Ikat and the eternal question….Will the result be a mess or a success? At most stages throughout the long process, I have absolutely no idea. Spoiler Alert….It all worked out in the end.
Things didn’t go exactly to plan with my latest project but with my usual “make it work” persistence, I ended up with something with which I am pretty pleased.
You may remember from my last post that I had discovered a blip in my ikat warp where I had neglected to wrap one of the sections with tape to preserve the first red dye color.
You might be able to spot the rogue section of black in the uppermostlarge diamond.
I took that as an opportunity to do a bit of spot-dyeing (but only because I knew that my piece of fabric would most likely never be washed. I have yet to learn how some ikat artisans make their spot-dyeing water resistant.)
You can see the sections of diamond that I spot-dyed black in the uppermost diamond and some spot-dyeing in progress at the very top of the image.I’ve put a sheet of plastic beneath that section to protect the rest of the warp.
That seemed to go pretty well. All that was left to do now was to remove the rest of the tape. I made a little video of my doing so for those who might be curious. Note that many ikat artists don’t tie knots in their tape. I do. It takes a while but it’s always exciting seeing the pattern slowly emerging.
And here’s the warp with all its tape removed. This is one of my favorite parts…
We’re still only seeing half the width of the warp at this point. I finished this part late at night and waited until the next day to unfold the warp to its full width.
Unfolding the warp is also one of my favorite parts but it does have me holding my breath just in case I had messed up and mismatched the bundles from the two halves when I first folded it. I hadn’t. Phew!
This might be my favorite part of all…the impression of order before I have to start handling the threads that are now loose and running free outside of their nice controlled wrapped bundles.
Next in the process is recovering the cross….carefully. Please don’t let the threads that I used to save the cross break!
Once recovered, I can use the cross to guide me to making my heddles on one of the two layers of warp.
Heddled and ready to go.
If you think you’ve seen me weave this pattern before, you’re not wrong.
Here’s a comparison photo with the blue purse ikat warp I created some time ago. Both are in my handspun cotton singles thread. The main difference is that I used more threads in each wrapped bundle in my latest so that the piece would be wide enough for my wallet project. The half diamonds on the edges are also colored differently.
This is the stage, before I throw the first shot of weft, at which I most ponder the “mess or success?” question that always comes to mind when I do ikat. The question looms even larger in my mind when I am using my own handspun cotton. The uniform nature of industrially-spun thread makes the result a little less uncertain. But, to be honest, in my limited experience, I just never can really tell what’s going to happen when I work with ikat.
Were the threads going to shift out of alignment more than I like them to? Spoiler Alert…..they were.
And I can’t account for that at all! I did every step in exactly the same way as I had for the blue project (except for the spot dyeing). Because there was what I consider quite a lot of shift going on I stopped weaving once I had the length of fabric that I needed for the wallet. It was getting to the point where the amount of shift just wasn’t attractive to my eye anymore. I cut the piece off the loom which means that I won’t have any any fun left-over bits to play with in a sewing project six months down the track.
My stitched shibori cloth is ready for the dye pot.
I wanted to make the inside pockets of the wallet from stitched shibori cloth and so I stitched some diamond shapes on some scoured cotton cloth and pulled up the threads so that the folds in the puckered cloth would resist the dye. I needed to first dye the cloth red and then overdye with black in order to hopefully produce the same brownish-black of the ikat cloth. I also dyed some plain cotton to line the ikat piece and make the bill pocket.
It has never occurred to me to do a multi-color stitched shibori but once I’d dyed the cloth red, I realized that there were some small open spaces that I could stitch to reserve the red color.
I didn’t put much thought into the design of the red figures. Someone said they look like puckered lips and now I can’t unsee that! Would I be able to match the brownish-black of the ikat warp? Spoiler Alert…I wouldn’t. Well, not on the first attempt anyway.
I don’t have the equipment to weigh and measure such small quantities of cloth and dye stuff. It’s all guess-work which makes it very hard to reproduce a color. However, after giving the cloth a second round of black dye, it came out just right.
The outside of the wallet with its tubular edging in place. The little tab of fabric on the left edge covers the cut end of the tubular band.
