Tag: ikat

Backstrap Weaving – A Bit of This and That

I’ve been spending a couple of weeks finishing things off, sampling, researching, soaking up some online inspiration and planning while I build up to getting into some meatier projects.

First I added the loops to my cuffs so that I could call them well and truly finished. I made simple three-strand braids from some of my hand spun wool, threaded them through the bands and knotted them on the other side. These slip over the buttons that have been sewn to the other end and secure the cuffs nicely around my wrist.

Next, I decided that I really needed to add a Finnweave cuff to the collection. It was fun planning and weaving this small Finnweave project after the larger one that I had recently completed. I used rows of curl patterns that are often found on Huichol double weave pieces and designed a pattern that I thought had a Mexican flavor to sit between them.

You can see the difference in the gold color in my Finnweave cuff and the cowl on the left. So much of the gold color came out when I wet-finished the fabric for the cowl! Not a bit of black came out and my Color Catcher cloth turned a deep gold color, almost orange. The cuff fabric in 20/2 cotton was light enough to allow me to turn a hem at the two ends without adding too much bulk. I used two black plastic snaps to secure it.

Apparently there is some golden yellow inspiration out on the streets these last weeks. I haven’t been out to see them, but the Bolivia 360 page on Facebook tells me that the yellow tajibos have been blooming. This is one of their photos…

So all three of the latest cuffs are finished and are ready for an outing one of these days!

I would love to also make a cuff from my three-color pebble weave sample in 8/2 tencel on the left but it is just that little bit too wide for any of my ribbon crimps and too thick to hem. It can sit in the sample drawer until I come up with an idea for it.

Next on the list was a return to something I had been playing around with back in early 2015. Back then, I was in one of my ikat phases and wanted to create shapes in ikat and fill them with pick-up patterns. I was heading in the direction of creating curved shapes in ikat to fill with pick-up and was working with 8/2 cotton at the time. I wove a wall hanging with angular shapes…two bird figures that I had seen in a book on a large piece of pre-columbian cloth…I ended up making three pieces in this series of birds. They currently live in my closet. Hopefully one day they will hang on my walls.

That project of angular shapes was followed by ikat circles which I also wanted to fill with pebble weave pick-up. It was successful except for the fact that I had forgotten to account for take-up. when I first tied the shapes into the warp. When I wove the cloth, I ended up with shapes that were certainly curved, but not quite circles. 

Now I am taking the same idea to my 60/2 silk and starting off once again with the somewhat safer angular shapes in order to ease myself back into this. But, I am not making anything nearly as large as a wall hanging! In fact, I thought that I might make this practice piece into a wrist cuff at first but decided that something a bit wider would be more helpful as a sample for future projects.

I used some red silk as the base color, tied it with ikat tape and dyed it black. I really shouldn’t take photos late at night as they are always pretty awful, but I wanted to get a quick picture of this so that it could go into the tub to soak overnight and be ready for dyeing the following afternoon.

I should mention that tying red warp with pink ikat tape is not fun! The colors are too similar and it was very hard to tell if the tape was reaching all the way to the margins of the pattern.

The pattern is a very simple one…horizontal and vertical bars that are supposed to look as if they are interwoven as warp and weft. I may have mentioned in other posts about ikat that I find creating straight horizontal lines particularly challenging. My bundles were pretty small. I find it much easier to wrap a thick bundle rather than a thin one.

Here it is on the loom with some of the shapes filled with Andean Pebble Weave pick-up….

I had by-passed my folders of charts and gone straight to the shelf and taken down my own pattern books to leaf through and choose a pattern.  I used one from one of my pattern books after having modified it to suit these small strips of weaving. I wanted a fairly busy Andean Pebble Weave pattern but not one  that had horizontal lines because I didn’t feel like fussing with the necessary modifications while weaving with this fine silk.

So far, the threads are behaving quite well. I think the interwoven effect would be more pronounced if there was less space between the vertical and horizontal bars. I was concerned that if I left too little space and if the shapes blurred along their upper and lower edges, one shape might end up merging with the next. You watch….next time I’ll leave less space and that is precisely what will happen!

