Tag: ikat

Backstrap Weaving – Where is it?

The slooooow move back to Australia is presenting some problems. One of them could have been easily solved by simply making a list of things that I have taken over there so far. That would save me from having the annoying ”Where is it?” question occupying so much of my time.

For example, I can’t find the silk that I dyed with cochineal last year. I have a certain photography spot beneath the bedroom window and I remember removing from it the little zippered bag that holds all those silk cochineal-dyed balls of thread so that I could place an item to be photographed. Now where the heck did I put that zippered bag? If I can’t find it here, surely that means that I must have taken it to Australia. But that doesn’t make sense. I wanted all of my yarn stash to be here so that I have things to work on between trips to Australia.

Anyway, something good comes from combing through plastic bags and cupboards….you find other stuff. You get to say….”Ooooh, I’d forgotten all about you” and feel all warm and fuzzy with the memories that the unexpected item triggers.

The first example of this was the band woven from my own handspun llama fiber that I uncovered in the closet. That brought back memories of a trip to Bolivia’s amazing Uyuni salt lake way back in 2002. It was on that trip that I met a farmer who sold me bags of llama fiber. I was grateful to be able to take the fiber back with me to spin in the fiber-less tropical lowlands in which I live.

I wove a long band from the mill-spun wool singles yarn that you see in the photo, cut it in two and used it to flank the llama band. I joined the three pieces with the tiniest of seams and it has become the slip case for my pin loom. What can I say?…. I love to weave and anything that is not nailed down around here will eventually get its own woven pouch.

Here’s a look at just some of the black-and-white bags, pouches and slip cases that house all manner of things around my home. They showcase a variety of techniques. Top left is a two-color ikat with a little supplementary weft patterning at the bottom. Top right is a shoulder bag patterned in the intermesh structure with a little weft substitution at the bottom. Bottom left is a three-color ikat using my own handspun cotton. Bottom right is a laptop slip case patterned in a single-faced two-color warp-float structure.

I like that I can keep learning and practicing stitched shibori techniques and use the learning pieces to line my latest creations.

I never seem to decide on the lining until I have finished sewing the bag which means that I get a lot of practice installing drop-in linings. This third stitched shibori project taught me about the effect of different spacing in the stitches and now lines the llama-band bag.

Find Number Two: This was some cotton fabric that I had picked up from a give-away box at a guild meeting I had attended years ago. I had no plans to sew it into anything. I took it because I like to use fabric as backdrops for some of my photos and no one else seemed to to want it. This find gave me the idea of trying the stitched resist technique on print fabric rather than plain white. I gave the fabric a quick wash in hot water which was obviously not enough to truly scour it and make it ready-to-dye. This was just a sample and I wasn’t willing to go to too much trouble. It was okay for a quick experiment and I think this idea is worth pursuing. Ideally, I would have the surrounding print almost totally covered by the dark dye. I don’t know if that’s even possible but I will do some research and put more effort into the scouring next time.

Flower pattern idea for stitched shibori from the website of Townhill Studio where you’ll find lots of tips and tutorials.

Find Number Three: This was a ball of indigo-dyed reeled silk that a former English teaching colleague had brought back for me from Japan. Dear Sayuri (r.i.p) had totally surprised me with this thoughtful gift. She was about the only one among my many teaching colleagues here who showed any interest in what I do but even so, I had never expected her to bring back such a treasure for me. I remember that I had been initially disappointed because my fingers had been stained blue as I was winding the thread off the skein into a ball. I wasn’t sure how that would affect my weaving with it and that might be why I set it aside all those years ago.

I decided that it was time I did something with this gift. I wound some off into skeins and washed them over and over until all the blue had been released. The difference in color as it appears in the photo is subtle but is actually quite significant. I prefer the post-wash color. This silk and some pictures that I had seen of indigo-dyed clothing worn by Chinese minority groups gave me the idea to weave something using a motif that had a kind of eastern flavor. I set about designing one to be woven with supplementary weft.

I used several strands of two colors of silk on a base of 20/2 cotton for my sampling. I love how a backstrap loom allows me to whip up these small samples without wasting too much thread. It took a couple of attempts to get something I liked. That first one was wrong! I was happy with this and was just getting down to the number-crunching part of the preparation process (I like this part because I get to write in my weaving journal with its handwoven cover) when I got distracted by Find Number Four.

