Guatemala – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Crossing Woven Paths

Since I last wrote, I had the luck to cross woven paths with a lady who lives on Hainan Island in southern China. She found her way into my inbox via my blog after she had spent time with some backstrap weavers on Hainan Island from the Li minority group.

I imagine that it had been a very intense time watching the weavers at work trying to absorb and make sense of everything they were doing. Megan told me that although she speaks Mandarin, the weavers speak a local dialect. They were only able to communicate using some very basic Chinese words. It reminds me of weaving with Quechua-speaking ladies here in Bolivia and Peru. One of my teachers had the habit of throwing a word in Spanish at the end of long sentences in Quechua hoping, I suppose, that it would somehow give context to what she was saying. Believe it or not, it sometimes actually did help me to get the gist of what she was saying! None of it was instructional, though. It was basically chit-chat and the way that we tried to bond talking about our families.

Here’s Megan observing one of the Li weavers at her foot-tensioned loom.

She told me that the loom had been warped and fabric had been woven before she arrived and so she was able to watch the steps to creating the patterns with the supplementary weft threads but had not had a chance to see the loom being set up.

She took home a loom with its partly woven fabric but was understandably a bit confused about the process and unable to sit and continue the weaving on her own. As she was about to travel to Europe and wanted to take the loom with her, she did not have a chance to return to the weavers and have her questions answered. I am glad she found me! She sent me a brilliant high-resolution photo of the loom with the parts numbered and an email in which she named the parts as best she could. I love to trouble-shoot but I can’t do so without good pictures that I can enlarge. I couldn’t have asked for more from the pictures that Megan had sent me. The piece is decorated with supplementary weft.

It was exciting because I had seen Li backstrap looms when I was at Convergence in 2010. Pam Nadjowski had a booth in the Vendor Hall with textiles and weaving implements of various Chinese minority groups and the Li loom was one of them. That’s it pictured below. I was tempted to buy one because the pieces were so beautiful However, I eventually settled on buying two fine bamboo reeds instead that have served me very well in my weaving projects.

Pam had sent me and allowed me to use pictures of the Li weavers that she had taken during the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market one year. Clearly they use several different kinds of techniques to decorate their woven cloth, not only supplementary-weft inlay.

I love the paddle-like ends of the beam against which the weavers place their feet. Megan’s loom is much simpler. I like how a piece of plastic tube has been used in hers as the shed rod. The caps on the ends are handy for helping to stop the rod from sliding out of the warp. Weavers in Peru often use pvc pipe for the shed rod in their backstrap looms. They thread a safety string through the hollow pipe and tie the ends together which helps to stop the pipe from sliding completely out of the warp. You can see how beautifully the paddle ends on the Li loom are decorated in my photo from Convergence.

When I examined the photo with the numbered parts that Megan had sent me, I was excited to recognize the set-up as one that had been taught to me by two of my weaving teachers in Guatemala in 2008. That’s one of my teachers, Carmen, in the picture at left. I have even written a tutorial on this blog for the set-up and technique.

So, I was able to help with an explanation. Because Megan had named the loom parts in her email to me, we already had a common vocabulary with which to work. I could point her to my tutorial which also has video and, with those prompts, she was able to remember what the weavers had been demonstrating and she was on her way! She too remarked on how much fun this connection was. In her words…

This was exactly the advice I needed, as now everything works PERFECTLY! I am so happy, not only because I managed to move on my own, but also because a lady on the other side of the globe, who works with native people of different culture, was able to give me solutions. I find this very awesome 🙂

Here she is contentedly weaving at her loom….I have to say that she seems to have the right toes for this.

Now we can take another look at the picture Megan sent me with the numbered parts and I can name them for you. The rods hold a circular warp which are, as far as I know, far more common in Asian backstrap weaving than single-plane warps. In South America I have only seen circular warps used by backstrap weavers in Ecuador and I have read that they are also used in far northern Peru. The Vietnamese hilltribe weavers with whom I studied also use circular warps as did the Burmese weaver that I spent some time with one day.

#1 and #10….the warp beam and cloth beam…or near beam and far beam as I usually call them

#2 coil rod or rolling stick

#3 patterning shed stick 2

#4 shed rod

#5 patterning shed stick 1

#6 heddle rod

#7 and #8 patterning swords

#9 main sword

Half the black warp threads lie on top of the shed rod. The other half are enclosed in heddle loops and are raised when the weaver lifts the heddle rod. Patterning shed stick 1 holds certain threads from the shed-rod shed. Patterning shed stick 2 holds certain threads from the heddle shed. It’s these threads under which the supplementary weft is passed to form the patterns. The patterning sticks raise groups of threads and the weaver selects threads from these groups according to the pattern she is creating.