I don’t often look at my own books because I have folders and folders of pattern charts with all the patterns that are found in my books along with so many  more that haven’t yet been published. And so, it was kind of fun looking through my Complementary-warp Pattern Book and remembering the time when I was putting this book together. I spent something like six weeks at my brother’s home in Australia drawing charts and weaving the samples. That visit to Australia was supposed to be about visiting family and then popping over to Bali to take a workshop on weft ikat. You may remember my tale about being five hours into the six-hour flight to Denpasar when a volcano on the island of Bali erupted. That forced us to turn back and all flights from Australia to Bali got canceled for a week or so after that. Of course, the workshop went ahead without me.

And so I  stayed in Sydney with my family instead and  work on the book continued.

Starting the collection of sample bands.

The book was finished something like four months later and it has been wonderful seeing these patterns being woven around the world ever since….

By Gonit Poratin Israel (right) using a backstrap loom and one of her students using the frame of a rigid heddle loom.

Frances Lewis used the fish charts from the Rivers and Oceans set to weave a band of fish, but using tablets instead of heddles. She filled in some of the fish outlines with her own pattern ideas.

Julie B liked the set of four cats in the animal section. I love weaving these too and wove them into a silk wrist cuff along with some of the paw prints that are also charted in this book. There are three different kinds of paw prints in the book.

Wendy made this beautiful hat band for her fisherman husband using the fish and other watery patterns from the Oceans and Rivers set…

Bees get a section all of their own in the book as there are four of them to choose from. Here is Carlos’ backstrap-woven bee piece…

Carlos was one of the designers who made a contribution to this  book. You can see his own bee design (below) flanked by some of the patterns from the Borders and Dividers set.

Original patterns contributed by Maja Burger, Laura McCarty and Carlos Vargas.

Nora included one of the bees and its hive in her band of patterns from the Garden-themed set…

I chose some patterns from this book (along with a couple from another one of my books) for the Christmas tree hangers that I made last year…

Could this be my favorite among my books? I’m not sure. I certainly had fun sitting down and looking through it while planning my latest ikat experiment and there are certainly some nice memories associated with weaving the samples (despite the disappointment of the failed Bali trip).

I guess one of the things I like the most about this book is the fact that there were so many contributions from people who had bought my earlier instructional books and then gone on to create their own awesome original patterns. Within the book itself, it’s impossible to pick favorites from the one hundred options. Julia transferred Sashiko sewing patterns to the Andean Pebble Weave structure. I love those. They are charted in the Geometric set.

I have woven my slightly adapted version of Maja’s weaving woman quite a few times. Yes, she might be my  favorite….my current favorite in any case! She appears on the cover of the book. The cheeky viscachas (Andean chinchilla-like animals) also appear on the cover. I charted this pattern from a pre-columbian textile fragment. 

I hope that if you own this book, you may now feel inspired to take it out and browse through the patterns as I have done. And, if you don’t yet own it, perhaps you will put it on your Christmas Wish List. Complementary-warp Pattern Book. And, if you haven’t learned how to weave Andean Pebble Weave yet, both my Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms and Complementary-warp Pick-up (for inkle and any other kind of loom that allows you to weave warp-faced bands) books show you how.

Our national election here in Bolivia is this Sunday. I hope it passes peacefully. I have re-stocked my pantry in case it doesn’t but let’s hope that there isn’t a repeat of last year’s upheaval.

Take care and stay safe, please.

 

Backstrap Weaving – Staying Balanced

One part of me is crying out for more ikat while another part is telling me to take a break, process what I have learned so far, and then head back in. I am really pleased with my latest ikat piece, mainly because I don’t have to add the familiar footnote: ”The colors didn’t turn out anything like I had expected them to”. This time I mixed my dyes…two kinds of blue with a blue-grey…and got very close to what I had in mind. Can I replicate it? Probably not. I am using such small quantities and don’t have the equipment with which to measure them. All I have is the tiny spoon that comes with the Stevia. 