Many years ago, I had bought these two ply-split straps. They were made in Colombia by Wayuu artisans who generally use them as straps for their crocheted mochila bags. In this case, they were being sold online as guitar straps but did not come with any hardware. I had become fascinated with the mochila bags and the band weaving of the Wayuu people after buying Dutch weaver Mirja Wark’s book on the subjects back in 2011. My Dutch friend, Anna, (if you are long-time follower of my blog, you might remember “bicycle Anna”) had arranged to get this book from the Netherlands to me here in Bolivia. The following year, 2012, I actually had the opportunity to travel to the Netherlands and spend a day with Mirja Wark. You can see that my recent unearthing of these these two straps has also unearthed a whole string of lovely memories.

My friend Dorothy owns this Wayuu mochila bag with its ply-split strap.

I am usually pretty good at focusing on one weaving project at a time. I may take time out to spin some cotton, weave a pin-loom square or stitch some shibori cloth but once I have chosen a weaving project, I usually stick with it from start to finish. Not so this time. The “eastern” project has been set aside so that I can plan a bag around the darker of the two ply-split straps. I had the idea of using the strap as the sides and base of a plain black bag and weaving an ikat patterned outer pocket to complement the strap pattern.

Wrapping warp threads with tape to resist the first of the three dye colors.

And away we go. I planned a very simple ikat pattern to mimic the “M” shapes in the ply-split strap. I used 20/2 cotton. I have woven two ikat projects with this weight of cotton in the past. The first was the two-color drawstring bag that appeared in the photo near the start of this post. The second was this one in three colors….

These were the pieces that would help me make my calculations. In my latest project I would use four colors. I wrapped bundles of thread that were twice the size of those that I had used in the first two projects. That fact, together with the small spacing between the wrappings, meant that the dense bundles of threads emerging from the wrappings did not have much room in which to spread and evenly take up the dye all the way up to the very edges of the wraps. I spotted the problem after the first dye bath using the tan color but it was too late to fix. I didn’t want to throw it into a second tan bath because I figured it would darken the color too much. In the subsequent brown and black dye baths I worked on moving the threads (as much as I could with rubber-gloved fingers) so that the dye would penetrate all the way to the edge of the wrappings. Every project carries a lesson. I just have to make sure that I add that to my notes….don’t make the bundles too thick if the wrappings are going to be placed close together.

The completed pocket fabric. The tan areas have little fringes of white due to the problem mentioned above.

Sides and base of bag….done. Outer pocket…mostly done. I am deciding on whether it needs a zip. I am going to scrape together thread to dye black for the body of the bag (remember that I’m trying to work solely from stash and so that will mean over-dyeing some colors black). I know from past experience that I’ll most likely end up with various intensities of black color as a result but that could be interesting. As for the shape of the bag…that’s yet to be decided. I wonder if I can actually figure out the lining this time before I sew the bag.

I still haven’t found the cochineal-dyed silk. But I am sufficiently distracted now. It will no doubt turn up when and where I least expect it to. Looking for it has resulted in some beautiful memory trips, though!

Backstrap Weaving – Cotton Tales

While scrolling through my Facebook feed last week I was surprised and excited to see an ad from the Museo ArteCampo here in Santa Cruz for a workshop being given by two Guaraní ladies on spinning cotton. There are three recognized groups of Guaraní people here in Bolivia living in the lowlands between the Chaco and the Andes. Artecampo has been working with people from the Isoseño group since 1984 helping them to recover and preserve dwindling knowledge of technique and motifs while providing a market for their handwoven hammocks, bags and wall hangings.

Examples of GuaranÍ textiles at the Museo ArteCampo.

The timing of this workshop couldn’t have been more perfect considering that I have only recently started to spend a serious amount of time spinning the stash of cotton sliver that I have accumulated in my closet…all generous gifts from my weaving friends. I haven’t seen anything like this being offered in all the years I have been here and who knows? I may not have considered taking the workshop if it had come along years ago.

Learning to spin cotton in Ecuador in 2007.

