Tag: garabata

Backstrap Weaving – Garabatá!

Heads-up: Much of this post is dedicated to the Ayoreo looped stitching that I’ve been studying with my teacher here but yes, there’s also a bit of backstrap loom weaving thrown in here and there.

I’ve been back in Santa Cruz for a while now after my trip to see my highland teachers. I got straight back to studying the textile crafts of the lowlands. While I still haven’t managed to get together with my Ayoreo teacher to learn how to spin the lovely bundle of garabatá fiber that she got for me, I’ve still been busily scavenging all the spun garabatá thread that I can find so that I can continue to practice, practice, practice.

There’s probably a few years of spinning in that bundle….for me, anyway, as a beginner.

You may remember that I’d taken a few lengths of spun garabatá thread with me to the highlands to throw into the indigo pot. It was such a small amount. I had to think carefully about how to best use it.

The bundles in the top left corner are the indigo-dyed ones.

I decided to try to copy the pattern on an Ayoreo bag that I’d bought which had been made with what looks to me to be a combination of Dosapey and Chiqueno pattern. The Chiqueno pattern is the fine-lined diamond shape. For all I know, this combination of figures has another name altogether and identifies another clan. I’ll have to ask Rocío next time I see her. So far, I only know the two patterns that identify the Dosapey and Chequeno clans. Rocío tells me that the techniques used to produce those two can be used in various combinations to create all the other patterns. Right now I have my eye on a pattern on a bag stitched by a Wichi artisan of Argentina which doesn’t seem to be one used by the Ayoreo here in Bolivia.

While it was interesting figuring out how to combine the two patterns, in the end I didn’t think it was the best way to showcase the indigo thread.
The finished pouch is on the right. I used the Dosapey pattern, or part thereof, in all these pieces.

Because of my limited supply of garabatá thread, I’ve been only stitching one face of the larger finished items and turning to my backstrap loom to weave the other face in cotton.

There’s something so nice about weaving just simple white cloth like this. I’m using the non-mercerized cotton that my Guaraní teachers call “crudo” and which does indeed have a very raw feel to it. The woven and stitched panels are quite easy to combine and I really like the result.

I still had indigo thread left over from that project and decided to try another project in which the color might play a larger role.

I love going to this little store that’s just a few blocks from my place here in the center of town. It’s on one of my regular evening walking routes. Carmen sells Guaraní and Ayoreo crafts and, as far as I can see, is the only one selling Ayoreo products in that entire handcraft market.

I drop by now and then to look at the products and be inspired. Occasionally, I can’t help but buy a little something.

This is one of the products that Carmen sells. It’s made from palm leaves by Guaraní artisans. It’s very firm and holds that lovely egg-like shape. It’s one of those things that just feels so good to cradle in the palm of your hand.

I bought a conveniently small Ayoreo bag from Carmen (convenient because it was one of the lowest priced bags due to its size) which had four rows of the Chiqueno pattern on a surprisingly bright turquoise background. This would inspire my next project…..multiple rows of half the Chiqueno pattern.

With this I added one more cuff to the collection. These are perfect projects for learning and practicing new patterns. I like the way the indigo is a bigger player in this piece.

What remained to be done was to continue that pattern to complete the full Chiqueno diamond. This was my hide-away-inside-during-the-Carnival-madness project.

I’m still working on the technique that allows the Ayoreo artisans to join two lengths of thread without using a knot. I’m not usually confident about my own attempts and end up adding a tiny drop of glue for extra security. Keep practicing!
This latest bag also got a woven back. This time I used the intermesh structure as I wanted to weave something that resembles the pattern on the front. The intermesh structure as I know it only allows me to use two colors, though.
At the backstrap loom once more. The structure that I’m calling intermesh uses two sets of string heddles alternated with rows of pick-up.

The diamond shapes are very easy to weave although I couldn’t match the scale of the pattern on the garabata piece.

Only after sewing the two pieces together and declaring it finished, did I have the idea of trying to copy the horizontal stripes on the edge of the garabatá piece. I could have woven them as vertical stripes and then turned the fabric sideways to sew. It would have looked pretty cool having the stripes continue from the edge of the garabatá piece across the back of the bag. Too late! But that idea no doubt is going to stick with me until I have a chance to try it out in another project.