In my last post, I showed you the warp extended on my backstrap loom. I told you how I was getting “railroad tracks” and had unwoven to see if I could do anything about it. No, there wasn’t a fix that I could see so off I went again with the weaving satisfied that I had at least tried.

As I mentioned in my last post, I believe the “railroad track” effect is due to the two layers of warp threads being slightly misaligned. I think that they got misaligned when I folded the warp in half to set it up on the frame where I wrap it with plastic. This is only the second time that I have folded the warp to halve its length. Other times I have either folded it in half to halve its width or not folded it at all.

This is the other project where I folded the warp in half. You can just see the two horizontal bars of white on either side of the center. That’s where I tied tape to secure the layers before I folded it. I think that’s the key and not doing that might be where I went wrong in this latest piece. I’ll just have to do another and test this theory! 

I was pleased that the pattern in my latest piece came out balanced, that is, my warp threads were quite evenly spaced across the width of the piece. Many things about this piece make me very happy! 

I say that the threads were “quite” evenly spaced because there is some tell-tale exposure of the supplementary weft in some parts where I added a motif in the center of the piece. 

I created a little motif in supplementary weft that would suit the ikat shapes. The hardest part of this was creating and placing a motif that would fit exactly in the available space. So, I had to start weaving the motif at just the right moment, make sure that I got to the center of the motif when I had reached the center of the warp and make sure that I maintained an even beat so that the two halves of the motif were balanced. The horizontal center line is created by wrapping the supplementary weft around equally spaced warp threads….it looks like chain stitch and is a method I learned from my teachers in Guatemala. I couldn’t use the usual inlay technique for an uninterrupted line like that because the resulting float would be way too long.

The Guatemalan weavers use this chain-like “stitch” in their figures to form things like the brim of a hat, a bird’s beak, the base of a skirt, a wing, or a plant and feet. You can see some examples below in the piece I wove with my teacher in Guatemala. 

Weavers in Bhutan also use it although they execute it in a slightly different way. My friend Wendy Garrity uses it in her work.

Here I am nearing the end. You can see the railroad tracks. I am thinking that in certain motifs, this effect could actually enhance a pattern but using it in that way would require being in control of when and where it occurs. I can’t see myself being able to do that!

Here it is fresh off the loom before being washed and pressed good and hard. It’s just the right size to hang on the narrow bit of dividing wall between my living/dining room and kitchen. However, I think I’ll be saving all my wall hangings for the time in some distant future when I am able to move back to Australia.

So, that marks the end of the experiments with un-dyed 60/2 silk for the time being. I’ve run out of thread. I’ll be spending some time now looking at my stash of colored 60/2 silk and the remains of my un-dyed 30/2 silk to see what kind of ikat project comes next.

As I said earlier, part of me is saying that I should take a break and do something else. I saw some work in striking black and gold by a Russian artist online that, at first glance, looked like Finnweave. When I read her descriptions, I saw that it was in fact crochet! It seemed to me that the motifs could be quite easily replicated in Finnweave. That is, if I could remember how to do Finnweave! I don’t weave this structure very much and have to go back to my notes each and every time I want to try it. My notes are scribblings of information taken from various sources including the Baizerman and Cahlander book on double weave structures and an article by David Xenakis in an old Prairie Wool Companion. 

This is the last thing I wove in Finnweave….It’s in 8/2 cotton and has motifs that I saw on belts made by Otomi weavers in Mexico.

I set up the warp with multiple heddles. It’s the only one of the balanced structures that I have tried that I am able to successfully weave without using a reed to maintain sett.

It’s a double weave. Two balanced plain-weave layers are being woven…one dark and one light. They are connected when there is an exchange of colors between the two layers, that is, when you create a pick-up pattern. You can see the dark and light layers separated in this picture….

For all other work in balanced structures, I use one of the lovely bamboo reeds that I have. I have two wide ones and one small one. The small one is the finest.

Recently, I used the small one with my 30/2 silk as I test to see if perhaps one day I could dabble in weft ikat.

A couple of years ago I was using the larger reeds for my experiments with cotton sheer cloth and weft inlay…

This is what the cloth looked like after being washed….