Here’s the video that I created a few years ago to show how to set up a warp with these patterning sticks. I am using heavy cotton thread and a really narrow warp just to demonstrate this. The second part of the same video shows how to operate the loom and use the sticks to create patterns. You can pass the supplementary weft from one edge of the cloth to the other as Megan’s weaving friend has done or you can create smaller discontinuous patterns by passing the weft back and forth just from edge to edge of the motif itself as I demonstrate in the video. My Guatemalan teachers use both techniques.

You can see the rest of that tutorial here. This is the cloth that my teacher and I wove together in Guatemala. The X patterns used continuous weft from edge to edge. The little figures were woven using the discontinuous method. Simple inlay as well as wrapping and soumak-like techniques are used to create these kinds of patterns. The blue checkered pattern is supplementary weft passed through the two unaltered patterning sheds. I used these methods to weave this cotton scarf some years after that trip….

Every now and then a student will bring me a warp that they bought in Guatemala with partly-woven cloth and I get to play on it! You can see the two patterning sticks in the warp just to the left of the shed rod….one on top and one below. Guatemalan weavers use single-plane warps rather than circular ones.

I am not sure what kind of system the Li weavers use to clamp and roll up their circular warps. The warp does need to be secured before weaving can begin or it will slide around the beams every time the weaver beats. I own an implement that I got from Dar Ku, a backstrap weaver from Myanmar, that I was able to spend some time with. It’s a split beam, the two pieces of which are placed above and below the unwoven warp ends and then joined and rolled to secure the circular warp and stop it from slipping around the beams. So far, I have only used it in more unorthodox ways.Right now, I am using it to secure to my current piece of weaving…

I found that I could no longer roll up the woven cloth around two beams as I usually do, as the little built-in pocket is bulky and was creating a bump. That was messing with the tension on the unwoven warp threads. So, I removed the cloth beam and had to find another way to attach myself to the piece so that I could continue weaving and be in comfortable reach of the weaving line and heddles. I have clamped the cloth between the split beam. I add another beam and can roll the cloth around both. Two rolls get me to a good position where I can start weaving again. That is working well.

Now I am on the home stretch having passed the half-way mark and have finished the diamond section of the pattern. Now I will weave the two weaving ladies again. This time I get to weave them the right way up rather than standing on their heads! I am thinking of trying to design a tree under which they can sit and weave in the shade.

Progress hasn’t been as fast as it could have been because I am working on another book. I realized that it is not often that I get to spend this much time at home and that I really need to take advantage of that. Too many of my book projects have been started and left standing with the interruption of travel. I am also very buzzed about the fact that I can include video clips with my publications on Patternfish. This is highly motivating!

Here are some projects from students and online weaving friends…..

Christine, who came to weave with me in Maine, is using a Harrisille Designs band lock, in much the same way as I am using the split beam, to clamp her band. She took this project away with her and reported that this was the easiest way to bring weaving along on her trip in carry-on luggage.

Caroline designed and wove this cute snail motif on a warp-faced double weave band that we started together.

Gonit Porat in Israel wove a fabulous band with several patterns from my book of traditional and original Andean Pebble Weave designs. She uses the two-heddle method which is just one of several ways to set up a loom for this structure. Click on her name to visit her website and see the amazing work she does with hundreds of tablets.

Yehudit is making striking key fobs using patterns from my Complementary-warp Pick-up book. That book shows another way to create Andean Pebble Weave patterns without using additional string heddles. And this is what Lenora is weaving using the same book. It is amazing how a little imagination in the arrangement of colors in the borders can give a band an extra bit of zing. I love it.

Lausanne finished the wool band with its aquatic patterns that she started during my visit to Vermont last year. She also used the two-heddle method for these Andean Pebble Weave patterns that are charted in my Pattern Book.

And, I was right in guessing that Kristin would be the first one to show me a project in which she wove and sewed the eye-pattern tubular band as an edging for her hand-woven cloth. This was all made with her own hand-spun alpaca yarn. It’s a beautiful finish for this piece.

Some feedback from an online weaving friend on these tubular bands and my most recent book, in which she compares the bands to potato chips, brought a smile to my face and really made my day 🙂

Oh my, these little bands are just like potato chips, but way healthier. I just can’t stop at one! I was in a bit of a weaving slump, but now I’m dreaming of things I can weave, just so I can add this lovely edging. I can hardly wait to finish one band so that I can try another in a different colour combo. I’ve been waiting for a book like this for years, down to earth and easy to understand. Thank you Laverne!

Lizzie Ruffell has been weaving bands using some of the knot-work pattern that are charted in my second book. She says that she is now completely comfortable with the spotted charts, has managed to adapt a tablet-weaving pattern (the dragons) to pebble weave and chart it, and is keen now to create some designs of her own.