Carmen told me that she often travels out to the communities to bring back new products and that she would look for garabatá thread for me on these visits. Because this particular conversation had taken place in December last year, I had given up hope that this would ever happen. However…. I was out on my evening stroll last week and bumped into Carmen in the street. She’d just closed up shop and told me that she had thread for me. The excitement!

An apple for scale. This will go a long way! I may have to save it to take back to Australia. I love just holding it in my hand and it has the most wonderful smell!

There’s been some activity with my Guaraní teachers too.

Now that I’ve learned the basics behind dressing and operating the Guaraní loom, I’ve been trying to focus on specific details rather than spending the entire time in class warping for a large project. It’s about process rather than product for me and my desire to do this is not something that my teacher quite understands. In this particular class, I could have happily spent the whole time just making string heddles in the Guaraní style over and over again until I felt less clumsy about it. The Guaraní style of heddle making is not like anything I’ve run across before. I think I have the hang of it now, though.

I think I disappoint Clara a little when I don’t want to put a large warp on the loom. She suggests making a placemat, for example, but no, I’m boring and weird and just want to make heddles…haha.

Below, you can see what the heddles look like at the end of the project when they’re removed from the loom. The warp above is a combination of colored Clea two-ply crochet cotton (roughly 8/2) and the heavier non-mercerized white. My teachers always use the heavier thread for heddles.

I wasn’t all that interested in weaving off that last narrow project. Like I said, I really only wanted to practice making heddles. But I did weave it and it was good practice in heddle operation using a method which also seems to be very unique to Guaraní weavers.

I grabbed this shot from a video I made many years ago with my first Guaraní teacher, Angela. You can see her using the heddles to create a shed.
Piecing together strips of that narrow piece to make another zippered purse. I modeled it on the one above that I wove years ago for a plain-weave weave-along that we ran on Ravelry and have been using ever since.
In the latest class I worked with an even narrower warp, only about 1 cm wide! Sorry, Clara, I still don’t want to weave a placemat.

In this class, I wanted to learn how to warp a checkerboard pattern that Clara and Eldina often use in their work and see the different ways it can be manipulated to create patterns both with and without doing pick-up. I’ve set up a warp with this pattern on my backstrap loom now for further study. I’ll show you the results next time.

After being cooped up for four days straight during Carnival, I decided to take a trip with a friend up to the foothills for a weekend about 2 hours out of Santa Cruz city. It was a nice way to escape the heat, do some walking, treat myself to some meals out and, most importantly, visit the hummingbird refuge!

Hills! Santa Cruz city is soooo flat!
This!

We went to the Refugio de Colibríes (hummingbird refuge) with very low expectations so as not to be disappointed. Maybe we’d see a couple of birds if we sat very still for an hour. Wrong! We saw loads of them. I’m not going to rattle off the various species but if you’re on Facebook you can visit the refugio’s page and see the photos taken by owner, Saúl, with accompanying descriptions.

I managed to get this shot by placing my phone over the eye piece of Saúl’s telescope. I could see the little guy’s chest moving to its heartbeat through the telescope. But the telescope was just an added bonus. The naked eye alone was enough to be able to enjoy the birds and be able to distinguish one species from the next. Owner-guide Saúl was fantastic. Goodness knows how many times he’s explained the same things to visitors but he does so with such enthusiasm.

Maybe there’ll be a hummingbird figure on my next Guaraní warp.

Backstrap Weaving – Dovetailing

Let’s start this post with the bit that is actually about weaving on a backstrap loom.

I’ve been studying with two Guaraní ladies and learning all about the style of loom that they use. It’s not a backstrap loom but rather a free-standing vertical frame.

A mini version of a typical Guaraní loom.

After weaving my second project on this loom, I decided to use the cloth I’d produced to cover a notebook in which I could record all I was learning with my Guaraní as well as Ayoreo teachers.

That’s where the backstrap loom came in. I wanted to weave bands with the titles of the book. One half would be for all the notes on the Guaraní loom. The book could then be flipped over so that other half could be used for the Ayoreo notes. I used Clea cotton (2-ply approx 35wpi) and embroidery floss for the supplementary weft.

For the book cover fabric I used a generic cotton from a large cone that my Guaraní teachers typically use and dyed some of it two shades of blue.

And then I had to refer to my drawings again to get back into the swing of dovetail warping.

