hummingbird motifs – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Making the Most of It

Back when I was doing my training to be a teacher of English as a foreign language, I remember being told over and over to make sure that any original materials that we created were designed to be multi-functional. Why go to all the time and trouble to create something that would be used once in only one context?

I loved creating my own materials for English-teaching. Back then when I didn’t have much time for weaving, it seems that I poured all my creative juices into doing that. It was multi-functional in that I got to be creative while at the same time providing some welcome fun time for my students away from the text books. And I got better and better with using the same material in different ways with a variety of groups in a variety of contexts at different levels in their learning. And, as a bonus, it gave me a reason to buy stationery. I discovered that I have a thing for stationery.

Give me a chance to draw and paste and sticky-tape and color and I am happy as a baby.

When it comes to weaving, I have folders and closet shelves piled high with charts that I have created for projects. They got used once and then filed away, like the mega chart that I created for my Shipibo-inspired project that you can see above. Sometimes I wonder why I keep them. But then you know how that goes….about a week after you throw something away, you find that you need it, right?

My cat always enjoyed my get-down-on-the-floor-to-chart time.

So, with all that in mind, I am pleased that I have been taking the hummingbird charts, over which I have long labored, and using them in a variety of ways…making the most of all that time and effort. And, I am not done yet. I have a theme in my head for a future project…something that I wish to express, and all this sampling is hopefully leading me there. It’s all just a vague idea at the moment and I am still waiting for the light bulb to come on. In the meantime, I’ll just keep weaving hummingbirds.

I wanted to see what my hummingbird motifs looked like in a large format. I had completed my piece in 60/2 silk. In that fine thread, the stepped nature of the lines that form the various diagonals and curves is not all that noticeable. But what about in something much heavier? Would those lines then become clumsy and ugly? I combed through my stash and found that the only thing I had that would work in terms of having two high contrast colors was 8/2 Tencel and so I created a short warp for sampling. Some particularly high-twist crochet cotton made pretty heddles for warp-faced double weave.

What a dream it has been to weave with this heavier thread! Firstly, the Tencel is gorgeous to handle. It plays well with the crochet cotton heddles and is so easy to see when doing pick-up compared to to the 60/2 silk…no surprises there. I do think it is a shame to use Tencel, which is so much appreciated for its draping qualities, in a dense structure like warp-faced double weave but it was the only option in my available stash for this experiment. I promise that I won’t do it again!

Because the theme that I have in my head concerns embellishment and also the lack thereof, I decided to embellish my king-sized hummingbird to the max. I really enjoyed planning those “hippy bandanna” curls and swirls and I think they add to the playfulness, the love of life and joy of flight that hummingbirds always suggest to me. The hummingbird will be my new signature pattern.

I felt that the curve-like lines and stepped diagonals looked fine. I certainly did not feel distracted by the fact that the steps in these lines are more obvious than they are in finer thread. In fact, I would have to say that I was pretty thrilled with the whole thing.

So, what was next? I could see that 8/2 in warp-faced double weave in something of this width (3″) would simply not be useful for much…too wide for a sturdy belt or bag strap and much too thick and heavy for anything else. So I turned once again to my stash for something a little finer. I happen have, courtesy of my friend Deanna, a good supply of natural-colored 30/2 silk along with a small quantity of it that I had dyed in a color called “rye” for an ikat project I wove last year. The problem was that I did not have any other color that would allow me to weave pick-up patterns in double weave. Yes, I could dye some but…sigh…I wasn’t in the mood!

Solution….use supplementary weft to create the patterns. Bonus: for the supplementary weft structure, I can use the same chart as I do for double weave. I like to use several strands of a finer thread for the supplementary weft which gave me a nice selection from which to choose in my stash of 60/2 silk. I went with rye warp and teal supplementary weft.

The pattern color that you see in the double weave version on the right comes from warp threads that do not float as opposed to the silk piece in which the pattern is formed by floating weft threads. I love the added dimension that the supplemental weft threads give to the cloth. Bonus: I only made one set of heddles for this structure as opposed to four for the double weave piece. The double weave bonus: I can create horizontal lines of any length I please which I can’t do in the supplemental weft structure as the weft floats need to be limited to a certain practical length. That meant that some parts of my original charts needed to be modified. Long horizontal lines for wings needed to be transformed into sweeping curves. It took some time but wasn’t difficult to do and I am really pleased with the way they turned out.

