving friends here via Zoom. And, I have been doing a fair bit of that lately. I am very grateful to the guilds that have allowed me to visit as a guest during some of my trips to the USA and who have been just as willing to give me a guest pass via Zoom. I also have a lovely group of volunteers who have been helping me test my efforts to teach via Zoom. Kinks are slowly getting ironed out and it has been a lot of fun. If you would like to know more about my Zoom programs, please leave a comment on this blog or PM me via Facebook or Instagram.

Here I am at my “Zoom station” using a tapestry that I wove way back in 1995 as my back-drop. Speaking of cutting into things with one’s heart in one’s mouth….after this Zoom meeting, I finally got out the scissors and chopped back my hair. The very last of the dyed dark brown is gone!

It is weird that I can Zoom with folks in the States and enjoy beautiful clear images of all them, while Zooming with my best friend who lives a mere fifteen blocks away from me here in Santa Cruz is a blurry, fuzzy experience. It is also interesting to note that my internet service here in Bolivia may actually be better than some of the services to which my friends in the States in more rural areas subscribe. I count my lucky stars.

Here’s some progress on my Finnweave piece. Finnweave is one kind of balanced double-weave pick-up technique. If I weave it without creating pick-up patterns, I would get a black upper layer of balanced plain-weave and a gold lower layer of balanced plain-weave (or vice versa). The two layers will not connect at all unless I intertwine the two colors of weft as they pass each other at the edges. I am in fact intertwining them so that the edges are not open. I can exchange colors between the two layers to create these patterns. When doing so, the layers connect at those points of exchange. I created a pattern of leaves (of course!)

Here’s a picture of the warp with its four sets of string heddles. Two heddles hold the two sets of black threads that form the upper layer and the other two hold the two sets of gold threads.

Something about the lines in these patterns kept taking my mind back to the beautiful wrought-iron work on the Victorian-era terraced houses that I saw when I was on teaching trips in Melbourne, Australia. I stayed with Ruth in North Carlton where these houses seem to be particularly numerous and well-preserved. There’s an example pictured below. It is odd because the wrought-iron patterns are mostly made up of curves whereas the Finnweave patterns are very angular so I am not sure why my mind keeps taking me there. I would still like to try to represent them in some way in Finnweave. When I have finished this piece, I’ll get out the charting paper and work on that. Right now I feel like I am still sampling and testing to see how my charted figures appear on the cloth.

I followed the motif of leaves that I created with some “flowers”….

I got the idea for this flower motif from a piece of crochet that I saw on Instagram that had been created by a lady in Russia. I can only do the most elementary kind of crochet. I saw images of work that seemed to be done in a double crochet in that there were two layers which, in the same way as I described for the double-weave structure that I am using, only connect when colors are exchanged between the layers. The motifs in this particular crochet technique have the same kinds of lines that I create in Finnweave. The fact that the crochet piece had been done in black and gold was what had first attracted my attention. I adapted one of the motifs to Finnweave. The motif had to be changed quite a lot because an exact copy would result in a figure that was way too elongated and, I suspect, and not flower-like at all. 

The next motif is my invention of leaves lying on their sides and I am now in the midst of a flower-like motif of my own design. You know, pretty much everything you weave in this structure ends up looking quite good even if it doesn’t really look like what you originally intended. The so-called flower motif that I am currently weaving will most likely not look like a flower at all to anyone else but I think that it will still look nice. I am having fun with this. The patterns are very easy to read and producing them requires less counting and concentration than weaving pick-up patterns in other structures that I use. The fiddly part is managing the four sets of heddles and maintaining the sett.

I’ll finish here with a couple of blasts from the past. When the future is so uncertain and it is almost impossible to make plans, I guess we tend to spend more and more time thinking back and enjoying memories. Facebook took me back recently to 2009 which was the last of the eleven years that I had spent teaching English at the Centro Boliviano Americano here in Santa Cruz. The picture below shows one of the many groups that I worked with in that last year.

In this same week of August in 2009, I took a chance and handed in my resignation so that I could see what I could do with my passion….weaving on a backstrap loom…. However, it didn’t take me long to realize that teaching was actually another passion from which I couldn’t walk away. I found a way to combine the two through tutorials on this blog, through my books, through my participation in online forums such as Ravelry and by connecting in my travels with weavers around the world. I hope that Zoom will be able to add yet another possibility to my ability to combine these two passions.