Dovetail warping….LEFT: Warping the Guaraní loom. RIGHT: Warping the fixed vertical loom in coastal Ecuador. I was creating a warp for a miniature hammock under my teacher’s watchful eye just so that I could learn the technique. We used her handspun cotton.

I had encountered this dovetail style of warping in several places in Ecuador and had had the chance to observe it being done in both wool (Otavalo) and cotton and acrylic (Salasaca) but I only had the opportunity to try it myself when I studied with weavers in coastal Ecuador.

My teacher Felipe demonstrating the way he sets up a dovetail warp for his backstrap loom in Salasaca, Ecuador. The post nearest his left thumb is the dovetail post. He uses an additional post for separating colors. He’s just winding a mini warp to teach me and provide me with a sample to take home.

It can be a little confusing but when working with only one color, you soon get the hang of following this kind of warping path.

W= Warping stake. C=Cross posts. D=Dovetail stick

It creates what I call a discontinuous circle. The warp threads travel in one direction until they reach D and then turn and proceed in the opposite direction until they again reach D. The drawing above resembles the set-up that we used in coastal Ecuador and the one that better represents the Guaraní set-up is below.

When weaving has been completed, element D (which was a stick in Ecuador and a string on the Guaraní loom) is removed and the cloth can be opened out to its full length leaving the loops at the ends of the unwoven warp intact. These loops are then used by the weavers in coastal Ecuador as part of the construction of their hammocks. In a normal circular warp, the warp has to be cut in order to open out the cloth to its full length.

When you start trying to use two colors at once on slightly different paths things get a little mind bending. Two colors are used when the Guarani weavers are going to create patterns in pick-up or just horizontal bars. The first time I did this with my Guaraní teachers, I have to admit that I hadn’t quite wrapped my head around it and was just blindly following the path that they patiently pointed out to me. Only later, when I sat down at my notebook and made my drawings, did I get it all straightened out in my head. But even so, I’ll be needing to refer to my notes for a while until I’ve had more practice.

Here I am passing the thread around the dovetail string. The two upper strings hold the warp cross.

With this learning warp I wove a piece that was wide enough to make a coin purse. However, once the piece was off the loom, I decided to sew two pieces together side by side and make a wider purse that’s more suitable for tools.

Winding the two colors together produced the horizontal bars. A weaving class often starts with winding yarn into balls. That’s Clara above. She and her daughter Eldina are the teachers.
The style of string heddles that the Guaraní weavers use is very unique. They are chained together and not held on a stick.
You can get a better view of them here. This is my teacher Angela who used to allow me to visit and watch her at work many years ago.

Clara was not keen on allowing me to make the heddles and I had to insist on being allowed to make at least the last three on my own. It wasn’t enough and I definitely need more practice. I hope to make our next class all about heddle making. So, when I created the much wider warp for the book cover, I went with the heddles that I am more used to making and tied them off in small bunches. I find it a lot easier to work with these bunches of heddles rather than with heddles suspended on a stick when working on a fixed tension loom such as this, and especially when the piece is wider than band-width.

Several two-color sections in my second warp gave me a lot of practice in sticking to the correct warping path.
This shows the wedges of wood that are the warp-tensioning system. So simple! The lower piece is removed after warping and the upper one, which is shaped, is positioned in order to maintain just the right amount of tension. It gets gradually moved along to its tapered end as weaving progresses and take-up tightens the warp.
The finished cloth….enough for the book cover and a zippered purse. I didn’t need the loops at the ends of the warp around the dovetail string and cut them off.
The cover is on the book and there’s the zippered purse. You can also see the purse I made from the first warp that I’d wound with my teachers.
The two faces of the finished book.
Imagine winding the warp on one of these looms for a hammock! And then making all the heddles. This is the first time I met Angela way back in 2002.

As`for my studies with the Ayoreo looping technique, I made use of the small amounts of the remaining garabatá thread by dyeing it and creating another cuff. Because I only had quite short pieces left and I haven’t got the hang of the clever knotless way of joining two lengths of thread together, I created this cuff in a slightly different way. Instead of working a wide and short piece, I made a narrow and long piece. That way I never ran out of thread in the middle of a row.

I made it mostly about stripes and added a small Chiqueno pattern in the middle.

The thread takes up the dye beautifully!

Dyed garabatá thread and an idea for an arrangement of stripes.

And because my edges, which got hidden within the hems in my other cuffs, would be exposed on this one….and weren’t pretty!….I added a cotton tubular edging to conceal them. And that tubular band is another backstrap loom project to add to this post.

