Tag: ikat weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Another Lifetime

I recently realized that I have spent almost half my life here in South America. The first five years were spent in the Chilean Patagonia at the southernmost tip of the continent…a pristine, wild, cold and windswept landscape from which I could look across the Straits of Magellan to the island of Tierra del Fuego. It was a hiker’s paradise and I had to be careful to make sure that I took advantage of the windows of calm and pleasant weather to explore as much as I could of the various national parks in both Chile and southern Argentina.

The Torres and Paine massif in the Torres del Paine National Park. The Circuit is a popular multi-day hiking trip.
The Circuit trail runs alongside Grey Glacier on the western side of the Paine massif.
Adelie penguins on Paulette Island, the first first of several species of penguins that we saw.

I hiked in the parks – the lands of the guanaco – and kayaked the fjords, explored some parts by zodiac, traveled down to Antarctica and over to the Falkland Islands but also spent a great deal of time huddled indoors.

All that indoor time is what is responsible to a large degree for my having taken up weaving and it was from there that I started traveling to spend a few months away now and then in order to learn to weave with women in the highlands of Peru and Bolivia.

Weaving a four-color Andean Pebble Weave piece in wool on my Navajo-style loom in Chile. This was in the very early days before I had the confidence to try wide and complex pieces like this on a backstrap loom.

The rest of my time in South America, when not out and about on my weaving explorations, has been spent basking in the tropical warmth of lowland Bolivia. This has become so normal to me now that I forget to stop and appreciate all that makes his place so delightful. Of course, thoughts of the eventual return to Australia are what have mostly brought this on. I lived on and off for 30 years in Australia, another 30 here….are there 30 more years left for another total change of scene? The place where I am hoping to live when I return is in the Blue Mountains, just west of Sydney…a place in which I spent many a weekend in my late twenties climbing and hiking. It’s far from tropical! The Blue Mountains is a beautiful area. That’s me on an easy, yet exciting, rock climb. I think that I am still game for activities like these…probably just not physically able anymore.

I went for a stroll one afternoon last week to buy dye and ask for advice from my local yarn store. It’s just four blocks away. I took a slightly different route home through the street market and returned with this…all of this fruit plus the dye for around $5.50 total….The fruit stalls carried the strong aroma of a yellow, smooth-skinned fruit called maracuyá. It smells and tastes exactly like passionfruit but sure doesn’t look like the purple-skinned ones that I have always known. This is one of the delights that I take for granted here….living in easy walking distance of pretty much everything I could ever want or need and having it all affordable considering my low income. The fancy, expensive malls and entertainments are further away, but who needs those?

I know that the apples are not exotic for most of us but whenever my students and I would talk about our favorite fruit when I was teaching English here, they would name apples, oranges and strawberries as their favorites…not the magnificent mangoes and the luscious papayas and pineapples that I find so wonderful. In fact, people who have mango trees in their yards here consider them a nuisance. The fruit falls, rots, and attracts flies faster than they can be gathered and consumed. It’s pineapple season right now and the street corners have little carts where you can buy thick slices of fresh juicy pineapple to eat while walking around. There is no such thing as a bad pineapple. The same goes for papaya. There was a time when I ate so much of it that the palms of my hand took on an orange hue.

As for the dye that I bought, I was consulting the store owner on how best to get a certain pastel green with the available dye colors that he carries. His chart said to mix eight parts of yellow with one part black. You may remember from my last post that he had advised me to mix blue and black to get grey and that I had been skeptical. Imagine my thoughts about the yellow and black mix to get this particular green. The grey that resulted from my having followed his recommendation was quite nice and so I can only listen to him again and try a sample with the yellow and black mixture. Of course, the recommendations are not his personally…they come from the manufacturer of the Brazilian-made dyes that he sells.

The blue-grey that I created for my last ikat project.

The pastel green is one of the colors that I might want to use in my next ikat experiment. I am hoping to create a fairly narrow strip of ikat pattern using two dye colors…blue and green… and then weave it flanked by expanses of natural green cotton. This is just one of a couple of ideas that I have floating around. The fact that one of the groups on Ravelry is holding a weave-along based on colors inspired by a picture of one’s own choice, might send me off in another direction.