While my northern hemisphere friends huddle indoors away from some of the coldest temperatures in decades, and Australia recovers from its recent heatwave, I am enjoying a few days of cooler temperatures here. I was filming video clips during a stretch of particularly hot days last week (I still can’t get a tech to come out and look at my broken air conditioner!). I have to get myself into some pretty awkward positions sometimes to film and give people the weaver’s view of what I am doing. At one point I had to stop filming because sweat from my forehead was dripping onto the band I was attempting to weave. I can tell you that holding some of the positions is doing my abs a whole lot of good!

I will leave you with a bright band and some spring-like images to brighten up your cold days, or soften some brutally hot ones. I call this band Birds, Bees, Butterflies and Blooms.

Backstrap Weaving – Time for a new Tool

One weaving tool which hasn’t really made its way into my kit is the temple, an instrument that helps weavers maintain consistent width in the cloth they are producing. I have never really felt the need to use a temple and that’s most likely because I haven’t used my backstrap loom to create the kind of cloth that I felt required one. The ladies with whom I studied in Guatemala used temples. They were wonderfully simple tools….a piece of bamboo that sat underneath the cloth with a couple of small nails holding it in place.

I have to admit that I would cringe every time we pushed those nails into the edges of the woven cloth. When I took the pieces that I had started weaving with my teachers in Guatemala back to Bolivia to finish, I continued using the temples for a while. However, I soon abandoned them as I really felt that they weren’t doing anything for me. I have seen some fine Bhutanese textiles with horrible holes gouged at intervals into the edges from the sharp ends of the temples and that, more than anything, has really put me off using them.

But, now as I am typing, I am remembering that there has actually been one piece of cloth that I wove where I could see a clear need for a temple. It was a wide silk piece that I wove some time ago. I did manage to get away without using a temple because I couldn’t bear the thought of pushing nails or even pins into the edges of the silk.

When weaving this wide piece, I was finding that the cloth would ripple slightly as I propped the shed open ready to pass the shuttle. I had to try and grab the edges of the cloth, first one side and then the other, to straighten and smooth the cloth so that I could be sure that I was laying in the right amount of weft. A third hand would have been handy! It was clumsy and slowed me down but I was willing to do it to avoid using the ”dreaded” temple.

My Montagnard (Vietnamese hill tribe) weaving teachers used wooden temples with carved pointed tips for the cloth they wove on their backstrap looms. They even used them for narrow bands…

And, my weaving teachers in coastal Ecuador who wove on vertical looms rather than backstrap looms, used a similar style of temple cut from a large tube of bamboo that they attach to the upper face of the cotton cloth on the loom. I remember really struggling to bend that slat of bamboo into place each time it had to be re-positioned on the cloth. This heavy-ish sturdy cotton did not suffer at all from the pointed tips of the temple.

Why all this talk of temples? Well, I would like to weave another sheer cotton piece like the one I just wove but using much finer cotton. I don’t have a reed that is fine or wide enough for the piece I have in mind and so I will have to resort to trying to maintain the sett and width by other means just like the Guatemalan weavers in Alta Verapaz do. The temple will help with the width. Maintaining the sett will be another story! What tool do the ladies in Guatemala use?….skill and lifetimes of experience and know-how passed down through generations!

Until I get the fine cotton singles that I would like to use, I will practice with the little bit of hand spun cotton that I have left over from my most recent project. For that project I used a reed and so I have a sample from which to take calculations for width and something to guide me to determine and try to maintain the spacing between warp threads. I have wound a short warp with half the number of ends that I used for my scarf. Wish me luck!

Here are some bits and pieces I have gathered together for possible temples…

The piece at the bottom of the picture is the temple that came with a Karen loom that a friend gave me. Pins have been taped to a piece of wood and the temple was sitting on the back side of the warp-faced cloth. The bamboo pieces are the temples I was using with my teachers in Guatemala. The nails that pierced the cloth and then turned into the open ends of the bamboo, are sitting on top of the tongue depressor. I was wondering if cutting points into a piece of heavy cardboard like the black stuff you see there and reinforcing it with a tongue depressor would also work.

Or, there’s this….contributed by friend Franco to the backstrap weaving group on Ravelry many years ago…

It was working well for Franco. I would love it if I could get something like this to work for me. It measures and maintains width all at once!

As for my current project…it is finished! Except for the very first part which I un-wove and turned into fringe, I got a consistent 9 1/8 inches of width.

After finishing the hem-stitching the far end, I slowly unrolled the cloth and worked my way back to the start, burying weft ends as I went. Then I cut the weft out of the first wider part of the cloth and hemstitched that end.

Here it is off the loom waiting to have its fringe twisted before being washed and pressed.

Procrastinating! Enjoying the cloth and taking pictures because I was nervous about what was going to happen to it when it was washed!