You may remember that I placed a coin purse on the outside of the other wallets that I recently made. I wasn’t keen on doing that this time because it would cover the ikat work. So, I sewed a small expandable coin pocket to the inside instead.
All that remains is to decide if I want to use a slim tab to hold the wallet closed. One might be necessary if the coin pocket gets very full.
That probably marks the end of the wallet phase! It’s time to fish around in my stash and see what’s next.
What did I learn from this project? It gave me some more experience with some spot-dyeing and it made me realize that I can layer colors in stitched shibori just as I do for ikat. And, as always, It added to my admiration and appreciation of the fabulous and meticulous ikat work done by the Masters in Indonesia, particularly those who use their own handspun cotton.
I’ll leave you with some news about Sue Richardson’s new blog. You might remember that I mentioned her work as writer for the Oxford Asian Textile Group (OATG) blog in my last post. I’ve also mentioned at various times her work with husband David documenting the techniques, history and cultural significance of textiles that they have encountered and researched in the field in Indonesia and other regions throughout Asia in their travels. The exciting news is that they have just started a new blog of their own….Asian Textiles Studies Blog. You might like to take a look and perhaps subscribe.
There’s no chance of my giving away any spoilers about my next project because I haven’t yet been swept away by a new idea. I’ll have to peer into my stash drawer and see what leaps out me.
I have been trying to gather my favorite things so that I can think about what needs throwing or giving away. I felt the weight of possessions most during the worst of the pandemic knowing how impossible it would be to just pick up and leave at those times when family felt so far away. And so I have been de-cluttering yet again and hopefully there won’t be too many regrets at some later point. I managed to find a school that was more than happy to take the hundreds of handmade flashcards that I had created and accumulated during the sixteen years I taught English over here, eleven of which were at this place, the Centro Boliviano Americano. We would earn US$19/day for a six-hour day in the classroom and that gave me a fairly decent living.
I have fond memories of fun and enthusiastic students (well, mostly), chalkboards, squeaky ceiling fans and cassette tapes.
Those were simpler times. During some of those eleven years I lived here, renting two of several rooms that surrounded an inner courtyard. On nights when it was intolerably hot, we would turn the tv around to face out the window and sit in the courtyard to watch. We could look up at the stars through the leaves of the palm tree that grew in the center of the yard.
I took a chance and left English teaching in 2009, a year after the school celebrated its 50th anniversary, to see if I could do something with my weaving. It seemed that as soon as I left, a whole bunch of funds was pumped into the place and it was modernized beyond belief! It became way too modern with its interactive boards and air conditioning to be interested in my old flashcards. However, there are still some of those humble low-budget institutions around which have no choice but to use what we used to call “barefoot” teaching materials. I am glad that they found a new home.
As It turns out, teaching was so much in my heart and soul that it wasn’t something from which I could just walk away in 2009. I am lucky in that I have been able to combine two of my favorite things…teaching and weaving… over these last ten years or so.
Here are some of the other favorite things that I have been pondering. They may not look like much but each has a story to tell. You might wonder, for example, why I am so attached to that basket. It has its story.
For fun, I wrote three verses to the song from The Sound of Music:
Intricate patterns on bamboo and gourd, A beater, a shuttle, a small weaving sword, Plant fibers twisted and woven like string, These are a few of my favorite things.
These books are the ones that I made by hand to record new techniques that I had learned from my various indigenous teachers. They are filled with diagrams, drawings, small woven samples, miniature warps, charts, and photos. I made eight of them.
Bone tools and wooden ones shaped just for picking, Others to strum across threads that are sticking, Laid out before me the pleasure they bring, These are a few of my favorite things.
Books that tell stories of teachers I’ve known, Covered with fabric and carefully sewn, They hold the memories to which I will cling, These are a few of my favorite things.
And then came the other books…all the ones I have bought and collected in my travels over the years here in South America… from way back in 1993 when I had first started playing with sewing thread strung between nails on a wooden frame I had knocked together. I ordered books looking for pattern ideas. I have books from that trip in 1995 to Utah and Colorado where I had crashed my mountain bike and, due to being on crutches, had learned Navajo-style weaving instead of taking the hiking trips I had planned. I returned to Chile armed with books on Navajo weaving. I will eventually go back to Australia and I can’t possibly take all these books back with me. So, which are my favorites? Which ones can I bear to part with? Many, while not all that special in themselves, have special stories associated with their purchase.