This painting by Paule Bernard Roussel inspired my silk paisley scarf project some years ago. I might use those various tones of blue to inspire an ikat project….perhaps a white ikat pattern on a background of various blues.
The silk paisley-patterned scarf in which I used four tones of blue to flank white.

Spinning the green cotton has been interesting. I had heard many a time that the natural green color darkens when the thread or woven item have been washed. I boiled my singles to help set the twist but was not prepared for the dramatic change in tone that resulted! Amazing.

This is the green cotton immediately after being boiled. It’s still wet and so looks darker than the color it took on when dry.
Now you can compare. The two balls lower right are the pre and post-boil colors.

Now I am wondering if I can somehow avoid boiling just a small amount of the green thread so that I can weave a piece that incorporates both versions of the green. I’ll just have to deal with the thread’s high energy. That is, after all, the point of these projects…experiment, explore the what-ifs, trial and error. I need another lifetime to fully explore the use of hand-spun thread and ikat.

Natural green alongside mahogany and white Sea island.

I have drawn a pattern that I want to use and I will fold the warp to halve its length this time. I could use this project to try folding in both directions but I think I will leave that particular challenge to a time when I am not using my handspun. My pattern is more or less a diamond but its sides curve outward ever so slightly. Let’s see if I can manage to make the curves work.

In my last post, I showed you my black, white and grey ikat piece off the loom.

Here’s a little picture summary of the process from spun thread to loom…

The warp was folded to halve its width and only half the pattern tied. The picture of the pink ikat tape, therefore, is a collage of the half pattern next to its mirror image.

I folded the finished cloth this way and that to see how best to make it into a pouch. You might remember that the pattern had been planned to be twice this length. The original idea was to fold the cloth at the half way point in the full pattern and form a pouch that way. But I had given up on that idea when I realized that my pattern tying wasn’t as precise as it needed to be and I abandoned tying at the halfway point. I modified the motif so that it could end there without, hopefully, looking too odd.

So, this is the pouch that I created in the end. It holds the surprising number of USBs that I have accumulated.

The brown thread that you see in the picture was labeled as “mahogany” in the bag of sliver that my friend Betty had given me. I found it challenging to spin with its very short fibers. Now I see that not all browns are equal. I have just started on another coil of sliver labeled ”cinnamon” and it is completely different in character. In yet another bag, I have more brown that is accompanied by a Fox Fiber card which calls it “Coyote Card Sliver organic ’89”. This color has a bit more warmth to it. The card says that the color will progressively darken the longer it is boiled so that “many shades of color unique to you can be created”. That’s pretty exciting. I shall have to experiment with that. Looking at the next picture, I am thinking that the takli’s hook could make a nice reed threader in the absence of a proper one, although I wouldn’t be able to insert it very far.

The paler cinnamon is on the spindle next to a ball of mahogany. I haven’t boiled the mahogany yet.

Spring is on its way. The weather is unsettled as hot and moist weather systems from the north east collide with cooler drier ones from the south. Sometimes they battle and it gets wild. We don’t have what you would call a classic coming of spring here as there are trees flowering all year ’round. In any case, I will acknowledge spring and show you my bands of spring flowers. I hesitate to say “celebrate” spring because the heat of coming summer (which can start as early as October) and the smoke that results from burning to clear land for the planting season are two of the few less delightful things about living here. But the mangoes will become larger and more varied and plentiful and even cheaper as the months go by…so who can complain?

Warp-faced double weave flowers in 60/2 silk.

And to finish, here are some amazing flowers that have been embroidered onto the knotted fringe of an ikat shawl from the Cuenca area of Ecuador. This shawl is one of the pieces collected by the late Dennis Penley (author of the book on jaspe shawls of Gualaceo that I showed you in my last post). The images are used with the kind permission of the current owner of the collection. Spectacular! If I had another lifetime, I would consider learning how to do this kind of fringe knotting.

Backstrap Weaving – My Favorite Things

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 🙂

Backstrap Weaving – Proud!

I have woven a lot of things that have made me very happy but my latest piece is something of which I am particularly proud. That might sound a little obnoxious…but I can’t help it. The little cross-body purse that I just hand-sewed has me grinning from ear to ear. I guess it’s because I remember my school days when I was convinced that I was a total klutz when it came to any kind of craft project. In the end I even stopped handing in the work all together and my report cards would say “No work presented”, “Assignment incomplete”, or “Disappointing result”. I remember having a friend’s mother take pity and rescue and do

the sewing part of an assignment for me. My mother was also convinced that she had no craft-related skills or talents and I guess I just assumed I would be the same.