I have a handy piece of furniture that allowed me to improvise a warping board for the tubular band warp.

When I next meet with my teacher Rocío, I’ll have her show me the neat way she has of carrying colors along the edge. And then we’ll get into spinning the big wad of fiber that she got for me! (I showed it in my last post if you missed it and are curious).

The tubular edging makes the cuff hold its shape very nicely, conceals messy edges and adds a really nice finish. I used a button-and-loop closure.

In the meantime, I’ve been visiting a lovely outdoor artisan market that’s just a few blocks from my place. Señora Carmen has a very small stall there where she sells handwork of the indigenous peoples of this lowland part of Bolivia. There I discovered that there is another group here that works with the same fiber as the Ayoreo people. They’re called Weenhayek and they call the fiber caraguata. They work the looped stitch much more loosely but the finishing stitch that they use along the mouths of the bags is different (and I think nicer than the one used by the Ayoreo). I had to buy one of their bags so that I could figure it out (I managed to) and I’m wondering if Rocío knows how to do it.

You can see the difference in tightness in the two Ayoreo examples on the left and the Weenhayek on the right.

And there I’ll leave it for this post. I’ll be getting back to my classes once we’re into the new year. In the meantime there’s plenty to keep me busy with Guaraní, Ayoreo and backstrap loom projects.

Hopefully next time I’ll be able to show a bit about how the garabatá fiber is spun. Until then, sporting a cooling summer cut (the hottest days are yet to come!), I’ll wish you all from my “transition home” here in Santa Cruz, Bolivia a Happy New Year.

Backstrap Weaving – Tales from the Lowlands

It’s been a long time since I last sat down to write a post. There’s been a lot going on and it’s been a bit overwhelming!

First of all, I sold my little one-bedroom apartment. I’d spent a large part of this year doing repairs and painting it, then slowly either selling or giving away my belongings. One of the last things to go was my backstrap weaving station, that is, the bed base to which I would attach my backstrap loom. It was quite sad cutting the straps off the base and dismantling the bed at which I’d sat and happily woven all these years and a little distressing not knowing when next I’d be able to sit at my loom again.

Many years have been spent in my bedroom-floor “studio”.

But that didn’t last long. I was soon occupied with other creative pursuits. In my last post I wrote about the short workshop I’d taken with an Ayoreo artisan learning about the looped stitch worked in plant fiber called garabatá that she uses to create the shoulder bags that both the men and women in this indigenous group carry about with them on a daily basis. The bags are almost a part of their clothing. They never seem to be without one.

My experience in the workshop hadn’t been as productive as I had hoped and while I’d finished it with a much greater amount of admiration for the work, I was also left quite disappointed in the limited amount we had been able to cover in that short time. I had been searching for an Ayoreo teacher for years and had actually given up on ever finding anyone who would be willing to take me on as a student. It seemed that I would have to content myself with buying examples of the bags to study while trying to replicate the stitch in cotton.

Well….I got lucky….so lucky! I was introduced to another teacher, Rocío, and she’s amazing! She’s not only been teaching me the basic stitch and the various patterning techniques but also has been very generous in telling me about the various clans and the origin of the patterns.

But we still had to work in cotton as Rocío explained that the recent fires (which, thank goodness, have now been finally extinguished) and drought either destroyed or weakened the plants meaning that the artisans haven’t been able to produce good quality thread from the extracted fiber.

Working the looped stitch with needle and cotton.

I did manage to scavenge a bit of garabatá fiber here and there so that I could start practicing with the real thing. Cotton really doesn’t do the trick. It behaves in a completely different way from the garabatá and in many ways is more difficult to work with. One nice thing about garabatá fiber is that you can join two strands together without having to tie a knot…a method which I have yet to perfect.

My initial projects will be wrist bands. I’d seen an Ayoreo lady at the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe, NM many years ago wearing several and decided that these would make good learner projects that wouldn’t require huge amounts of thread. It’s always nice to have some kind of finished product rather than just endless samples and the thread was too precious to use only for sampling.

My first finished cuff with a pattern from the Chiqueno clan.

I then started a more complicated pattern from the Dosapay clan which has been stalled until I can find more fiber in these colors.

Sorry about the bare leg shot. As you can see, the project gets tied to the upper leg while the artisan sits crossed legged on the ground.