Moe procrastination…yes, it’s sheer now but will it lose this translucency when it has been washed?

A whole day has gone by. Tomorrow I’ll wash this thing.

Post-wash and press: it lost between 1/8” and 1/4” in width and the warp threads moved closer together ever so slightly. It feels so soft!

Post-wash verdict: I love this super soft supple cloth that is so unlike anything I have woven before!

Now I am thinking about dyeing it. Should I?

During all the pre-wash dithering, I decided to take a sample that I had woven before my last trip away and make it into something. You might remember that I wanted to make a wool shoulder bag with a built-in pocket in the style of the ch’uspas (coca-leaf bags) that the Bolivian weavers make. I learned how to set up the warp and weave the pocket back in 1997 with my teachers in Potosí. This small green piece is the wool sample that I most recently wove to refresh my memory of the technique. I edged the little pocket with triple cross-knit looping.

I decided to go ahead and make this into a little zippered pouch. I edged it with a tubular band style that is woven in Chahuaytire, Peru which also served as the strap. The bottom is decorated with coil stitches and the pocket is edged with single cross-knit looping. A four-strand braid makes a nice zipper tab.

The wool surface loved to attract the stray bits of cotton that I have had flying around during my latest project.

I had started gathering materials for this project before I had finished weaving the cotton scarf. I thought about what I could possibly fit into the tiny pocket and found that my door key sat within it perfectly. Two days later when I wanted to go out, I turned my apartment upside down looking for my door key. I was locked in and had completely forgotten about having placed the key in the little pocket. I had to call a friend who keeps a spare for me to come and let me out. Another two days went by before I picked up the little green bag once more to work on it and discovered the secret contents of the little pocket. Duh!

So….I guess the hand spun-cotton-with-temple experiment is next. I have also wound my skeined silk into balls ready for warping. I am thinking about weaving a silk cowl….just a simple tube to drape around my neck instead of a whole scarf. At three-and-a-half months into the grey hair transition I am still thinking about wearing color around my face to brighten things up a bit. Until next time……..

Backstrap Weaving – Summery Cloth

With the temperature around 91 F and a broken air conditioner, it’s just as well that I have decided to weave something light and airy as my first big project for this season. I usually find myself at this hotter time of year weaving something totally inappropriate, like a wool lap blanket. Silk thread is not pleasant stuff either in sweaty fingers. I do, in fact, have plans for both wool and silk projects for the next few months but hopefully my a/c will be up and running again by the time I get around to them.

I threaded the reed for the project for which I am using some hand spun cotton that I picked up from this lady in Guatemala in 2008.

It was a little worrying while re-tying the cotton ends to have some of them untwist and break as I attempted to pull and tighten the knot. Breakages?! I hadn’t even started weaving yet! I did not want to have to size this warp and I am glad I didn’t panic and do so as, so far, I have only had one thread break while weaving. This same thread has broken multiple times and so I guess and hope that it was just one section of this particular strand that was more loosely twisted than the rest.

Of course, I first wove a small sample for this open and airy balanced-weave that I want to do. You can just catch of glimpse of it at bottom right in the picture above.

I am trying to replicate the structure used by weavers in the Alta Verapaz region of Guatemala…a base of open balanced weave into which they place patterns using supplementary weft. The thread they use is much much finer than the cotton singles that I have. I was told that in some communities in Chiapas, Mexico where this kind of cloth is also produced, some of the weavers divide 20/2 commercially-spun cotton into singles and use that as their warp threads. What a job! Not everyone can manage it and those who can’t will pay someone to convert a cone of thread into singles. In the Alta Verapaz region, some weavers use commercially-spun 20/1 cotton thread is used which perhaps explains why the thread in the sample piece that I bought at the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe a few years ago is so incredibly white. This information comes from Kathleen Vitale. I also read that other weavers use a 30/2 mercerized cotton which isn’t split and which is available in local markets. The hand spun cotton that I am using is off-white (and much thicker!) as you can see below.

But, I am happy to have this piece of fabric from Guatemala and these balls of hand spun singles so that I can at least try this out and practice creating the patterns. The finer thread can come later!

Here’s a look at the little piece I bought in Santa Fe still on its loom. I would love to know how it changes after washing but I don’t want to cut it off its little loom. Or…did they somehow wash it in order to sell it?

Here’s my tiny sample on the loom, and then after washing (sitting on top of my latest knitted cowl…still very excited about picking up knitting again!)

The more open sett at the start of the sample is what I was aiming for but I unconsciously allowed the piece to narrow and deepened my beat which gave me consistent width and neater selvedges. However, in doing so, I almost lost the translucent quality that I had been wanting.

So, here is the large piece underway. I was so doubtful about the success of this project that I very uncharacteristically did not bother to plan out and chart a pattern. I just started winging it. So, I have to say that I am not entirely pleased with the layout of the figures. I am just practicing various basic lines and shapes. It’s another ”sample”, albeit a very large one!