I experimented with weaving a small piece without a reed (because the reed was too cumbersome for this width) and using a flea comb to beat!…It was somewhat successful but there’s no need to mess around with this on wider pieces when you have a reed, is there?

I think the first piece I ever wove using one of the bamboo reeds was this shadow weave piece from many years ago…

It’s fiddly reaching and working with multiple heddle rods behind the reed and I am grateful that Finnweave, with its need for multiple heddle rods, works for me without the need for a reed. 

When I saw the black and gold crocheted piece that I mentioned earlier, I was reminded that my friend Betty had given me two cones of 20/2 cotton…one black and one gold. Perfect! So, I set out to weave a width sample.

The finest thread I have used for Finnweave so far has been 8/2. I needed a new sample in 20/2.

My first sample was cute but way too small to really give me a reliable measurement. I will probably return to it some time and weave a wrist cuff so that I have another structure to add to my wrist cuff collection.  I used it to also test the proportions of some shapes I was panning to use in a bigger project.

I then created a wider warp.

There was a bit of a wobbly start as I got back into the rhythm of the moves and working out how best to interlock the weft threads when working with two shuttles. The lower pattern is from bags that are woven by Otomi weavers in Mexico. The pattern that I am starting is part of a motif from a piece I photographed in the National Museum of the American Indian in D.C way back in 2007, also from a textile woven in Mexico. I have doubled it and added a motif in between.

Although I am able to stop the warp threads from drifting together and making the piece warp-faced, you can see that the sett is not equal. The motif on the right is wider than the one on the left….something to work on. The motifs at the weaving line that I am just starting to weave are some basic leaves that I created. Of course, there had to be leaves! I am pleased with the way this is turning out. I am anxious to see how it all comes together after wet-finishing and am hoping that the black is color-fast. I am so used to the what-you-see-is-what-you-get nature of warp-faced weaving, that it is hard to wait until the wet-finish to discover how this will really look and feel. The 20/2 thread is not hard to work with . It is helpful that the threads are paired in Finnweave and so the units that I need to pick up for the pattern are easy to see. 

Doramay Keasby wrote a nice article in Handwoven Jan/Feb 2011 in which she compared five types of double weave pick-up structures. She noted that Finnweave gave the smoothest pattern (that is, no feathering along horizontal or vertical lines. Feathering along horizontal lines look like icicles hanging off the end of a roof and can be a pretty effect) but is not double faced. So, you wouldn’t want to use it for something in which you would like both faces of the cloth to be admired. There is pattern on the reverse but it is rather odd looking.

So, that’s what has kept me busy and sane these last couple of weeks. That, and another Zoom meeting with some weavers along with my attempts to learn some new juggling tricks. I confess that I didn’t get too far with my spinning in the Tour de Fleece. I plied one lot of the green I was spinning and got through the purple. But, I am motivated to do some three-color pebble with this yarn and just need to keep that goal in sight. I am not adding extra twist as some people do for wool that is destined for warp-faced weaving. I just don’t like the way the “tight” thread feels and I would rather just adjust the technique I use to operate the loom to account for a softer yarn.

The messages that I get from online friends are a big help in these unsettled times too! Keep them coming. Please never feel shy about contacting me with questions. I include an email address in all my publications for that very reason. Or, you can write to me via a comment on this blog. The comments go into moderation before they are approved for publication so you can ask me not to publish, if you like. 

Here are some projects from my online weaving friends….

Annette Giles has created a nice set of wrist cuffs using the warp-faced double weave structure that she learned in my book. I see that she added a touch or two of her own to some of the patterns. That’s a good first step toward designing one’s own motifs.

Judy Lepthien has also been using my Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms book and has already started creating some patterns of her own.

Wendy sent me a picture of the piece that she wove on a backstrap loom and sewed into a pillow. She tells me that she had some trouble handling the wider warp with the multi-sword pick-up technique that I teach in my Complementary-warp Pick-up book and so she went back to a narrower band to practice it some more. Then she was able to better handle this wider piece. The pattern is one used by weavers in the community of Chinchero, Peru.