Two video classes on cotton spinning by Joan Ruane and Stephanie Gaustad as well as a short in-person demo with weaving friend Elizabeth in Australia (who had gifted me a takli spindle) had helped me to get started with using a takli. I am sure that some of what I had witnessed and tried during my stay with a family of cotton spinners and weavers in coastal Ecuador way back in 2007 also helped. I had really been way more focused on the weaving during that stay. Although I was curious and interested, cotton spinning at that point hadn’t captivated me. I just couldn’t see myself having the desire to do it or having a need for hand-spun cotton thread.

This was also true when I’d had the opportunity to study with Ju Nie, a Montagnard (Vietnamese hilltribe) weaver and spinner. She showed me how she first teased the cotton with a bow and then spun it on her spinning wheel. It was fascinating but I had considered that demonstration of such beautiful traditional skills and tools as just an interesting interlude during my studies of the beautiful patterned weft-twining that she was using on the fringes of her woven pieces. You can see the frame on which we were carrying out the twining work in the background. I recently learned that dear Ju Nie passed away last October.

And so, my time had finally come during the pandemic to focus more closely on cotton spinning. And then came this workshop. A miniature Guaraní loom sat on the table at the workshop with a piece of weaving in progress but I didn’t allow myself to get distracted!

Under a tree dripping with mangoes, fourteen of us gathered to learn how to spin cotton on the typical spindle used by the Guaraní ladies.

I already own a spindle that I had bought from my Guaraní weaving teacher many years ago. She only had a little cotton on hand and had given me a very brief demonstration. That had been enough to satisfy my curiosity as, again, I was much more interested in the weaving at that time. She did tell me at that time that cotton was being grown in the community of Isoso and that the inhabitants were not willing to give the seeds away to anyone….not that I had asked for any. I have nowhere to grow it. At the workshop, however, we were free to keep the seeds that we were removing from the cotton.

Angela back in 2010 giving me a short demonstration of how she spins cotton.

The spindle I bought from Angela as well as the ones we were given to use in the workshop, had thick pieces of rubber for whorls. The rubber pieces look like they have been cut from the soles of sandals. A simple groove is sliced into the end of the shaft.

The workshop spindle.
The spindle I bought from Angela in 2010 has a beautifully shaped end rather than just the simple cut groove.

We took the seeds out of the cotton and teased it apart with our fingers into a light airy sheet. Then we copied our teachers’ movements and rapidly lifted and dropped the sheets multiple times a few inches above the table before very gently forming them into loose rolls. One problem we faced was that Sabina, the teacher at my table, was left-handed. She loaded each spindle from scratch and then handed it off to us. As soon as we right-handed folks started turning the spindles, the thread was un-spun and subsequently broke. Not a big deal. We all laughed.

Sabina gets the spinning started while we prepare the cotton.

Although, I am very much used to the watch-and-copy style of teaching used by my teachers here, I had also had the benefit of lots of spinning explanations from my video and in-person experiences as well as lots of trial-and-error practice on my own. And so, I managed to get on just fine. I could understand very well the struggles of the other participants because it wasn’t so long ago that I was experiencing the same difficulties.

Clara worked with a group of participants at another table.

I really wanted to use this workshop as an opportunity to see how the Guaraní ladies manage to spin much heavier thread than I do. They weave hammocks with their plied thread and it is thick and sturdy and so I spent the workshop time trying to focus on that. I created thread that was just a bit thicker than what I have been creating at home but it was nowhere near as thick as Sabina’s and I wasn’t able to keep it consistent. Sabina kept laughing at my fine thread but also told me, with what seemed to me to be pride, that her grandmother had been able to spin very fine thread. My other interest in the workshop was to chat with the teachers about their experiences learning to spin and weave as children. Plus, I wanted to see if I could manage to spin decent thread from cotton I had prepared myself in such a basic way rather than with the beautifully prepared sliver that I had been given.

Cards had been placed on a table so that we could see the Guaraní words used for describing what we were doing. Our attempts to correctly pronounce the phrases brought on more laughter.

GuaranÍ spinning vocabulary and Spanish translation.