While I wait for that light bulb to come on which will enable me to figure out how exactly to compose the themed piece that I have in mind, I will weave these embellished hummingbirds into something useful. I think I will use my embellished hummers with some indigo-dyed cotton from Guatemala that I have and use it to make journal covers as I have in the past. That will involve an outing to the stationery store to find a nice sized journal. I want something quite big so that I can squeeze in a lot of hummingbirds. I am hoping to get something that has paper that is nice for sketching.

The indigo and champagne colored Guatemalan thread along with the initial width sample that I wove for the first journal.

I used this 30/2 cotton in the past for mini-journal covers which I have given away as gifts. I wove my friends’ initials into the spines of the books…no re-gifting allowed!

For these, I used embroidery floss for the supplementary weft but I can tell you that removing strands from the slightly twisted six strands of floss is a royal pain if you are wanting to use very long lengths. I like to split all six strands and then lay them back together again so that all twist is removed. That way they lie flat and ribbon-like on the cloth just the way I like it. Yes, it’s a pain and so I might use silk instead. Combining threads to create multi-stranded weft is so much easier than pulling stands apart.

In the meantime, Zoom time is still spinning-and-plying time and progress is ever so slow. It gives me lots of time to think about how I would like to over-dye some of these colors and what I would like to weave with them. The planning is all the more important when using one’s own handspun and I already blew it by over-dyeing a really nice green with black the last time I used this handspun to weave some cuffs.

I also have another idea for an ikat project developing in which I combine it with three-color reversible pebble weave. I am sure that it will happen long before this handspun is ready for use.

And so I keep myself busy and out of trouble and keep my spirits lifted. Book sales at Taproot Video are keeping me afloat and I am hoping that the cooler temperatures in the northern hemisphere mean more cozy time at home weaving for those who live up there and maybe time to try some of the patterning techniques that I teach in my books. As always, thank you all for your support!

Backstrap Weaving – A Bit of the Blues

I don’t have the blues. In fact, the opposite is true. I have been getting such a lift from the various Zoom events that I have been attending lately and I try to focus on these rather than on the news.

One such Zoom event that I found very uplifting was the annual conference of WARP (Weave a Real Peace) that took place last weekend. My friend Dorinda had given me a one-year subscription to this organization which allowed me to take part in the Members Only social sessions over the course of the three-day gathering. The rest of the conference was free and open to the general public. The webinar style of the panel discussions did not give us the chance to see who else was attending and so the social sessions were particularly nice in that they enabled me to see and chat with many of my “old” weaving friends, some new friends that I have made during the pandemic and meet new-to-me textile enthusiasts via the break-out rooms.

Zoom and loom…they are both still very much major parts of my life.

During the Sunday morning coffee social, Mari took a screen shot to show what we were all working on while chatting. It seems that I am not the only fiber person who finds it hard to sit still with hands unoccupied. I have been using Zoom time to spin on my drop spindle.

I chose to use the word “blues” in my title for this post because I have finally shifted away from the red and black that I have been using for the last seven months. I started sampling my new hummingbird figures in warp-faced double weave on a sample warp of black and gold 60/2 silk. Yes, black again, but I find that sampling in black is handy because I can adjust the patterns on the cloth with a black charcoal pencil before changing my chart. Most of the charcoal dusts off with some coaxing if I want to revert to the original. Now, a variety of blues are creeping into my work.

There is no lack of images of hummingbirds on the internet to help me chart my patterns. I think it must be quite a feat to be able to capture an image of one in flight with its wings showing sharply. I have read that they flap their wings up to eighty times per second. The giant varieties that are found in South America flap at more like ten to fifteen times per second. But even without internet access there was an image available to me right under my nose….

There it is, the picaflor gigante! This new Ten Boliviano bill has been around for a few years now and I can’t believe that I had never noticed this! I am not sure what made me stop and examine the bill just the other day and discover the hummingbird.

It didn’t take me long to fill my black sample band with figures, many of which were multiple re-workings of the same motif and I was still left dissatisfied. Some looked too chubby, some too pigeon-like. Back to the warping board. I could barely face the black thread again!

In the meantime, I found an article about the Guaraní people’s legend of the hummingbird. One of the regions that the Guaraní people inhabit is the part of Bolivia in which I live. I studied for a while with a Guaraní weaver here and while her textiles in the Moisy structure contain images of birds, they are not recognizable to me as hummingbirds. If I ever find my Guaraní teacher again, I hope to ask her about that.