Josefin Waltin has been using her own hand spun and hand dyed yarn to weave fabric on a backstrap loom. She used this fabric to make a sweet bag….

Carlos Vargas has been working with un-mercerized cotton on his backstrap loom to make some beautiful fabric too.. He said that he worked out a way to operate the loom so that there was not too much abrasion of the un-mercerized cotton. If not handled well, un-mercerized cotton can create a mess of fluff in the heddles and make it impossible to create clear sheds. Backstrap weavers need to have different strategies up their sleeves to allow them to work with a variety of materials. It would be a shame to have to be limited to only the smoothest and friendliest of materials…only mercerized cotton and only very tightly spun wool, for example.

It’s nice to finish this post admiring Josefin and Carlos’ soothing colors.

Take care, please and I’ll see you again soon.

Backstrap Weaving – Chasing Away the Blues

I have been working with blues (and once or twice with the blues) these last two weeks as my latest ikat experiment develops. I still call these “experiments” as I aim to iron out kinks, try new things and learn something new from each attempt. I suppose the main focus of this one was to create the colors that I had in mind at the start of the project. If you have been reading along over this last year and following the progress of my ikat experiments, you will be used to my saying…”the color didn’t turn out at all as I had expected, but it grew on me.” This time, I decided that I would mix the dye powders I have and try to create certain tones of blue and have them match as closely as possible the colors that I have in mind, rather than just making do with what I get. Yes, Facebook reminded me that it’s has been a whole year since I started working on this latest round of ikat experiments. They began with my using short multi-colored base warps and black dye.

I showed you the start of my latest experiment in my last post where I had just begun applying the ikat tape. It’s a long narrow piece using what remains of my supply of 60/2 silk…a sash that will hang on the wall alongside other ikat pieces that I have created in this 60/2 silk. On the warping frame, it is folded to halve its length so that I can wrap the tape around two layers of threads at once.

Maybe a Christmas tree or a pine tree springs to mind…but, in my mind, these lines represent veins on a leaf.

I was able to mix three colors from my selection of dyes and get this faded-jeans blue as the first color layer. I was pleased with that. I wanted to get something that perhaps resembles the first dip in a vat of indigo.

The warp then went back onto the frame so that I could tie more patterns. That would allow me to reserve some of this color and then dye a second color over the top. Basically, all I wanted was a darker blue as the second color, preferably something that would look like multiple dips in an indigo vat. That took two attempts. On the first attempt, the color looked good and dark in the pot. I know to expect the color to lighten a lot as the thread dries, but it lightened way more than expected and I knew that there would not be enough contrast between the two shades of blue. 

On the second attempt, I got smarter and threw in some loose strands of silk that I had used as a test for the first faded-jeans color. I was able to remove them when I thought that the color was just about right and then rinse and quickly iron them dry to see the true color.

The warp then went back on the frame so that I could cut off the plastic wrappings. This time I didn’t leave any wrappings on. In my other experiments I left a row of wraps on the warp at the far end of the loom believing that they would help reduce the amount that the threads shifted as I wove. Time will tell if removing all the wrappings this time has been a mistake!

With all the wrappings removed, it was time for the grand opening. The warp could then go on my backstrap loom and be extended to its full length. I locate the pieces of thread that hold the cross and install the string heddles so that I can weave.

There are two kinds of shift that I have noticed from having done these ikat experiments as well as from having examined ikat work online, in exhibits and in my friends’ collections. When individual threads shift in varying degrees, you get that pleasant blurred effect that we all love. However, there’s another kind of shift that seems to be caused by the two layers of threads being misaligned. The result of that is an effect that I call “railroad tracks”. I am not fond of those railroad tracks!

In the picture below of an example of ikat work from Uzbekistan that my weaving friend Ute brought to show me , you can see the horizontal bars that I am calling railroad tracks. It’s something I would like to avoid. At the time of writing, I can tell you that the very first piece of pattern that I have reached in my current experiment, now that I have started weaving, is displaying railroad tracks….darn. I will be un-weaving and assessing and seeing what can be done about that. It may be the price for having removed all the wraps! If that is the case, I can say that this experiment truly had a purpose in showing me what not to do!