One of the 60/2 silk ikat pieces that I wove last year.

Not that this latest project is any great feat of sewing. It holds together and looks like what I had in mind and that is enough to please me. There aren’t any zips or fancy pockets. I took sewing skills that I had learned in my recent shoulder bag project and got to apply and improve on them. I took the ikat skills that I had learned in all the silk projects that I had woven during the worst of the pandemic and applied them to cotton.

In my last post, I showed you my ikat warp on the loom, heddled up and ready to go.

Almost all heddled. There are 880 ends in total of 20/2 cotton.
A coil rod in place on one of my older cotton scarf warps.

I had been deciding n whether it would be worth inserting a coil rod. I did go ahead and use one. Next time I will insert the rod right at the far end of the loom and leave it there. This time I inserted it, as is my habit, within reach just beyond my shed rod which meant that I had to roll it along the warp each time I advanced the warp. The rod will pick up the tiniest looseness in tension in any particular thread, take it up, and sort of push it along and away to the far end of the warp where it remains trapped. This is all very well unless you are trying to keep your ikat threads strictly aligned. In this case, it is preferable to have any tension differences gradually even themselves out as you inch your way along the warp in such a way as not to be noticeable at all. Each time the coil rod pulled a thread out of alignment, I had to take hold of the thread and ease it back into place. Lesson learned.

It’s amazing how fast the weaving goes after all the wrapping and dyeing that had taken place before I could even get the warp on the loom. Of course, it is only a meter of cloth which was the amount I had calculated as being necessary for my purse. I did not have a pattern for the purse and made up something very simple that is not all that different from my shoulder bag shape, except for the absence of pleats.

Rapid progress on the loom. The coil rod, unfortunately, is out of shot.

All my weaving friends will understand the reluctance to take scissors to a piece of your hand woven cloth and so it won’t surprise you that I had to let this cloth just sit about for a few days. In the meantime, I had to scale down the paper pattern I had made for my shoulder bag.

The finished one meter of ikat cloth.

I sewed a dummy purse, minus flap, to see if the shape I had drawn worked. I felt that it did and was able to use that dummy piece as the drop-in lining. It’s chocolate brown and I guess I was influenced by these naturally-dyed quilting pieces from Threads of Life in Ubud, Bali when I came up with my combination of colors. I have also seen ikat work in Guatemala that combines natural indigo blues with chocolate brown.

Hand-spun, backstrap loom-woven cotton pieces from Threads of Life…swoon.

Sadly, I neglected to take in-progress shots of the sewing part of this project. I wove three bands, one of which became the sides and base of the purse. The other is the strap and the third is the tubular edging on the flap. I was pleased that the pattern on the flap lined up quite nicely with that on the body of the purse and I used a magnetic clasp for the flap.

Feeling proud…can you tell?
Finished cross-body ikat purse.

These are sloooow projects but I find the slow hand-sewing so very relaxing. I posted my cloth in an online weaving group and one member responded with something like….”That looks like so much work!” I was kind of surprised. That’s the kind of thing that non-weavers say when I do a demonstration of backstrap weaving at an event. I have always felt that weavers, on the other hand, just get it!

A benefit of slow projects like this is the value you get from a relatively small amount of yarn! It has certainly kept me out of trouble for a good while. It never fails to tickle me that the bits that you see below can be transformed into a patterned purse.

20/2 mercerized cotton thread, dye for cotton, and ikat tape.

Next up…an attempt to make a small zippered coin purse in warp-faced fabric as a way to test my hand-spun Sea Island cotton. My teachers in coastal Ecuador used hand-spun cotton singles doubled rather than plied, and not sized, for their warp-faced weaving. My singles have stood up well to a balanced structure in an early test sample. Warp-faced will be a different story all together with all that added abrasion. Why am I using singles? I guess it’s only because I want the thread to be that fine. I may be completely misguided in this but we shall see what comes out of this next small experiment. I don’t think I will be wasting too much thread while learning these lessons. If my single thread stands up to the abrasion it just might be because I have put in too much twist and perhaps robbed it of its rustic hand-spun qualities. There are so many lessons to learn!