As for my cotton spinning at home, I am still working my way through the color labeled Cinnamon. I boiled the color labeled Mahogany and was astonished to see how much it changed its tone. I love it. Either some of the brown comes off in the water, or this cotton was particularly dirty…the water became a mucky, murky mess!

The boiled Mahogany in the center with the original color below right. Above is the original Cinnamon color with the boiled and not-boiled greens on the left.

Now for the latest ikat project using my hand-spun cotton. I might try this particular idea again some time, but not with my hand-spun cotton. It turned into quite a business! I wanted to have a white ikat pattern on a background of various tones of blue. You might remember a project I did a couple of years ago in which I used a multi-colored warp for ikat. This was industrially-spun and naturally-dyed silk and the project was relatively simple: tie the ikat tape on the multi-colored silk…the dyeing of the warp thread had already been done by someone else…and then dye the whole thing one solid color, in this case, black. I loved the result.

I am able to get quite sharp images when using using uniformly spun thread.
The color-inspiration picture.

The current project is more or less the opposite in that I wanted the ikat to be a single solid color, in this case, white, with a multi-colored background. I wanted the change in the blue tones to be fairly subtle. And so I had to tie the pattern and then split the warp into sections and dye two sections at a time separately so that the outer sections were very dark, gradually lightening toward the center. The very center section was dyed grey (which I now regret doing…I should have just gone with light blue) as I was using a picture of my choosing for color inspiration as part of a group weave-along and grey was part of it.

What a task it became! I was using my hand-spun cotton singles. The small individual sections totally twisted up on themselves in the dye bath and so the dye was not able to fully penetrate some parts. I had to repeatedly remove the thread from the bath and try to separate the individual threads and then poke and prod and pick at them in the water. The poor things took quite a beating. And then they would dry and I would find them to be too light and the contrast between the strips of blue too great and so back into the dye bath they would go. Yes, so next time I try this particular ikat idea, it will not be carried out with hand-spun singles. There was way too much picking and pulling and wrangling of the thread going on. I just knew that I was going to have a lot of shift in the pattern as a result. So much fuss over such a small piece. I had been planning to weave it after adding natural green cotton to the sides to make a piece wide enough for a pouch but I decided not to risk my precious green on a project that seemed doomed to fail. Perhaps it could be a wrist cuff instead.

Another goal of this project was to arrange the angle of the diagonals in the pattern so that the diamond shape was more curve-like. That part seemed to have worked out quite well. As always, I really enjoyed unwrapping the plastic ties to reveal the pattern and then sitting down to finally weave it. One of the center threads broke. That’s a problem when it’s ikat unless you have another tie-dyed thread to replace it. But everything else went smoothly. There was a lot of shift in the pattern but that was expected and I was happily weaving away at this point.

After looking at the finished piece for a few days, I decided that it wasn’t so bad after all. I decided to go ahead and weave the green sides separately so that I could piece together a useful item. Yes, another pouch. After all that work, the ikat piece really deserved to be made into something. I planned the layout combining the darker boiled and not-boiled green with a little blue that I had already dyed for a previous project.

I wove the two strips separately but at the same time…if that makes sense. It fit better in my weaving space if I wove it this way rather than as one long strip cut in two. Besides, I could keep a better eye on matching width this way. Again, it was just lovely to be at the loom doing simple plain weave and enjoying the look and feel of the hand-spun cotton. Three broken threads were easily replaced…no tie-dye to worry about this time. The broken ones happened to be the not-boiled green…coincidence, or does that say something about a change that takes place during the boiling process? The threads broke when I was moving the coil rod. Note to self again…set up the coil rod right at the end of the warp and leave it there.

A first look. The sewing isn’t finished yet. I’ll just use a large snap at the mouth of the pouch. I am very happy with the curviness of the pattern.

Here’s the gang of hand-spun ikat projects all together.. The pattern of the latest one repeats on the back as I had folded the warp to halve its length and was therefore able to tie once and get two patterns.