I would call it successful because I have only broken one thread so far. That had been my biggest concern.

Un-weaving is quite the thing. The fluffy warp and weft threads meet and grab hold and do not want to let go! However, it is this ”gripping”quality that seems to allow the Guatemalan weavers to simply cut off the start and end tails of supplementary weft right at the edges of the pattern rather than leave some length and make an attempt to bury the ends within the pattern. I am guessing that washing the fabric will further reinforce this. I suppose I’ll find out! This is after all a sample, right? I haven’t cut the tails very short yet.

I was eventually able to coax out one of the ends of supplementary weft in the unwashed Guatemalan sample so I could count the number of strands the weavers were using.

It’s a very relaxing technique for me. I can sing, listen to podcasts…it doesn’t require the heavier amount of concentration that most of pick-up work involves. And, it sits light as a feather on top of my legs. It is certainly the fabric with highest amount of drape that I have created on my backstrap loom. There’s a long way to go. The warp measures something like eighty inches. which means that there is plenty of room left to play with patterns.

I am so thankful for these reeds that I managed to buy in the vendor hall at Convergence in 2010. They have just the right spacing for this open structure in the weight of cotton I am using. When the time comes to use finer thread, I will have to figure out something else. Or, not use a reed at all. The Guatemalan weavers don’t. I only want to handle one challenge at a time!

I think the only other time I used one of these reeds is when I did a four-shaft shadow-weave piece a few years ago…

My backstrap weaving friends, Christine, Kristin and Tracy made their own bamboo reeds in a workshop with Brian Whitehead at ANWG 2017. Here’s Christine with hers…I know that Kristin and Tracy have put theirs to use multiple times with both commercially and hand spun fibers and have created some truly awesome pieces of fabric. I’ll have pictures and details in future blog posts.

A much simpler project that came off my loom last week was the piece on which I had been demonstrating at recent fiber events. It is now a backstrap to add to the collection of straps that my weaving friends use when we get together. It is sitting here with a couple of my bone tools. The one on the right was given to me by a gentleman in northern Chile. He had found it in the Atacama desert. It has a beautiful shape and point.

And, here’s the latest from some of my online weaving friends and students…

It’s lovely to see patterns from my books appearing in Marsha’s beautiful band projects. She is using the Gilmore Mini and Big Wave looms as well as a Handywoman treadle tape loom with a variety of materials…cotton, silk and tencel.

Maxine combines colors so beautifully on her inkle loom. How inspiring is this? It’s nice to see these patterns from my first book being used in such an awesome way.

This is Caroline Sargisson’s first band using an inkle loom and a pattern and instructions in my Complementary-warp Pick-up book.

Julie Beers finished a really long band of the playful kitties patterns in my latest pattern book. She wove this on one of the Gilmore looms.

Tara’s making a pouch from fabric she wove using a backstrap loom. She may use some of the finishing techniques I teach to decorate it.

And Tracy has edged her bag with the ñawi awapa tubular band. She wove the bag itself using a backstrap loom and her own hand spun wool. The strap is currently underway.

Penelope made bands for her living history top hats using a Jonathan Seidel card loom with a Vav kompaniet heddle.

And, yarndragon made some keyfobs using 10/2 cotton. Because she thought 10/2 cotton too lightweight for fobs, she neatly backed them with denim.

Patrick finished the double weave band he started with me. The pattern is his own creation…

And, last of all, I will leave you to gasp at a picture of the amazing pikb’il cloth that really inspired my current project. It was one of the last things I saw on my recent trip away but became the item that jumped to the top of my to-do list on my return. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Many thanks to Deb who showed me this scarf that she had bought on a recent trip to Guatemala. It looks like it would float away in a summer breeze………

Backstrap Weaving – Color Catching

I have been washing all the pieces I have made with the cotton my friend Betty brought back from Guatemala. Two of the pieces were recently made and two were made quite some time ago. Why have I waited? Well, the Guatemalan cotton was around 30 years old and that might explain why the color was coming off the thread as I wove. The most serious case was the purple thread in the spring scarf I made. It is flecked with white where the color had completely come off in places while I wove giving the cloth a sort of denim look. To tell the truth, I really liked that denim look. But, I was afraid to wash the piece thinking that it would lose a lot of color and that perhaps the purple would bleed into some of the silk supplementary weft.

I suppose that people who have more experience with fiber and dyeing would have told me that that wasn’t likely but, what did I know? I didn’t want to take the risk. And so I waited.