Mariana weaving warp-faced fabric for a double-pocket saddle bag using doubled hand-spun cotton singles, coastal Ecuador.

In my next post, I’ll have photos and information that my online weaving friend Christina has shared with me on her experience studying with ikat weavers in Mexico in 2019 as well as some images by another online friend who was in Ecuador interacting with ikat weavers in the 1970s. There might be a little something to report on my cotton coin purse project. I might even get to use my cochineal and alum.

And speaking of the red color of cochineal, here’s a teaser from next week’s post as the weavers in Mexico remove an ikat wrap to reveal one tiny part of the overall pattern…just in case you have seen enough blue for today! (Note that these weavers were using synthetic dye for their large production runs of 90-meter warps but use cochineal for their single unique backstrap-loom-woven pieces).

Photo courtesy of Christina Palafox.

Until next time…

Backstrap Weaving – Between Science and Magic

Between Science and Magic….I have copied the title of this week’s blog post from the title of an article by Maria Popova that my friend Susan sent me on a new publication about the amazing and magical hummingbird…a subject which has been dear to my heart as I weave my way through my series of panels called Within These Walls. The article is accompanied by beautiful pieces of artwork such as this one created by John Gould in 1861 and states that…

There is, indeed, something almost magical to the creaturely reality of the hummingbird — something not supernatural but supranatural, hovering above the ordinary limits of what biology and physics conspire to render possible.

The magically larger-than-life hummingbirds that I created for my first three panels played a fantasy role as messengers, friends, guardians and helpers as I wove my way through pandemic maze and, while poking around online, I found that it is not unusual to assign magical qualities to these little creatures.

I found an article which described the role of a single hummingbird in Andean textiles as being a messenger between the three levels of Andean existence…..the underworld, the heavens, and all that lies between. Hummingbirds are often depicted in pairs in highland textiles with their beaks connected and are said in this case to represent nurturing and new life.

Which makes me even happier when I think back to 1996 and the fact that the very first motif I was shown by my backstrap weaving teachers was a hummingbird….although I had not recognized it as such at the time. It also amazes me that I first came to see it as a individual figure flying straight towards me in its role as messenger and that only years later I was able to also recognize it as two mirror-image figures with beaks connected. I find it magical that this one figure can, at least to my eyes, be seen in both these ways.

In 1997, I returned to Peru where I learned to make sling braids with a gentleman in Yanque in the Colca Canyon. He later introduced me to a weaver friend of his in Cabanaconde. She taught this bird figure to me along with others in a supplementary-warp structure. This is the actual band that I wove with her. I wonder if this too is meant to be a hummingbird.

Here’s another excerpt from Maria Popova’s article…

Essential as pollinators and essential as muses to poets, hummingbirds animate every indigenous spiritual mythology of their native habitats and are sold as wearable trinkets on Etsy, to be worn as symbols — of joy, of levity, of magic — by modern secular humans across every imaginable habitat on our improbable planet.

In the first panel in my Within These Walls series the magical hummers are valiantly fighting their way through the chaos to bring me (caught in a window between worlds….do I try to get back to Australia or stay here in Bolivia?) messages of comfort and solidarity as well as practical items….yarn and sticks for my loom.

In the second, they help me build the walls of my safe space and create a new normal within, planting saplings as a way of bringing pieces of the natural world inside. They even warp my loom for me.

In the third, while I remain safe within the walls, they stand as guardians hard at work trying to maintain some kind of a connection between the four disjointed pieces.

Which brings me to the fourth and final panel in the series which the drawing at bottom right in the image represents.

This one is my vision of a post-pandemic world and one in which the hummingbirds’ work is done. I figured that they should shrink back to what could be called a “scientifically acceptable” size in this final panel.

I got out my sampling band to see if I could create a tiny, yet still recognizable, hummingbird figure. The tiniest that I could create was still the length of the little weaver figure’s face and that was okay because I read that the largest species of hummingbird, the Patagona gigas, grows to eight inches (in some reports 9.1″) in length and is native to western South America. Perfect!

In the fourth panel all the pieces are connected into one smooth shape. This shape, which I create using ikat techniques, is filled with a tree around which three tranquil backstrap weavers sit at their looms.