I am pleased with the tones of blue that I created. From now on, I will always toss a tiny bunch of loose silk into the dye bath with the ikat warp so that I can iron it dry, see the true color, and then adjust the dye mix accordingly. One other thing I did, which was maybe not a good idea, was leave the metal rod in place in the warp in the dye bath. I fold the warp around a metal rod when it is extended on the ikat frame. I removed it and replaced it with string in the first dye bath. As a result, all the threads at that end of the warp finished in a tangled mess. I left the rod in place in the second dye bath which kept everything in good order. However, either the metal stained the warp, or it reacted with the dye as there is a bit of a line across the center of the warp which may or may not come out in the wet-finish. More lessons learned!

At left, you can see a rough drawing I made of what I expect the finished piece to look like, complete with the line across the center. That line may refuse to budge in the wash and I so I may as well get used to it being there!

You may have noticed that the title of this post is “Chasing Away the Blues”. I have actually been actively welcoming blues in my latest project rather than chasing them away. What I am referring to in the title is the fact that I was involved in a very nice blues-chasing activity this morning. I received a very warm invitation to attend the Zoom meeting of a group of band weavers who call themselves the Banditos. What a way to lift my spirits! I am so grateful to Keith and the other Banditos for thinking of inviting me. This group is part of the Weavers Guild of Minnesota. Being able to join in gave me a chance to experience just a little piece what I have been missing from not being able to travel to meet and weave with weaving friends while chatting about all things weaverly. I have traveled to Australia in July and August every year for the last four years to do that. Last year I even got to go to New Zealand and spend time with weaving friends. These Zoom gatherings certainly help to chase away the blues that I sometimes feel as we all face such uncertain futures. 

Now it’s time for Show-and-Tell….(another thing that chases away the blues for me is seeing what online weaving friends are creating using my publications)…..

The idea in this photo is to show you the band that Allyne Holz wove to go with the bag that she crocheted. The pattern that she chose for her Andean Pebble Weave band is from my Complementary-warp Pattern Book. However, I know that you won’t be able to take your eyes off the bag! Leaf-lover, that I am, I have barely been able to get past the bag and its awesome draw-string closure either!

Diane Wardlow has chosen to weave a double weave band to add to the upper edge of her bag to cleverly increase its depth. She wove the  fabric for the bag using a really interesting sakiori/rag weaving technique.

Meg Kourmadas is also working her way through double weave using my book and has used the alpaca figure as part of her very first learning band.

Monique de Viscos is using a pretty variegated thread to weave patterns from my More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns book. It is interesting to see the effect of not using a third border color. I really need to include variegated thread in my bands from time to time. Monique’s band is very inspiring.

Orangie wove a striking sampler of eight-thread patterns from my Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms book. 

I love the colors that Judy Andersen has combined for one of the 8-thread Andean Pebble Weave patterns in which S hooks are joined to form a sort of ram’s head motif.

And here’s Terry Martin’s first double weave learning band. I think she may have squeezed every one of the 11/12 learning patterns onto her band. I love the boldness and simplicity of lettering in this structure and how effective the very simplest stick letters can be.. There are also examples of more sophisticated alphabets in the book to inspire you.

Unfortunately, I was too late in asking permission from my online weaving friend, Josefin, to show her beautiful backstrap loom warps that she sets up attached to a tree in her garden in Sweden. She spins her own yarn and hand dyes it in lovely soft colors that look so natural. Hopefully I can include those very inspiring pictures next week.

I wonder if any of you are taking part in Ravelry’s annual Tour de Fleece event. I joined a team and have been spinning while waiting for my ikat warp to dry. I bought what were called Felters’ Packs when I was at the guild in Melbourne on one of my trips to Australia a few years ago. Here are the contents of one pack. I loved the colors and bought three packs. I think the quantity of yarn I get from this will be enough to weave a nice band perhaps in three-color pebble weave…something I haven’t done for a long time.