I had been hearing about Color Catcher cloths in one of the online groups and my friend Claudia got some for me when I was visiting her in the U.S. They work like a dream. You throw one in the wash with the garment and it magically takes up all the color that is released and is roaming about loose in the water. So, I washed all the pieces and there were no disasters. I can’t tell you how happy I am with the results after giving all four pieces a good press. They feel so wonderful!

The purple scarf doesn’t look any dfferent for having lost what seemed like a lot of color in the water.. I was worried that it might end up looking quite worn. It looks as bright as ever and feels gorgeously soft.

Four pieces got washed and three of the four were a great success. The fourth piece was the subject of a mini disaster. It taught me how the use of different kinds of silk supplementary weft in the same piece can effect the way the fabric shrinks.

Let me show you the red ”leaf” piece that I recently made. This is one of the successes.I finally got around to hemming and finishing it with a wash and press.

It’s sitting on top of the two brown panels that I showed you last week that are now off the loom. I used the same kind of silk throughout this piece and all went well.

As soon as the brown pieces were cut off the loom, I couldn’t resist placing some of my small woven samples on them to see how they looked. As you will know from my previous posts, I want to sew the two panels together into one piece using decorative stitches to cover the join. Here they are fresh off the loom. I haven’t even tidied up the broken warp threads yet.You can see the replacement threads still pinned to the cloth.

And now you see them, tidied and hemmed….

At this point, I was a little unhappy with the fact that the brown color wasn’t nice and solid. The off-white supplementary-weft was showing through in several areas where the warp threads were spaced slightly further apart than in others. I could have called that a ”denim” look and been happy with it but I didn’t want that denim look in this piece.

What I was really pleased with were the edges…good and straight. That is something that I have under control. Once I have figured out the width a piece wants to be, I easily manage to keep it there and don’t need to fuss with it. The two panels were going to join up beautifully. I was excited. I was also happy that the motifs on both pieces lined up nicely. Although I didn’t have to measure and check on width as I wove, I did have to check and compare the length of the two pieces as I finished each motif to make sure that my picks per inch were the same on both.

I washed and pressed the two panels. The Color Catcher cloth drank up the significant amount of brown dye that was released into the water….yay.

The good thing: as the piece shrank, the warp threads smooshed together and gave me a much more solid brown piece of cloth.

The bad thing: my edges got messed up.

I had used three strands of one kind of off-white silk as the supplementary weft to make the double hook pattern and four strands of another kind, in yellow, to weave the diamonds. The parts with hooks pulled in more and now my edges are scalloped. The scalloping is so regular….the fabric draws in for the hooks and out again for the diamonds…that it almost looks like it was planned! My two panels are not going to join together as neatly as I had hoped. I will have to come up with another plan and perhaps sew the tiniest seam possible. I read somewhere that the strips of Kente cloth that are sewn together are connected with 1/8” seams. Maybe I can pull off something like that.

Above, you can see the even edge of the red piece next to the wavy brown edge.

I so love the way the red piece feels and looks now. The floats of supplemental weft in the leaf pattern are quite short and now, after pressing, the patterns have really become embedded and it looks as if they were printed on the cloth rather than created with supplemental threads. The patterns on the brown piece don’t quite look that way as the floats, particularly in the hook pattern, are considerably longer.

I hope I can get more of this Guatemalan cotton. I love working with this weight of thread and there are empty loom bars asking to be filled. In the meantime, I will continue with my curved ikat experiments and see where they take me. Now to see how I go with my decorative sewing.

Backstrap Weaving- 5 years

Facebook has started reminding me that it was five years ago that I opened my account. Every few weeks I get a Facebook Memories reminder showing me a picture I posted on that day five years ago with the option of sharing it with the public. It seems they consider five years the period of time that should pass before a person can look back on an event with nostalgia.The first one I got was this:

This was taken the day before my birthday five years ago. I was in North Carolina and went to visit some ladies from Vietnam – Montagnard, or hilltribe, backstrap weavers – to look at their textiles and watch them weave. They dressed me up in one of their traditional skirts. The skirts are made of two panels which are woven on backstrap looms. The panels are sewn together and the join is covered with decorative stitching. The entire piece is then placed on a frame so that it can be edged with weft twining. They also gave me one of their shoulder bags to carry for the picture.

The following day I returned to watch Ju Nie prepare her warp. I learned a lot about her use of the coil rod on a circular warp and heddles that are applied during the warping process. It was a perfect way to spend a birthday. I was lucky to be able to return to visit Ju Nie and Ngach again a few months later and study their weft twining technique.

I went home and wove something to put into use some of the things I had learned and seen…a patterning technique using warp floats, patterning with supplemental weft and weft-twining.

I can’t believe it has already been five years since I did this. It takes me back to the time of my beginnings in the online weaving communities, the purchase of my first digital camera and the start of this blog. So much has happened since then in my world of weaving and even more had happened prior to that. I am in my 20th year of backstrap weaving now.