In my last post, I showed you the root system of the tree. It is unusual for me to weave a newly-created pattern without first having sampled it. I paid the price by having to un-weave and make several adjustments to those roots. I didn’t sample the foliage either but got luckier this time and only unwove to fix mistakes.

A big part of the challenge is fitting all the pattern into the ikat-created shape, not allowing any parts to overflow and disappear into the solid black areas. I wanted the shape of the foliage and the roots to still give the impression of the stair-stepped figures that I used in the other three panels without having them look like hard-edged confining walls.

I enjoyed designing a baby and placing it on the back of one of the backstrap weavers. The hummingbirds are yet to be seen in this image. They are flying high being normal hummingbirds doing hummingbird stuff.

I love how the sheen of the unwoven warp has been captured in this picture. I am again using doubled 140/2 silk for this one. Three threads broke this time…one mysteriously and the other two through my own carelessness. I am impressed by the way this fine silk stands up to this warp-faced structure on my backstrap loom.

Here’s the finished tree. You can see the hummingbirds in this one. I had been wondering just how high hummingbirds fly off the ground in their search for nourishment and read that they have been known to fly as high as the balcony of a 14th-floor apartment to sip at a feeder.

Pale-bellied Hermit Hummingbird. John Gould 1861.

This fourth panel is still on the loom as I have yet to weave the horizontal band of pattern across the top. Of course this leaves me wondering what comes next. First of all, I will get out the good camera and see what I can do to get better photos of these pieces. So far, I have been using my tiny iPod. My good camera has never much liked red so we’ll see how that goes.

My internet wanderings in search of information on hummingbirds have taken me to unexpected places. In one such place I found inspiration for a possible future project in three-color Andean Pebble Weave. If that materializes, I’ll tell you more. One of my online weaving contacts suggested I weave a wrist cuff with my hummingbird figures and the new backstrap weaver. That might happen too. Perhaps the hummingbird is becoming another signature pattern for me. It might be fun to combine my favorite leaf pattern (another I consider a signature pattern) and the hummingbird in one piece.

Thank you for following the progress of this project. I hope that you have enjoyed the developing story. I’ve been working on it for several months now and it is not something I would have considered taking on if I had still been traveling three times a year.

Until next time, I’ll leave you with this beautiful image by Australian-born photographer and filmmaker, Christian Spencer. You can see a whole ballet of his hummingbird photos if you chase him up online.

Backstrap Weaving – Into the Deep End

When I sit here deciding on the title of my blog post, it’s amazing the number of times that the title “Lessons Learned” immediately comes to mind. But then I think…Nope, I’ve used that one before. It’s lovely to weave structures and follow methods that I have used dozens and dozens of times over. The lessons have been learned from multiple mishaps. There’s no risk. It’s all fun. The results are guaranteed.

My current project doesn’t fall into that category. I broke my rules about sampling which left me with a large-ish project with a number of firsts and, therefore, many risks. And, I am still not done, so who knows whether this will a mess or success? Many lessons are being learned along the way while I splash around in the deep end.

I am still in ikat mode. You might be thoroughly bored with this topic by now. I certainly am not! There has been plenty to keep me on my toes. 

It was time to move on from 30/2 silk to the finer 60/2 silk. If I had been sensible, I would have woven a small sample to see how well I could handle keeping the pattern aligned in 60/2 silk, test the new methods that I have been hoping to use, as well as sample the dye colors.

Problem number 1: I decided that I should re-use the pattern that I had created some years ago in an ikat project in black-and-white in 20/2 cotton. I felt that I could double the pattern and still not end up with anything too wide in the finer silk. Well, it turns out that 60/2 silk is not all that much finer than 20/2 cotton. I drew out my pattern and calculated the number of threads I would need without fully realizing just how wide the project would end up being. Once I realized how wide it would be, there was the opportunity to scrap it and start over with something smaller but I was too carried away by the pattern at that point! I couldn’t wait to see how it would turn out.

 

Problem number 2: I didn’t check my calculations and, therefore, didn’t dye enough thread in the base “rye” color that I like. I prefer the more subdued rye color over white. Once I had measured out the rye-color dye, there was only a tiny bit left in the jar. I thought ….What the heck…and threw it all in. Then I discovered the mistake in my calculations. So, I was short on yarn, with no dye left. I was in a position where I could have changed my pattern to a smaller one in order to suit the amount of thread that I had dyed. But no, I had my heart set on that pattern and wasn’t giving up. I dyed more thread in a color called “wheat” and figured out a way to work it in so that it looked like it had been planned.