Stay safe, please and see you next time…..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Backstrap Weaving – At the Bottom of the Tool Box

Last year I decided that something had to be done about my collection of backstrap weaving tools. This picture was taken back in 2016 and I can assure you that between then and 2019, the collection had grown with the bins being replaced by larger ones and the addition of yet another. My smaller tools were getting lost at the bottom, things I hadn’t used for a while were getting dusty and one of the bins was top heavy and inclined to topple over. It was time to make a change.

I bought a four-drawer chest. I won’t show it to you because it was kind of cheap and nasty. It did the trick. The top drawer holds all the beams…the round ones, the square ones, the split beams and all the shed rods and heddle rods in their various lengths and girths. Some of the beams have carved ends. Some don’t, and just have rubber bands at their ends to hold the backstrap in position. The beams that support the two ends of the warp are pretty much all around the same length. It’s the sticks that go between that vary greatly depending on the width of the piece I am weaving.

The second drawer that hold the swords and shuttles is my favorite and it’s in that drawer that I can often get lost in nostalgia. One of my favorite parts of the set-up process for a new project is selecting just the right swords for the job. Sometimes, I’ll need two or three. Sometimes they need to be hefty, other times slim. Sometimes I like to have them in two distinctly different colors of wood. It’s easier to select and pick up dark threads when they are sitting on top of a light sword and vice versa. I love projects that require multiple swords as I enjoy the clack-clack sound that they make as they bump against each other in the warp or when I remove them and place them in a pile by my side.

The red, black and white project at left, which I wove some years ago, was woven in a fairly dense structure in 8/2 cotton which meant that I got to use one of my heftier swords.

The teal silk project was the first I had woven in a width that was too great for my standard beams. I got to use an extra long rod that I happened to have for the near beam (it had been a particularly long shed rod in a Guatemalan loom that I had been given) and cut some dowel for the other end.

That long beam came in handy again when I wove these two wool panels that were sewn together to make a lap blanket. The structure was less dense which meant that I chose to use lighter swords. I needed several because I was working with multiple sets of heddles.

Here are some swords in vastly different sizes for different kinds of projects…Above, you can see two swords that are the biggest and smallest in a collection of six that make up the standard set used by my weaving teachers in Salasaca, Ecuador. Below, you can see one of the big boys alongside the very first band-weaving sword that I was given to me to use by one of my teachers in Peru. That sword has become bent out of shape with use over the twenty-four years that I have owned it.

While selecting tools for my current project, I found myself sitting on the floor surrounded by swords and shuttles enjoying trips down many memory lanes as I recalled the places I had been when I had acquired a certain piece, the people I had been with, or the person who had made the tool or given it to me. If there is anything good to be said about the times in which we are currently living, it is that I allow myself the time to do things like this.

I laid out just some of the pieces for a photograph before they got returned to the pile in the drawer.

There are swords that I have bought from, or have been given by, my weaving teachers. Others were given to me by my weaving students. There’s a lovely collection of five band-weaving swords on the left that came to me via two of my Australian students and which are made from different woods that are native to Australia. The tool with its label still attached is some kind of spatula made from sassafras wood from Tasmania. One of these days I will bevel the edge and use it as a sword.

The sword with the pretty carved pattern was made by Allen Berry and given to me by my students. You will see a shawl pin (another gift) and a hair stick that are being repurposed as pick-up sticks along with others in wood and bone. Some of these came from trades that I made with my indigenous teachers in the highlands and lowlands. A lovely fine sword in olive wood sits above the hefty one and was made and given to me by a student. There’s one very fine sword in that lot that came with a Guatemalan loom I was given. I treasure that one when I am weaving a piece with four selvedges.

I love my ice cream-stick shuttles and there’s a quirky little shuttle-like thing near the spatula which is actually supposed to hold fishing line. I found it in an antique store while on a road trip in Australia with a weaving friend.

This is just a basic outline of the “wheres” and the “whos” behind those pieces.. Of course, all the pieces hold stories and fond memories that go much deeper than these brief descriptions.

This piece sitting on top of one of my ikat experiments from years back, is the one that started the whole nostalgia trip! It was well and truly lost at the bottom of the drawer. This is my oldest home-made tool. It is ugly, grubby and unimpressive, right? It started its life at three times this length as my attempt to make a shuttle for the Navajo-style tapestry pieces that I was weaving back in 1995. Once I discovered backstrap weaving, I knew that I was unlikely to continue making tapestries. The shuttle got cut down and roughly beveled and started its new life as a sword and beater. I love it. You can see the darkened ends where my hands have grasped it to beat the weft into place. I wish it were long enough to use in my latest project. It’s been hidden away for far too long.