There’s this one, for example. It doesn’t happen to have any special story behind its purchase. In fact, I don’t remember how it came into my hands but I have always been so impressed with what I call a gem of self-publishing. It was published in 1974 and originally sold for $4.00. I wrote in a blog post many years ago about how this little booklet had given me the courage to self-publish books of my own. It is a beautiful documentation of the set-up and operation of backstrap looms in northern Ecuador which became all the more meaningful to me after I went to that part of Ecuador myself in 2005 and witnessed the process. I had always wondered about the author, simply noted as Redwood. Male or female? First name or last? There was an address inside…Santa Cruz, California…a place which I have visited many times as I have several backstrap weaving friends there. What was their story?…what took them to Ecuador? The guild in Santa Cruz had a loom from Ecuador in storage that they had been given.. Had this perhaps been a gift from the mysterious Redwood?
Anyway, long story short, a Mr Redwood Kardon suddenly showed up on Facebook asking to join the Backstrap Loom Weaving Group for which I am the administrator. I read his answers to the membership request questions and put two and two together. I couldn’t believe that he had suddenly shown up after my having loved this book all these years. We have corresponded and he has shared among other things some of the photos of the ikat process that he was able to observe in the Cuenca area of Ecuador from back in the 70s. Now this has become one of favorite ikat pictures…
This is how to turn the rather tedious part of the process in which the wrappings are removed from the dyed warp into a more tolerable activity…sit about in a family group, distribute sections and unwrap together enjoying each other’s company.
I have Dennis Penley’s book on ikat, Paños of Gualaceo (a small town outside Cuenca), published in 1988 which helps me to better understand how the weavers in this area set up their ikat warps. I am still not quite sure about this but it seems that instead of folding the warp in order to tie repeated sections of pattern, they simply gather and bundle all the sections that require the same wrap position, and there might be as many as four or five of these across the width of the warp, and tie the resist material around them together. I am sure that the way these sections are gathered together and wrapped as one large bundle must produce a natural attractive shift in the patterns, in the same way that gathering all the hair in one’s bangs into the center and cutting a straight line will not give you bangs with a perfect horizontal line. I am still struggling a bit to make sense of the descriptions. I also have a piece of video that I was given by the director of the museum in Gualaceo which shows parts of the process. I collect and keep these things for years, not paying them much attention at all and then suddenly they come into focus and are of prime importance to me. This is my big fear about having to abandon books when I eventually make my move….things that aren’t my favorites now could well be needed later and not all of them are replaceable. Sigh.
Old weavings have also surfaced as I pick through almost thirty years of stuff. I found the very first piece that I wove when I returned to Chile after my first trip to Peru in 1996.
In Peru in 1996 with one of my teacher’s woven pieces draped on my shoulder.
And here’s the piece I wove with my newly acquired backstrap loom skills on my return. I wove a little sampler of all the figures I had been taught, arranging them in three columns just as my teacher had done. There’s a puma, a dog, llamas, a person on horseback, and several kinds of birds, all motifs from the Ayacucho area of Peru. Later, I cut the band and sewed two pieces together to make a photo album cover. I used the album to carry photos with me when I went on other weaving adventures. My teachers loved to see pictures of where I live, family etc and I also liked to show my weavings as a way to break the ice. Sometimes they would even ask me to teach them motifs or techniques that they saw in the pictures. This piece is definitely one of my current favorite things.
But back to the present and my latest adventures with weaving ikat using my own hand-spun cotton thread. Before the pandemic I had started asking contacts if they knew of any place in Indonesia where I could study ikat. I wasn’t interested in studying with weavers who used hand-spun cotton because I knew that I would never consider doing that myself. I figured that there would surely be special methods used for the particular challenges associated with using hand-spun rather than industrially spun thread and that I would never have to deal with that. But, here I am just a few years later doing ikat with hand-spun cotton. Never say never! The pandemic is responsible for my finally getting the cotton sliver out of the closet and trying to learn to spin decent thread from it.