I have another ikat idea developing using my 30/2 silk and reds…maybe cochineal? In the meantime, I will keep spinning cotton. I want to boil small amounts of the new Cinnamon color for different lengths of time to see if that produces different tones. Right now I have some 60/2 silk on the loom and am using double weave to create some jewelry pieces….experiments. I already have a nice ikat pouch in which to keep them…lol. I am thinking ahead to my eventual move back to Australia and considering the eye-wateringly high cost of living (compared with Bolivia). It will be helpful if I can perhaps sell some woven items at craft fairs.

One other thought that just popped into my head is to once again dye sections of pre-warped (but not ikat treated) hand-spun singles allowing them to twist on themselves. Perhaps the differences in dye penetration along the length and breadth will create interesting patterns. It’s hard to believe that this is me writing this….the one who likes everything to be controlled!

Until next time….

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 – Ikat in my In box

Surprising and amazing things come to me via Messenger or email and I so appreciate people’s willingness to share their stories with me.

Recently when I was posting some of my ikat work on Facebook, Christina Palafox contacted me to share photos of her experience learning about the ikat work of Camelia Ramos Zamora and José Mancio Gutiérrez in their studio, Taller Xoxopastli in Malinalco, Mexico. After meeting José and Camelia at an event in Texas, Christina went to Mexico in 2019 to study with these Masters in the art of creating fringed cotton shawls, or rebozos, on both floor and backstrap looms. The shawls that they weave are patterned in the ikat, or jaspe, technique in which parts of the unwoven warp threads are bound before the warp is dyed. The bound areas resist the dye and form a pattern on the unwoven warp which can then be placed on the loom and woven into cloth.

José is seated at the loom at a fair in Texas while Camelia explains the process to visitors to their booth. The unwoven warp ends at the start of the warp will be later tied into intricate knotted patterns by specialists in the technique.

I learned a little about the ikat technique on my first visit to Ecuador in 2005, a tiny bit more on a visit to Guatemala in 2008, and have been playing with it with varying degrees of success ever since. I have added to my knowledge base through trial and error but also via the internet and am grateful to those who take the time and make the effort to so beautifully document and share techniques.

Now I have yet more to add to my knowledge base and even more reason to admire the artists that create these magnificently detailed pieces.

Christina was taken through the steps for creating a jaspe warp for a single rebozo on the backstrap loom while at the same time being able to witness the process for setting up the ninety-meter japse warps that are woven by the workshop artisans on floor looms. Commercially available synthetic dyes are used on those long production pieces. The backstrap loom pieces are dyed with natural substances.

José explaining the use of indigo and cochineal to dye the backstrap-loom-woven rebozos.

Here’s a description in Christina’s own words of the start of her adventure in Malinalco…

My course began on the day after my arrival. After great local coffee and pan dulce (Mexican pastries) we entered their sanctuary of fiber and tools. I was thrilled to hear the clacking sounds of the standing pedal looms (4) the sound was like a symphony to me. The weavers were in ages 18 to 80 and most were kin or friends to José and Camelia.  Jesus was the youngest, Guillermo, Oscar, and Antonio were fast at work creating textiles. The rhythm was delicious. I felt like I was in heaven surrounded by textiles, threads of various colors, old looms, handmade warping mills and hand-cranked bicycle wheels that served as bobbin winders and other miscellaneous weaver’s tools. The ambience was enhanced by four great and well-behaved street dogs that had unique and pleasant personalities and who provided a nice diversion from my zealous attempt to learn the multiple processes I had never attempted. An added visual delight was that the studio was beautiful and set in the foothills of Malinalco. Wrought-iron glass doors and windows swung open to the beautiful mountains and yard of his house. There were hummingbirds (colibri) darting around the bougainvillea. Before work and after coffee, the weavers ceremoniously but quietly light a candle to the Virgen de Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico, ensuring the day’s work goes well and thanking her for watching over their work.

Because I have had a little experience of my own creating ikat pieces on a backstrap loom, what initially stood out for me when Christina first started telling me about her experience in Mexico, were the differences in the methods and tools that were being used. I have been using a Japanese plastic tape to wrap the threads after a few false starts in which I tried to use agave fiber and then cassette tape. It was interesting to see the use of cotton string as the resist material in José and Camelia’s work. The other interesting thing was their use of liquid corn starch sizing before they tied the patterns. The starch helps to keep the fine threads stiff in their bundles and, therefore, easier to wrap. The warp is stretched out to dry and I love the idea of placing bottle caps between the bundles to stop them from sticking together as the starch dries.