Rocío tells me that when the piece gets longer, the work is often tied to a bar instead, allowing the artisan to continue to work with the bulk of the piece in their lap. I am nowhere near that point yet!

This next cuff that I made is a two-color example of the Dosapay pattern. It’s hard to appreciate the form of the pattern because I could only fit half of it on the cuff.

As I said before, working with the garabatá fiber is in many ways easier than working in cotton. One disadvantage is the varying girth and stiffness of the handspun thread which can be thin and relatively loosely plied in some parts and therefore quite flexible, only to become much thicker and tightly plied in others.

I dyed some of the fiber black for the third example and used a small version of the Chiqueno pattern so that I could fit the whole thing onto the cuff.

So, there’s been a lot of cuff stuff going on. Rocío told me that there was a chance of perhaps being able to buy a whole ball of spun thread. Her family lives five hours away from us here in the city and maybe they could bring some the next time someone travels in or she travels out.

What happened in the meantime is that someone did come in from the communities bringing a big wad of the raw fiber. I got a call from Rocio asking if I was interested in buying it. I was! It hadn’t been my plan to learn how to spin the fiber but it looks like it’s going to happen! She assured me that this fiber is top quality and will be worth the effort.

A photo that Rocío sent me of the purchase. This cost $7. I can’t even imagine the amount of thread this will produce!

I haven’t had a class with Rocío since that purchase. I know from my experiences learning to spin wool and cotton that it’s going to be a long time before I’ll be able to spin anything usable. I will then surely have a greater understanding of how difficult it must be to produce thread of consistent girth and ply. The fiber is rolled along the upper leg to produce thread. I’m envisioning a very sore leg and hand! My upper leg is already riddled with the evidence of having stabbed myself with the needle multiple times while practicing the stitching.

An Ayoreo lady at the Folk Art market in Santa Fe demonstrating the spinning method.
Three garabatá and four cotton wrist cuffs.

As you can see above, I’ve been weaving as well. Yes, I did manage to get back to my backstrap loom fairly quickly. After selling my apartment, I moved into a fully furnished room still here in the center of Santa Cruz city. It’s in a very vibrant part of the city and just a couple of blocks away from an awesome street market. And hooray, the bed has a wooden base which made setting up a new weaving “studio” very easy! I brought a little piece of the old studio with me…a wool rug woven in the foothill communities 2-3 hours from Santa Cruz city.

I’ve been weaving cuffs…just small projects as I really don’t want to unpack everything in my new home. I have four large wheelie bags packed and ready to go for when I make the final move to Australia and I don’t want to touch anything in those if I can avoid it. I’m just in a transition phase now while I take advantage of the fact that I can study with Rocío.

So, when I found that I needed a shuttle for the wrist cuff projects, it was easier just to buy and eat an icecream than dig through those four wheelie bags in search of one.

And who wouldn’t want to stick around during the Santa Cruz summer when those big beautiful mangoes are filling the street markets at a cost of four for $1.50! Those are Guarani-made placemats on the table which are part of the furnishings in this rented room. I’ve settled in so easily here. I can easily live in one room. My little flat in Katoomba in Australia that awaits me will feel huge after this.

The first two cuffs I made from the same warp have button-and-loop closures. The ends have been turned twice and hemmed. The garabatá cuff has a sliding knot closure. This kind of closure is something that I want to play with more as I hope to weave and sell cotton cuffs at local craft markets once I’m back in Australia. I will be needing additional income sources in order to be able to afford to live there and selling at the markets will also be a good way to publicize classes. The sliding knot closure will allow the cuffs to be adjusted to fit different wrists.

I’m back to using the Brazilian-produced Clea cotton that was pretty much all that was available to me before I started traveling to the States and got thoroughly spoiled with all the choices. However, now with the current amigurumi craze here, there are several other options. Clea remains my favorite, though. It’s fine enough to allow hemmed ends that don’t create excessive bulk on the wrist bands.

The second cuff warp. I plan them to get two cuffs out of each warp. That length of warp fits nicely into my available space here without having to do any rolling up. I’m also avoiding opening those wheelie bags to get out what I would need to enable me to wind longer warps!