Sea Island cotton singles
In my last post, I showed you some of the process pictures for this newest ikat adventure. Here’s the design idea I came up with which I tied onto the warp once I had folded it in half….
Here is the warp after its two dyeing sessions, unwrapped, opened to its full width, mounted on my backstrap loom, heddled, and ready to go. I always spend quite some time admiring it at this stage because it is by no means a done deal at this point. Any number of things can happen. Just because it looks quite orderly here, doesn’t mean it will remain so. Threads can break and there’s a greater possibility of this happening because I am using hand- spun singles….threads that have been spun by someone who is not very far into learning how to spin good thread.
I was so pleased with the colors!
It behaved itself surprisingly well. There was just enough shift to create an attractive blur. I like my figures to be sharp but fully appreciate that this is a big ask from thread that has not been spun with a uniform amount of twist. There was some curl at the corners of the finished cloth which sorted itself out once the fabric was folded and sewn into the little zippered purse. That eliminated the need to edge it with a tubular band.
This is now one of my favorite things!
I felt confident enough after this project to try another a little bit longer and wider. I don’t think that I pushed things too far in terms of width and length but I do believe that I was over ambitious in my choice of pattern.
I was very much inspired by a design I had seen on a scarf on the Threads of Life website….a lovely ikat piece in black, grey and white that backstrap loom weavers in Indonesia had created. I only had enough space to create a very short and modified version of it but it was still too much for my level of experience.
I folded the warp to halve its width so that I would only have to tie half the pattern on the two layers of warp threads. That would give me an automatic mirror image of the pattern I had tied once the warp was opened out to its full width. The pattern also had a halfway point at which it reversed lengthwise. This is the part with which I had difficulty.
My paper pattern and the warp after its first dye bath.
I have created designs in the past on warps that I have folded to halve the length as well as others where I have folded the warp to halve the width…but not both at the same time. And so, with this warp, I was taking on the task of tying the first half of the pattern and then being able to perfectly replicate it on the second half. That turned out to be beyond me! I was tying tiny one-centimeter sections. If sections were out by even a millimeter here and there, those variations would go accumulating until the pattern lines were noticeably off track. It was possible to make modifications and compensate for that to a certain extent but I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to replicate all that in the second half. So there it ended at the halfway point and I re-designed the pattern to suit.
The next time I feel like taking on something like this, I will measure and mark the basic layout of the entire pattern at the start with the charcoal pencil, perhaps dividing into halves, quarters and eighths. The other option would be to try folding the warp in both directions so that any modifications made in the first half are automatically replicated in the second. The whole thing should then look balanced.
The unwrapped warp on the loom after its grey and then black dye baths. My LYS friends told me to combine two parts of the blue dye that I have with one part black to make grey. I was skeptical. But it worked…although on its own it looks quite blue. Together with the black it takes on a more grey appearance.
As usual, I took time to enjoy this sight before heading into the great unknown! The threads shifted quite a lot this time in very irregular ways. I noted some spots of lazy spinning. One time as I was raising the heddles, I watched in dismay as an unintentional slub in one of the threads self-drafted with the effect of smoothing and lengthening the thread! Well, that was very nice of it to do so but not welcome at this particular point in the process. In any other weaving, I would just take up the resulting slack, but when it is a tie-dyed warp thread, it’s not so easy to do so while keeping the various color sections properly lined up.
I broke four warp threads but I had tie-dyed replacements on hand! Why? How? Well, that’s another story that is too long to tell here. Even so, it was hard to perfectly align the colors along the entire length of the warp. I was lucky in that only one of the four replacements created a very noticeable blip.
Now all that remains is to figure out the best way to turn this into a pouch.
One idea is a long pouch like this but I will probably end up folding the cloth so that half the pattern shows on each face.
That’s natural green cotton on my takli. I spun one coil of the natural brown and am not pleased with it. I need more practice before tackling the other brown ones. I am finding the green much easier to spin. I hope to be able to create some narrow columns of ikat on white to place within expanses of the natural green.
I don’t need any woven products! I am just having a whole lot of fun with how much I am learning about cotton spinning and the ikat process and if all of my favorite things end up being housed in hand-woven pouches and bags, that’s an added bonus 🙂