The legend tells of the forbidden love between Poti, (flower in Guaraní), a princess belonging to one of the tribes, and Guanumby, a member of another rival tribe.

When the affair is discovered, it is forbidden and a marriage is arranged with a member within Poti’s own tribe. In her despair she begs the gods to kill her. Instead, they turn her into a flower. The moon tells Guanumby of this and he extends his arms to beg the heavens to help him find Poti. He is transformed into a hummingbird going from flower to flower trying to recognize the kiss of his beloved Poti.

Before I could make it to the warping board, I suddenly remembered a silk warp that has been lying dormant in one of the drawers for a few years. It was the warp that I used to sample my arrangement of paisley shapes before I moved on to the real project. It was all heddled up and ready to go. Brilliant. As much as I love making string heddles, being spared having to make the seven hundred and twenty that have already been made for this warp made me very happy. I loved being able to revive this warp. The rubber bands had rotted but the sticks had not jumped out of the cross. I don’t know if it was a conscious need to be color coordinated when I chose that pretty blue for the string heddles. That’s a DMC mercerized cotton thread in size 60, from memory.

Because the silk threads are so fine and because there are so many ends, I use four sets of string heddles to help me to do the double weave pick-up. Warp-faced double weave can also be done using just two basic sheds which is what enables us to do it on inkle looms. That is the method I teach in my book Warp-faced Double Weave on inkle Looms. It works beautifully when weaving narrower bands using thread of larger girth.

The pattern appears on both faces of the cloth with colors reversed. I find warp-faced double weave a very nice structure for designing and include a tutorial in my book with suggestions on how to go about it. There are no warp-floats to consider which means that anything that you draw on the chart will be structurally sound.

I used a metal rod in the warp ends which is then lashed to the warp beam. This enables me to create a third selvedge. You can see that in the center picture above. Using a metal rod is not traditional and is just one of my own quirky practices! It works for me and makes it easy to remove a partly-woven project from the beam and store it away. These soft colors are so nice to look at after all those months of black!

And so, I continue sampling my hummingbirds and can test my charts of bits of foliage in the process.

In the real project, whatever that might turn out to be, I won’t be leaving all that open space. That will be mostly filled with foliage. It will be quite a busy scene.

This is one thing about warp-faced double weave that should be kept in mind. In places where there is no pick-up pattern, the two layers of double weave do not connect. The two layers of double weave in this piece are bound at their edges by the green strips of plain weave. Wherever there is pattern, the layers are connected. The fabric can feel unstable or even experience a sort of ballooning effect if there are large plain solid-color areas between the figures.

I think that I am pretty happy with these two figures but there’s still some work to be done on the others. I also want to experiment with weaving the hummingbirds as solid shapes rather than as outlined figures. I think that it is fun seeing the birds emerging from the splash of paisley shapes. I enjoy using my ice cream-stick shuttles which are just the right size for this piece

This will keep me busy for a while and in the meantime, I will think of what exactly I want to weave once I am happy with the designs. If you know me at all, you will know that I am really all about the process. The idea for the product may only come once the fabric is off the loom. I agree that it’s a strange way to operate.

And here’s some more gorgeous blue. Lately, I have been creating to-do piles instead of to-do lists and so my bedroom floor is an obstacle course of little piles of yarn, woven samples and scribbled notes to remind me of my intentions. Among the piles is some beautiful indigo-dyed 30/2 (or perhaps it’s 20/2s?…I don’t remember now) cotton from Guatemala that I bought at an ANWG conference way back in 2013, I think. I don’t think that it is possible to buy more and so I must choose its project very carefully. I used some of it to weave a couple of journal covers as gifts. You can see my friend Claudia’s initials in this piece that I wove some years ago which lay along the spine of the book….

At the moment the thread sits in a pile next to my weaving spot simply because I like looking at it. I haven’t yet come up with the idea of what I would like to do with it. Actually, just pausing to stare at this picture on the screen is starting to give me ideas. Maybe it is in fact 20/2s. Hmmm….I have some white 20/2s but do I have dye for cotton?

But then there are all the other piles to consider. There is certainly no shortage of projects to keep me busy for the rest of the year. I know that I won’t be traveling anywhere this year no matter how optimistic some people seem to be in other parts of the world.

I know that one day my life might be very different and I will be wishing that I had more time to weave and so I plan to make the most of the rest of this enforced time at home. What about you?

Until next time…..