There are other reasons to stay on here and not jet off back to Australia immediately. One is the opportunity to study with two Guaraní weavers. I spent time with Angela, my first Guaraní teacher many years ago. We never had any formal classes. It was more a case of my visiting her and hanging out watching while she wove. She was always very generous in allowing me to take pictures and video and ask questions. We would come across each other every few years as she made her way back and forth between the city and her Isoseño community sometimes stopping and living here but then suddenly disappearing back to her community. I eventually lost touch with her. My new Guaraní teachers told me that Angela passed away six years ago. Such shocking and sad news.

Angela in the patio of her home here in the city when I used to visit her. She always had several projects on the go.

I will leave that part of my recent activities to another post. I have my very own Guaraní loom now in mini form which I can work on in my room. Of course, I won’t be carting it to Australia and will give it back to my teachers when it comes time to leave. I love its simplicity and particularly like the shaped wedges of wood which are moved within the slot to reduce the increased tension on the warp that results from take-up. It’s such a simple and effective system! Two of the strings hold the cross while warping. The third is the dovetail string which I’ll tell you more about in the next post.

Mini Guarani loom on top of my wheelie bags set up ready to be warped.

I’ll leave you with this picture of it and tell you all about it and the weaving in my next post, hopefully before Christmas. I’m nicely settled here now and should be able to get back into posting more often.

Backstrap Weaving – Mind Blown

First of all, I should point out that this post is not about anything woven on backstrap looms. I just always happen to start my titles with the term Backstrap Weaving.

The Ayoreo are a formerly nomadic indigenous people who live in the eastern lowland part of Bolivia known as the Gran Chaco. I’ve always admired the work they do making fabric using fiber from a plant in the pineapple family.

An example of the Bromelia Hieronymil plant from which the fibers with the local name garabatá are extracted.

Information about the Ayoreo people is sketchy. Population estimates in different sources range from seventeen hundred to four thousand Ayoreo people, distributed amongst seven to ten clans. They use off-loom netting, twining and knotting techniques, sometimes with the aid of a needle, to make a type of shoulder bag called utebetai using a fiber called garabatá fino from the Bromelia Hieronymil plant. The fiber is twisted and plied by rolling it on the thigh using ashes to take away some of its stickiness. It may also be dyed before use.

Chatting with one of the ladies representing the Ayoreo people and their work at the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico many years ago. The group has been invited many times to attend the Market.

 A special looped stitch is used by the women to create fabric which is then sewn into the utebetai bags that they use in their daily lives.

An example of one of the bags on display at the Arte Campo Museum here in Santa Cruz where I live.

The bags are of different sizes according to their use and are named accordingly. Each of the clans has its own unique patterns but in recent years it’s said that new designs are being created along with modified versions of the traditional ones. According to a booklet put out by CANOB (Central Ayorea Nativa del Oriente Boliviano), the designs used include representations of the patterns on armadillo shells, clouds, snake skins and the eyes of a jaguar.

I did at one stage own a few of the bags. I had unpicked the seams so that I could display the fabric opened out at full length. Later, I gave them away to appreciative friends along with almost all the art and handcraft pieces that I had gathered during the years I’ve spent here in Santa Cruz. It’s what you have to do when you are planning to move to the other side of the globe.

The three pieces that I had owned.

I have always wanted to learn about this but gave up some time ago trying to find a willing teacher. I’d had many leads but they’d all ended in dead ends.

But then….just a few weeks ago I spotted an ad by the Arte Campo Museum here in Santa Cruz about a very short workshop in which an Ayoreo lady would be teaching the special looping stitch that they use to make the bags. I couldn’t believe my luck.

I can tell you that there’s nothing like having an experience like this to make you appreciate the tremendous skill that goes into making these pieces. I’ve always admired them and do so even more now that I know just a little bit about what goes into making them. I can only hope that the things I post online and the classes I give have had a similar effect on my students and readers in that they have a greater appreciation of the textiles that are created in the highlands and lowlands of these South American countries, the people who make them and the simple tools with which they work.

I can’t believe that I actually went to the class thinking that once I learned the “stitch”, I’d be able to make myself a little bag. Ha!

First I explored the museum and took notes and photos, dreaming of the wonderful patterns I was going to be able to create.
The pieces are worked while tied to the leg. Luckily I had chosen not to wear a skirt that day which is my usual attire in the tropical heat.

Samples were handed out to the ten participants. I was thrilled with mine as it was in one of my favorite color combinations. The idea was to have us stitch a couple of rows and then sew the little piece into a miniature bag that could be hung around the neck. Easier said than done!