The 90-meter warp, enough for 30 rebozos, is stretched outdoors.

Here are a couple of screen shots from a video that Christina sent me which shows José wrapping bundles with the cotton thread. He uses a blade that is strapped to his hand and with a flick of the wrist is able to cut the string when he finishes with each bundle. It’s ingenious but I know I would create havoc if I were to try using something like that!

Wrapping the warp with cotton string.
The blade strapped to José’s right hand.

I use charcoal pencil to mark the pattern on my warp after having read about the use of charcoal by ikat weavers in Uzbekistan. I once used a black marker pen but the yellow component of the black ink bled into my pattern. Jose and Camelia mark with ink which doesn’t bleed and which gets covered by the dark dye colors. Some patterns are marked free-hand while for others, wooden blocks are used….very handy for the tiny repeated patterns. The measuring and marking is quite a job and the blocks must make the process so much easier. I have seen other ways of marking patterns in India in which an entire grid of perfectly spaced lines is drawn onto the warp so that the “wrapper” does not need to stop and do any measuring of wrap length or spacing along the way.

Wooden pattern blocks used to mark the warp before wrapping.

The long floor-loom warps weigh around 20kg when wet. It’s quite a job wringing them out when they emerge from the large galvanized buckets of dye.

Christina’s backstrap-loom warp took three days to dye in blue and green. Plain green warp threads would be placed alongside strips of blue jaspe thread.

Christina undoing the string wrappings. It’s a tedious job but so exciting to see the pattern emerging. José calls this “work for crazy folk”.
It’s so gorgeous seeing the threads together like this. The threads will be combined as the warp is placed on the beams of the backstrap loom.
The combined warp.

Of course, string heddles need to be made before weaving can commence. But there is also another task. Any remaining corn starch is removed from the threads with the aid of the brushes (the best ones are made from agave fiber) that you can see here in this display of tools.

Heddled and ready to go….so beautiful!

Christina tells me that although there are 90-meter synthetically-dyed warps on the floor looms, José and Camelia spend time every day weaving single one-of-a-kind naturally-dyed pieces on backstrap looms. These are their finest pieces which are often entered in shows and awarded as well as worn on catwalks at shows that honor Mexican craftsmanship.

I have a backstrap weaving friend in Mexico who has just finished his first japse patterned rebozo on a floor loom. In his Facebook post he states that a rebozo without a knotted fringe is simply not a rebozo. And so, it would be remiss of me not to mention the beautiful knotwork, rapacejos, that goes into the fringe once the cloth is off the loom. Two sisters in their seventies who live in a remote village and who have been knotting fringes since childhood, do this finishing work for José and Camelia.

In Christina’s words….

Camelia and family with their textile business support 70 indigenous families in the communities around her, others who like these sisters do the finish work on the rebozos. Camelia knows how to do the knotwork as well, but since she is so busy being the jefa (chief) negotiator, designer, shopkeeper, she prefers to farm out the finishing to the nearby villages. Camelia’s work ensures sustainability for these little communities.

Here is an example of knotwork on a shawl that Christina commissioned to honor her grandmother…

You can see more of Camelia’s work on her website, on Instagram and on Facebook . José and Camelia are happy to welcome students to their home. Maybe one day I will be able to travel there and meet them. You can contact them via these links to ask about that. Many thanks to Christina for sharing all this with us.

I will leave you with my little ikat efforts for the first time on my own hand-spun cotton. I am not willing to attempt anything grander for the time being until I have woven this and seen how my hand-spun cotton behaves. If it works out reasonably well, I’ll sew the cloth into a zippered coin and card purse something like these that I made many years ago.

I have folded my warp of hand-spun cotton so that it is half its width so that I can tie the pattern onto two layers of warp at once. When I later unfold the warp, I will have the mirror image of what you see here on the other half. I am going to use the same blues that I used for my recent cross-body bag. Again, I am not willing to try anything new until I know that my hand-spun cotton is up to this. I had been thinking about using cochineal but decided not to risk it.