I can’t believe that it has already been eight years since I went to coastal Ecuador to study cotton spinning and weaving with Trini and her family.

This has been on my mind because my friend, Janet, has just returned from time spent with this same family and it has been amazing seeing some of her pictures. Trini’s nieces and nephew have grown and one even has a child of her own now. I am waiting for Janet to send me pictures so I can show you. She has been busy practicing the simple warp float technique that she learned there…the patterning technique that you see on the piece in the above picture. She also came back with the confidence to warp up a 10-foot long piece using a dovetailed warping system (see below) on a large vertical frame to make a plain-weave panel for a hammock.

She will weave and sew two panels together to make the complete hammock in the same way that my Vietnamese hilltribe teachers sew panels together to make their skirts and blankets. The dovetail warping system allows a weaver to work her way around the circle of warp and then open out the cloth once it is off the loom without having to cut the warp ends. Stick D in the above drawing is simply removed and the intact end loops of the warp can be used to form the ends of the hammock.

Guaraní weavers here in the Bolivian lowlands where I live also use this system. They use vertical frames and cotton thread and weave their hammocks with pick-up patterns all in one piece.

It’s been thirteen years since I first met my Guaraní teacher, Angela, pictured above warping for a hammock, here in Santa Cruz. She left shortly after to return to her community. It was only in 2010 that I found her again back in the city.

I have had the joining of woven panels on my mind lately which is partly what has been responsible for all these thoughts about my past experiences with this practice and the weaving teachers who showed it to me. My latest project is about weaving two identical panels and then joining them using a decorative stitch.

I have done this in the past using narrow pieces which gave me a chance to put to use one of the decorative stitches that my Montagnard backstrap weaving teachers use. Below, you can see how I joined two bands to make a tool bag…

You can see the stitching down the center. I also joined a long belt that I started weaving on a floor loom at a friend’s house and finished at home on my backstrap loom. This is the piece that I used to put together my instructions for Andean Pebble Weave on a four-shaft loom.

I cut the long strap in half and sewed the two pieces into a backstrap. It has been used by many people who come to weave with me and is a favorite. I used the same stitch as the one I used on the tool bag for this project.

I came across some belt weavers in Peru who sew their pieces together to make satchels to sell to tourists. They create neat joins which they do not cover with embroidery.

I decided to be moderate in the width of this project rather than fill my loom bars up completely with thread. Weaving two very wide pieces with pick-up patterning and joining them is my ultimate goal. These panels are just under 12” wide with 1100 ends of Guatemalan cotton in each. I am weaving a pattern using silk supplemental weft along the four edges and leaving the center blank as I hope to sew large stitches over the seam where the two pieces will be joined.

The project has progressed with all the challenges that I had anticipated and then some more!

Firstly, I wrongly assumed that this brown cotton from Guatemala was the same as the red cotton I used in the project I showed you in my last post. I calculated to get a 30cm width based on measurements taken from the red piece but, once I started weaving, the piece clearly did not want to be that wide. So I unwove and started over at 27.5cm.

Both panels have exactly the same number of ends and are the same width yet the one on the left is exposing more of the white supplemental weft than the other. I have three broken warp threads in the one on the left and several others are looking kind of sad. Meanwhile, the threads on the one on the right are in excellent shape. I am scratching my head about that. I also have to be on the lookout for the need to adjust my beat as the picks per inch on one panel tend to outnumber the ones on the other. So far, it is pretty much under control. I expect the embroidery over the join will be another challenge and I think I will practice on other cloth before I attempt it it on this piece.

I have the idea that creating identical panels in plain weave in this fine thread may be more difficult than doing so using a warp-float structure. I think that finishing this project will place me in a good position for a second one in Andean Pebble Weave.

I played around a little with supplementary-weft designs before starting this piece. I had seen a picture online of a flower motif and wanted to try something new in the way I used the supplementary weft. The image was so tiny that it was impossible to see any kind of detail by enlarging it, but it gave me ideas.

One of the limitations of the single-faced supplemental-weft patterning technique that I use a lot is that you can’t really create and fill in large solid shapes. You are limited by the length of the weft floats. This is simply because very long floats are not practical. They won’t lie flat and can get caught on things and pulled. One of the supplementary-weft threads around the buttonhole in this bag that I made got pulled right out of the shed. It got caught on a finger nail as I fastened the button. It was too long and placed in a high-traffic area.

Naturally, the finer the thread you use, the more detailed the patterns can be. With fine thread, the weft could float over 15 warp ends, for example, and not cause any problems, whereas heavier yarns might make anything more than a 5-span float impractical. This means that if you want to fill in a large shape with supplemental weft, you need to break the weft floats into several short segments.