I’m very much used to the “look-and-learn” style of teaching with all the experience I’ve had studying weaving techniques with my teachers here. There are no explanations….just watch. “You look, you know”, as my Vietnamese twining teacher would say to me. However, those were one-on-one experiences. It’s quite different when there are ten people battling to get a good view and capture every move on an iPad or cell phone…plus the garabatá thread was so fine! I didn’t even try to record it.

I soon realized that the row that I was supposed to looping onto was black and that I couldn’t make out a darn thing! Sadly, I swapped my beautiful sample for another so that I could stitch onto white. My active thread, however, was brown and that was very hard to see too. There were moments when I was thinking, Wow, maybe I’m getting too old for this!

The younger ones reviewing footage on phones and iPads.

So, much of the two-hour class was spent just trying to figure out the basic stitch. Mine were too dark and too tight to really tell although Teresa, the teacher, kept telling me that it was okay. I wasn’t convinced. She did point out that my work was too tight. I don’t know how she could see anything at all! No one got to make their little bag in the allotted time. We were all struggling! Some people got discouraged and left early. I stubbornly kept going. I don’t know how many times I ripped it all back to the beginning of the row. Now I can see that it’s actually a very very simple two-part process that was made complicated because ten people all wanted to be helped at once.

As with all these kinds of things, tension is key. You can have the stitch down, but it just won’t look right if it hasn’t been properly tensioned. The ends have to be pulled this way and that as the loops are tightened in order to position them correctly. I stitched along to finish the brown row and went home still not knowing if I was doing it right. I then changed to white which happened to be thicker than the brown and then quietly at home without the chaos of ten people all competing for attention, I started to get the hang of it.

You can see my squashed and uneven brown row and then my much nicer white one in progress.

And now, I’ve run out of garabatá. I think it’s quite amazing that we were given the laboriously prepared and precious thread to work with in the class in the first place instead of some industrially prepared substitution and I really appreciate that.

I decided that I needed to get out some chunky stuff to continue practicing stitching with proper and even tension. I have to say, though, that here is absolutely nothing charming about the work in this size thread and in these colors!

And now you can all get a closer look at it. Perhaps you’ll find that you already know how to do it.

I think I’ll go down in thread size now and continue practicing.

So I simply had to go back to the store and buy a bag and I was blown away by the quality of the work I saw there. The stitching is even tinier and more dense and beautifully even than the pieces I bought all those years ago. It actually makes the samples we were given in class look quite clumsy. I can’t get over how beautiful the bag that I bought is. Now I’m thinking that the teacher prepared the samples with larger, looser and more open stitches to make things easier for us.

The Ayoreo create their pieces flat and then sew the sides together. They work from left to right and then turn the piece over to work the next row so that they are always working in the same direction. In my thick-thread example above I was attempting to create it in a continuous circular form thinking that it would somehow look neater than having to create a seam. I have a vague memory of having read somewhere that the same looped stitch is used in Papua New Guinea to make bags but that the pieces there are worked in circular form.

However, the joining of the two sides in the piece that I just bought is so finely and beautifully done that the stitching is practically imperceptible. The sides don’t overlap. They are perfectly butted together. I’m so pleased to have this piece! It feels so good and has the most wonderful plant-y smell. And how in the world do the Ayoreo ladies go about adding in the colors to create those shapes is beyond me. That was actually one of my main motivations for buying a bag…I wanted to be able to study it and discover what was done with the start and end tails at the color changes. I can’t tell! It’s so expertly done. Mind blown.

Was I equally enthralled when I bought those three pieces twenty-four years ago? I wasn’t. I certainly admired them but then eventually gave them away. The difference has been having just that tiny introduction to the technique and that tiny amount of interaction with Teresa, our teacher.

Here again is the young lady I met in Santa Fe showing how she twists and plies the fiber. Of course, looking back at this photo now, my eye is captured by her wrist cuff.

So, if I never get to make a bag in this lovely looping technique, maybe I could aim at making a wrist cuff instead if I ever figure out those color changes. A simpler striped one may have to do for now. But maybe I’ll find another teacher before I have to move away.

I’ll finish with a photo I took recently of my cuffs in Fall colors, even though it’s Spring here. I happened to be in an Autumn kind of mood. I always get questions when I post these photos from people who’d like to know more about how I finish my cuffs. I might make my next blog post about that.