The third drawer in the chest holds many of my weaving samples and some of the finished pieces. The last one is full of all those odd bits and pieces….cable ties, turn buckles, cord, backstraps, reeds, rigid heddles, band clamps, umbrella ribs, bicycle spokes, rubber bands, dpns….you get the idea.  I can reach over and open it while still seated at my backstrap loom and dig out just the right little piece of equipment that I need.

As for progress on my latest project, I washed the finnweave sample that I showed you last week and was happy with the way it looked and felt. I figured that the sett I had used had been good. I have two pre-colombian balanced-double-weave textile fragments and it’s amazing how these two pieces that both have exactly the same pattern are so different in appearance. It’s almost like one got washed and the other never did…

Cloth that is woven using the finnweave structure has a very distinctive look on the back. A comparison of the back of the sample that I wove a few years ago as a replica of these fragments and the backs of these very fragments confirmed that I was using the same balanced-double-weave structure that the weavers who produced this cloth had been using in pre-colombian times.

Here’s my washed and pressed sample alongside the new finnweave warp and my selection of tools. I later added a light-colored sword to that set when I realized that picking-up black threads on a dark background wasn’t going to work for me.

Backstrap loom warps are often left just lying on the ground while the weaver is off doing something else. In their limp state they can often look like a freaky mess…

Place the backstrap around the hips, place tension on the threads and everything immediately looks friendlier!

And friendlier still once the heddles are in place…

I often read comments in online groups from people who wonder what happens to the warp on a backstrap loom if you have to get up and do something. They think that surely all the sticks must fall out once you relax tension. No, they don’t. The kinds of heddles that I make grip the sticks to which they are attached. I can tilt and shake that warp about knowing that those sticks are going nowhere. Nor is my shed rod which is tied to a second cross stick. My far beam is lashed to the bottom of my bed and the near end of the warp is safely lashed to its beam. It might look like an ugly mess on the floor but it’s all under control!

Probably the worst that can happen is tripping on the weft as you walk away. That’s like pulling on a drawstring which totally rumples up the fabric.

For that reason. I am now in the habit of parking my shuttles, in this case two, on top of the fabric at the base of the warp before I remove my backstrap and place the near beam gently down on the floor. You can see the nice light-colored sword that is sitting under my black threads. And, there nestled between the two swords is the sweetest little tool that I am using to help pick-up the threads. My student, Claire, made that and gave it to me when I was visiting in Tasmania. It was cut from a stick from an apple tree. You might know that Tasmania is often referred to as the “Apple Isle”. 

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You will notice that I have managed to get through this post so far without any reference to my books! Until now!! Those who have been following my blog over the years will realize that my travel-to-teach lifestyle can no longer be. Fortunately, I can continue teaching and showing you things through my blog posts. I try to illustrate with as many pictures as possible. I know that not everyone wants to read all the text and that just being able to scroll through some eye-candy is also nice.

And, there’s also teaching via my books which gives me an income. So, I will leave you here with a little bit about my latest books and hope that you may feel inspired to make a purchase. And to all those who already have….THANK YOU!

 

One of the features of my most recent publications is the inclusion of supplemental instructional video clips.

I know that some people like to have movements and steps frozen in images. Others like to have detailed written instructions that help them to visualize the process. And others like to hear the instructions while watching the movements on video. Some people tell me that they hear my voice in their heads as they weave.

I like to include all three options so that I can satisfy a variety of learning styles. Apart from the instructional video clips, I include some “just weaving” clips so that you can also watch the movements in silence without interruption.

All my books are available at Taproot Video as PDFs. The titles in English are also available as spiral-bound books.

 

 

 

Backstrap Weaving – Staying Balanced

One part of me is crying out for more ikat while another part is telling me to take a break, process what I have learned so far, and then head back in. I am really pleased with my latest ikat piece, mainly because I don’t have to add the familiar footnote: ”The colors didn’t turn out anything like I had expected them to”. This time I mixed my dyes…two kinds of blue with a blue-grey…and got very close to what I had in mind. Can I replicate it? Probably not. I am using such small quantities and don’t have the equipment with which to measure them. All I have is the tiny spoon that comes with the Stevia. 