Problem number 3: While I had placed the wheat-colored thread in the warp in what seemed like a nicely balanced way, I forgot to take into account the distribution of the threads into the bundles that would be tied with ikat tape and the placement of the wheat color in the pattern itself. It turns out the the wheat color wasn’t so well positioned after all. But…..I was beyond caring at that point!

Problem number 4: This wasn’t so much of a problem as a challenge. I wanted to divide the warp in two so that I could tie my pattern onto two layers of thread at once and create an instant mirror reflection. I divided it so that it was half its width, placing one half on top of the other, and checked countless times that I had the two layers aligned correctly so that I could start tying the pattern. This was my first time doing this and I dithered over it for a long time! I did something similar in another ikat project. That time I halved the warp so that it was half its length and, for some reason, it was easier.

Problem number 5: After all that dithering, I measured incorrectly and started tying the pattern in the wrong position. Never mind, I had only just started, I cut out the ties and happily started again, very pleased with myself for having done so. Then, when I was well into it, I discovered that I had made another mistake and was off in the pattern by one bundle. Urgh. I wasn’t going to start over. I adjusted the pattern and I think I can get away with it!

Here’s most of the main pattern tied…

I am usually very particular about sampling before I launch into a large project. It never occurred to me to sample the dye colors. In terms of color, this project has not turned out ANYTHING like I what I had originally envisioned! Fortunately, I still love it! Of course the colors in the paper chart that I have are based on dyeing over white. I had to expect that dyeing over rye and wheat would produce tones that did not match the chart. In fact, I was hoping that they would be duller colors. I dyed several layers of color in this project and now I know that I really can’t expect any color, no matter how strong it is, to completely cover and cancel out the underlying color. I was just lucky that I didn’t end up with a muddy mess! 

A discussion online had me thinking about weavers that work with natural dyes from plants that they grow themselves.. I am sure that they often get unexpected variations in the colors as rainfall and other conditions vary from year to year and must affect the quality, strength and tone of the colors that the plants produce.

This is the first color I dyed. It wasn’t what I had been expecting. I then tied some more sections on the green, adding some small motifs like the three you see here, to preserve this first color.

Below, you can see the result of the second layer of color. If I had been wanting teal, this would have been perfect. However, I had been expecting something VERY different. I tied off a few sections to preserve this color and unwrapped others ready for the third dyeing. Goodness knows what the third color will look like! At this point I was already contemplating Plan B:  if this project was a disaster, I would take off all the ikat tape and dye the whole thing black. Then I would be able to save it by weaving some colorful patterns into it in supplementary weft. It would still be a nice “something”…just not an ikat “something”.

Deep breath….here comes color number three…again, not what I was expecting!

Above, you can see it with all the ikat tape removed from the two combined layers. The two remaining strips of tape are preserving the teal color and are tied to the two layers separately. This means that I can now open the warp to its full width and leave those strips of tape in place while I start the weaving. I always feel more comfortable weaving with some ties still in place as I believe that they help minimize the amount that the threads shift. I am not crazy about having the teal there and I will probably weave some motifs in supplementary weft on those strips to almost completely cover them.

Now to get the cross sticks in and make heddles…882 of them! It was fun peeling the two layers apart to see the completed pattern.

The threads are still sitting together in their little bundles, somewhat stuck together after having been tightly wrapped for so long. I try to leave them that way as much as I can as I think that this also helps stop them from shifting too much out of alignment (although it is really tempting to strum and fan the whole thing out to get the full effect of the pattern).

In other news, I am moving along with my latest book project even though this ikat project has been occupying a lot of time. Sitting at the frame and tying patterns is very relaxing after typing away on the book project but it also opens my mind up to thinking about the current instability here in Bolivia and also the dreadful bush fires in my other home, Australia. Many people have written to me with their concerns about the situation in Bolivia as well as for my family, friends and property in Australia. I am always grateful to receive those messages and I reply to them in as much detail as possible. I hope you will understand if I don’t feel like talking about any of that here.

I’ll leave you with a picture taken by my brother, Wayne, of little bit of re-growth in the blackened bush at the back of his home on the mid north coast of NSW.