This is the picture I saw online…

I am not even sure if this is a handwoven piece of cloth or what the technique is but I like the idea of having the shapes of the leaves and petals broken into those regular diagonal sections. It gives the shapes the look of being solid without being heavy. It is a lovely delicate look and I would love to create something like it.

At the bottom of this red band you can see my first rather clumsy experiment with this idea. I wasn’t pleased with this and will definitely keep working on it. In the meantime, I decided to go with something more Andean-like for the current project and wove a couple of samples to test design proportions.

My Guatemalan weaving teachers have their ways of dealing with large shapes. I took out my Guatemalan samples pieces and journal to refresh my memory and, again, I had to pause in disbelief at the realization that it has already been 7 years since I went there to study.Below, you can see one of the patterns that is typical of San Antonio Aguas Calientes. You can see that the large shapes, that look quite solid when viewed from a distance, are made up of several short weft floats. Three short floats take the place of one long one which would simply not be practical on a woman’s blouse.

The weavers of San Antonio Aguas Calientes use both single and double-faced techniques when patterning with their supplementary weft threads. The double-faced technique allows them to create truly soild looking shapes without the sort of ”speckled” effect created by the exposed warp ends that you can see in the single-faced method above,

The bird and flower motifs that I wove above are made with the double-faced technique. The motifs look exactly the same on both faces as you can see below. Although the figures actually comprise a series of several short weft floats, they look solid.

Here’s a brief explanation of how the double-faced method works. This is not meant to be a tutorial as I have not gone into details of thread weight and how to actually start and end a pattern. I just want to give you an idea of how the solid look is created as I have been asked many times about this especially by my backstrap weaving friend, Eladio, in Mexico. I hope he is reading this!

The ground cloth is warp-faced plain weave. The next shed in the weaving sequence is opened and the band is beaten. Then, blue supplemental weft is worked over and under the warp ends on a closed shed, that is, the weft goes over and under all the threads rather than just the threads in any one shed. The supplemental weft goes over and under groups of four warp ends…two ends are taken from the upper layer of threads and two from the lower layer to form this group of four threads.

In the first picture, you can see the weft going from right to left over, under, over, under four groups of threads. The weft then turns around behind the last group and passes from left to right (see the second picture above) going over, under, over, under. The supplemental weft needs to be laid quite loosely in the shed. The original shed is then reopened and the main white weft is passed.

The next shed in the sequence is then opened and the band is well beaten. The two passes of supplemental weft will pack to look like a solid line. After beating, it is time to use the supplementary-weft again on a closed shed to build up the pattern as you can see below. The supplemental weft shows on both faces of the band.

Below, you can see the little bee motif which was the first one that I was taught by my Guatemalan teacher. The weavers often use sheets and booklets of cross stitch patterns for design inspiration. Lidia took me yarn shopping and the little stores had many cross stitch magazines and individual pattern sheets. One of Lidia’s wishes was to to find patterns to which no one else in her community had access. Competition to sell weavings is fierce.

You can see how I have chosen to chart the bee motif. Each filled square represents four passes of the supplementary weft (my two explanatory photos above show how to make two passes). A half-filled square, therefore, represents two passes. What is critical to the success of this technique, as with all work with supplemental weft, is finding the right balance in the weight of the ground weave material and the supplemental weft. That is a matter of trial and error. Supplemental weft that is too light will not provide enough coverage. The opposite will make it difficult to maintain a horizontal weaving line.

One of these days I will make this a complete tutorial, take much better pictures than the blurry ones I took in low light this morning and fill in all the details.

However, I have to tell you that this is the slowest and most tedious technique I have done so far! I wove my large piece with the quetzal birds (at left) when I got home as well as a couple more samplers, and I have not done anything with the double-faced technique since!

I used the quetzal piece as my journal cover which was not such a great idea as you can’t see the other side and appreciate the double-faced nature of the technique. However, the Guatemalan weavers’ double-faced work is also hidden on the inside of their blouses.

It’s time to get out some cloth and start practicing my stitching for the join in my two panels. I want my sewing to be as neat and pretty as my teacher Maxima’s is. I hope to sew triangular shapes, as she has, and I chose the supplementary-weft motif that I am weaving, with its sort of triangular base, with that in mind.

Picture courtesy of PAZA Bolivia and Dorinda Dutcher.

I will leave you with a couple of hat bands that Anne wove using the intermesh technique that we wove together on one of my visits. My teachers in Huancayo 19 years ago, taught me the intermesh structure with a two-heddle set up which makes it partly loom-controlled. You can see Anne’s two heddles and sticks holding her picking cross below.She has used the lettering that I include in my second book in which I also teach this structure. The other design is charted in my second book and was adapted from a Mexican tapestry motif. Anne started the hatband as part of a weaving get-together we had on one of my trips. It is lovely to see it finished. I think her hatbands have come out beautifully.