In my last post, I showed you the warp extended on my backstrap loom. I told you how I was getting “railroad tracks” and had unwoven to see if I could do anything about it. No, there wasn’t a fix that I could see so off I went again with the weaving satisfied that I had at least tried.

As I mentioned in my last post, I believe the “railroad track” effect is due to the two layers of warp threads being slightly misaligned. I think that they got misaligned when I folded the warp in half to set it up on the frame where I wrap it with plastic. This is only the second time that I have folded the warp to halve its length. Other times I have either folded it in half to halve its width or not folded it at all.

This is the other project where I folded the warp in half. You can just see the two horizontal bars of white on either side of the center. That’s where I tied tape to secure the layers before I folded it. I think that’s the key and not doing that might be where I went wrong in this latest piece. I’ll just have to do another and test this theory! 

I was pleased that the pattern in my latest piece came out balanced, that is, my warp threads were quite evenly spaced across the width of the piece. Many things about this piece make me very happy! 

I say that the threads were “quite” evenly spaced because there is some tell-tale exposure of the supplementary weft in some parts where I added a motif in the center of the piece. 

I created a little motif in supplementary weft that would suit the ikat shapes. The hardest part of this was creating and placing a motif that would fit exactly in the available space. So, I had to start weaving the motif at just the right moment, make sure that I got to the center of the motif when I had reached the center of the warp and make sure that I maintained an even beat so that the two halves of the motif were balanced. The horizontal center line is created by wrapping the supplementary weft around equally spaced warp threads….it looks like chain stitch and is a method I learned from my teachers in Guatemala. I couldn’t use the usual inlay technique for an uninterrupted line like that because the resulting float would be way too long.

The Guatemalan weavers use this chain-like “stitch” in their figures to form things like the brim of a hat, a bird’s beak, the base of a skirt, a wing, or a plant and feet. You can see some examples below in the piece I wove with my teacher in Guatemala. 

Weavers in Bhutan also use it although they execute it in a slightly different way. My friend Wendy Garrity uses it in her work.

Here I am nearing the end. You can see the railroad tracks. I am thinking that in certain motifs, this effect could actually enhance a pattern but using it in that way would require being in control of when and where it occurs. I can’t see myself being able to do that!

Here it is fresh off the loom before being washed and pressed good and hard. It’s just the right size to hang on the narrow bit of dividing wall between my living/dining room and kitchen. However, I think I’ll be saving all my wall hangings for the time in some distant future when I am able to move back to Australia.

So, that marks the end of the experiments with un-dyed 60/2 silk for the time being. I’ve run out of thread. I’ll be spending some time now looking at my stash of colored 60/2 silk and the remains of my un-dyed 30/2 silk to see what kind of ikat project comes next.

As I said earlier, part of me is saying that I should take a break and do something else. I saw some work in striking black and gold by a Russian artist online that, at first glance, looked like Finnweave. When I read her descriptions, I saw that it was in fact crochet! It seemed to me that the motifs could be quite easily replicated in Finnweave. That is, if I could remember how to do Finnweave! I don’t weave this structure very much and have to go back to my notes each and every time I want to try it. My notes are scribblings of information taken from various sources including the Baizerman and Cahlander book on double weave structures and an article by David Xenakis in an old Prairie Wool Companion. 

This is the last thing I wove in Finnweave….It’s in 8/2 cotton and has motifs that I saw on belts made by Otomi weavers in Mexico.

I set up the warp with multiple heddles. It’s the only one of the balanced structures that I have tried that I am able to successfully weave without using a reed to maintain sett.

It’s a double weave. Two balanced plain-weave layers are being woven…one dark and one light. They are connected when there is an exchange of colors between the two layers, that is, when you create a pick-up pattern. You can see the dark and light layers separated in this picture….

For all other work in balanced structures, I use one of the lovely bamboo reeds that I have. I have two wide ones and one small one. The small one is the finest.

Recently, I used the small one with my 30/2 silk as I test to see if perhaps one day I could dabble in weft ikat.

A couple of years ago I was using the larger reeds for my experiments with cotton sheer cloth and weft inlay…

This is what the cloth looked like after being washed….

I experimented with weaving a small piece without a reed (because the reed was too cumbersome for this width) and using a flea comb to beat!…It was somewhat successful but there’s no need to mess around with this on wider pieces when you have a reed, is there?

I think the first piece I ever wove using one of the bamboo reeds was this shadow weave piece from many years ago…

It’s fiddly reaching and working with multiple heddle rods behind the reed and I am grateful that Finnweave, with its need for multiple heddle rods, works for me without the need for a reed. 