The completed pattern. The warp gets soaked and then goes into the pot for the first dye of light blue.
After the light blue dye bath, I wrapped all the areas that are to remain light blue before dyeing the warp dark blue. The ball of white is there to remind me that I also need to dye some thread for weft….how many times have I forgotten to do that! The cotton dye that I buy here leaves a slightly greasy residue in the pot. It will get a good scrubbing before its next use.
After the second darker blue dye bath. I might need to go darker.

One thing about dyeing at night….it’s hard to tell what color you are getting under artificial light. This isn’t as dark and inky as I would have liked it to be. I will unwrap one of the light blue sections and see if I like the way the two blues look together. If not, this will go back in the dye bath with a bit more black added to the blue…and I will dye in daylight! I just don’t have the instruments to accurately weigh and measure these very small quantities and so it is hard to follow the notes I have made for other larger dye projects.

Because I am using cotton singles, I expect the woven cloth to curl. You can already see the curl in the threads in the above photo. I hope to use a tubular edging on the little purse which will flatten the cloth. Andean weavers often add tubular edgings to their pieces. Perhaps the primary purpose is to strengthen and protect the edges of the cloth but the tubular bands also have the effect of calming the curl in the cloth that has been woven with their high-twist plied wool yarn.

This is the discontinuous-warp piece that I wove in high-energy hand-spun alpaca yarn from Pitumarca, Peru. Once off the loom the piece would not lie flat…..

Two corners curled over and the other two curled under.

Here is the same piece after I applied the tubular band. The tubular band has its own curling energy which possibly works against the curl of the cloth. The piece then lay nicely flat.

To finish, I am would like to show you some bands that have been woven by friends on Ravelry. Brettchenweberin contributes to the Backstrap Weaving Group while the other ladies have been contributing to a band weaving WAL that has been running these last few months in one of the other weaving groups. The band-weaving WAL brings us all kinds of band-weavers who use string heddles, rigid heddles or tablets to create their pieces using backstrap, inkle or shaft looms. I have been thrilled to see people using and enjoying both my instructional and pattern books and will use this opportunity, if I may, to also remind my readers of my publications. Things have been a little slow lately business-wise and I am guessing it’s because this is the first summer in the north since the start of the pandemic that people feel comfortable enough to get out and about. I have vague plans to travel next February and hope that things only further improve for all of us between now and then.

Brettchenweberin has used figures from my two pattern books – Complementary-warp Pattern Book and More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns. If you have used either my Complementary-warp Pick-up book or any of my books on Andean Pebble Weave to learn the technique, you will be able to weave all the patterns in the pattern books. I love the color combination and think that there might be plans to sew these strips together to make a wider piece.

This one from Beverly has one of my favorite patterns because of the memory it brings me of a cool sunny winter’s afternoon sitting on the grass in the Bolivian highlands with my teacher Maxima. She had taught me the technique so that I could continue on my own without her supervision. That allowed her to continue with her own weaving and sewing projects and we sat side by side concentrating on our work and enjoying the peaceful afternoon together. This pattern is charted in my Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms book as well as in my Complementary-warp Pick-up book.

I love everything about this picture from Dunja Roberts. Can you imagine sitting on the grass in the shade of that tree weaving this? I love living in the tropics but I am afraid that this kind of activity is not so pleasant here. It is either too hot and humid or there are too many bugs! This pattern is charted in the Complementary-warp Pick-up book.

Rebekkah has been weaving lots of motifs from my pattern books. The knotwork pattern on the left is one of several in the More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns book. She added a wavy border to it which looks great. Then she took the little viscacha figure from my Complementary-warp Pattern Book and created her own layout for the little guys.

This is adorable! Nancy has been weaving patterns from my books for some time now and has just sent me her latest original creation…her own Andean Pebble Weave pattern of a cardinal. I love it when people feel inspired to start creating their own patterns.

And here’s some more “adorableness”. This comes from Brettchenweberin. She used my tutorial on the Bedouin al’ouerjan pattern (free for all to use right here on this blog) to weave a band and use it so beautifully on a bag that she sewed.

And with that, I shall leave you all until next time. I am hoping that I like the way the two blues look on my ikat project because I would really like to get back at my loom and put the dye pot away!