When I saw the black and gold crocheted piece that I mentioned earlier, I was reminded that my friend Betty had given me two cones of 20/2 cotton…one black and one gold. Perfect! So, I set out to weave a width sample.

The finest thread I have used for Finnweave so far has been 8/2. I needed a new sample in 20/2.

My first sample was cute but way too small to really give me a reliable measurement. I will probably return to it some time and weave a wrist cuff so that I have another structure to add to my wrist cuff collection.  I used it to also test the proportions of some shapes I was panning to use in a bigger project.

I then created a wider warp.

There was a bit of a wobbly start as I got back into the rhythm of the moves and working out how best to interlock the weft threads when working with two shuttles. The lower pattern is from bags that are woven by Otomi weavers in Mexico. The pattern that I am starting is part of a motif from a piece I photographed in the National Museum of the American Indian in D.C way back in 2007, also from a textile woven in Mexico. I have doubled it and added a motif in between.

Although I am able to stop the warp threads from drifting together and making the piece warp-faced, you can see that the sett is not equal. The motif on the right is wider than the one on the left….something to work on. The motifs at the weaving line that I am just starting to weave are some basic leaves that I created. Of course, there had to be leaves! I am pleased with the way this is turning out. I am anxious to see how it all comes together after wet-finishing and am hoping that the black is color-fast. I am so used to the what-you-see-is-what-you-get nature of warp-faced weaving, that it is hard to wait until the wet-finish to discover how this will really look and feel. The 20/2 thread is not hard to work with . It is helpful that the threads are paired in Finnweave and so the units that I need to pick up for the pattern are easy to see. 

Doramay Keasby wrote a nice article in Handwoven Jan/Feb 2011 in which she compared five types of double weave pick-up structures. She noted that Finnweave gave the smoothest pattern (that is, no feathering along horizontal or vertical lines. Feathering along horizontal lines look like icicles hanging off the end of a roof and can be a pretty effect) but is not double faced. So, you wouldn’t want to use it for something in which you would like both faces of the cloth to be admired. There is pattern on the reverse but it is rather odd looking.

So, that’s what has kept me busy and sane these last couple of weeks. That, and another Zoom meeting with some weavers along with my attempts to learn some new juggling tricks. I confess that I didn’t get too far with my spinning in the Tour de Fleece. I plied one lot of the green I was spinning and got through the purple. But, I am motivated to do some three-color pebble with this yarn and just need to keep that goal in sight. I am not adding extra twist as some people do for wool that is destined for warp-faced weaving. I just don’t like the way the “tight” thread feels and I would rather just adjust the technique I use to operate the loom to account for a softer yarn.

The messages that I get from online friends are a big help in these unsettled times too! Keep them coming. Please never feel shy about contacting me with questions. I include an email address in all my publications for that very reason. Or, you can write to me via a comment on this blog. The comments go into moderation before they are approved for publication so you can ask me not to publish, if you like. 

Here are some projects from my online weaving friends….

Annette Giles has created a nice set of wrist cuffs using the warp-faced double weave structure that she learned in my book. I see that she added a touch or two of her own to some of the patterns. That’s a good first step toward designing one’s own motifs.

Judy Lepthien has also been using my Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms book and has already started creating some patterns of her own.

Wendy sent me a picture of the piece that she wove on a backstrap loom and sewed into a pillow. She tells me that she had some trouble handling the wider warp with the multi-sword pick-up technique that I teach in my Complementary-warp Pick-up book and so she went back to a narrower band to practice it some more. Then she was able to better handle this wider piece. The pattern is one used by weavers in the community of Chinchero, Peru.

Josefin Waltin has been using her own hand spun and hand dyed yarn to weave fabric on a backstrap loom. She used this fabric to make a sweet bag….

Carlos Vargas has been working with un-mercerized cotton on his backstrap loom to make some beautiful fabric too.. He said that he worked out a way to operate the loom so that there was not too much abrasion of the un-mercerized cotton. If not handled well, un-mercerized cotton can create a mess of fluff in the heddles and make it impossible to create clear sheds. Backstrap weavers need to have different strategies up their sleeves to allow them to work with a variety of materials. It would be a shame to have to be limited to only the smoothest and friendliest of materials…only mercerized cotton and only very tightly spun wool, for example.

It’s nice to finish this post admiring Josefin and Carlos’ soothing colors.

Take care, please and I’ll see you again soon.