I hope you are all finding ways to stay positive and chase away the blues. Please stay safe and keep well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Backstrap Weaving – Creative outlets

It’s interesting to see what my online friends and acquaintances are doing with the time they have on their hands during these periods of lock-down and self isolation. I won’t call it “killing time” as who would want to kill a commodity that is so precious? Most are using the time, their hands and yarn from their stashes to weave, crochet, braid and knit. A couple of friends have been drawing. My friend Yonat just finished a spectacular tapestry piece and I have seen some amazing quilts developing.

It’s no secret what I have been doing with my time and it’s not really anything different to what I would be doing in a “normal” world. The only difference is that I am not organizing my time around the fact that I have a trip away coming up. The last few years gave me the opportunity to travel to Australia in the down-under winter months. We are still in strict lock-down here and for me the biggest difference is having to pick through my stash to plan my future projects rather than plan something and only then buy yarn specifically for those projects on a trip away. There’s something rather nice about that. So, it’s all about weaving for me and soon it will be about planning my next book.

Oh, and I have been juggling. That’s a new one. My nephew taught me to juggle many years ago when I was on a visit to Australia. You never forget but you do get rusty….in my case, very rusty. It’s a great way to warm up my arms and shoulders before I do other exercises, not to mention all the other parts of the body that are involved in retrieving dropped balls. Now I am thinking about how to make my own juggling balls. I don’t need another set but some custom-made ones would be fun. I have a “good” set and then a set of crocheted rice-filled ones that I bought from Guatemala. It’s amusing watching the grains of rice escape and fly about the room as I toss the balls in the air. Maybe I’ll learn something other than the basic three-ball toss.

I hand-sewed my face masks. They came out pretty well. I picked apart a disposable pleated surgical mask to use as the model, made it a bit wider to reach to my ears, and added a little tuck under the chin. I had some wire to use for the nose and used the elastic from some eye masks that I had. One mask is only a single layer of fabric and the other is doubled. I wear them both at the same time. They’ve been through the wash several times and survived. I guess my hand-sewing isn’t that bad after all. Wearing a mask is mandatory in all stores and businesses here. I have not heard a single peep of complaint from anyone here about that.

My sister-in-law, Debbie, is one of the people that I mentioned who took up drawing during some of her stay-safe-at-home time. She had never done any drawing at all in her life and she whipped up this sketch of me wearing a mask and surprised me with it. I love it….

I don’t sew and don’t have a stash of fabric. The masks were made from fabric that my friend Claudia had given me so that I could sew an edging on my ikat cowl. I guess I favor these autumn colors. They happen to be the kinds of colors that I have been using in my recent ikat experiments.

After having finished experiment #8, above, I calculated the amount of 60/2 un-dyed silk that I had left to play with and saw that I had enough to make a sash that could hang on the wall with the other two pieces. That would leave me with a tiny bit to make a wrist cuff. I always like to be able to wear cuffs when I teach. They serve as nice portable examples of the various techniques that I use in my work. After all this time spent on ikat, I felt I needed to add an ikat cuff to the collection. However, I wanted it also be an experiment and planned to make it a test of some of the dye colors that I would use in the larger sash project….autumn colors.

Here it is on my arm along with other cuffs and bracelets that I have woven in autumn colors. It is fresh off the loom here and so it looks dull and fluffy and you can still see the charcoal markings where I drew the pattern on the warp before tying the tape. Its look would change after a wash and press.

One of the tape ties came partly undone in the dye bath which spoiled the pattern a little. I guess I got distracted and didn’t complete the knot for that particular tie. This piece went through three dye baths. That’s a lot of fuss for such a small piece but I learn something every time. Figuring out the most efficient way to stage the steps for dyeing the three colors colors is something that I am learning. On this occasion, I dyed with the burnt orange first. Then I unwrapped the parts that would be yellow and dyed those. Then I unwrapped the border threads and covered the entire pattern section with tape and dyed brown. Other possible sequences come to mind and I guess it depends on the ratio of pattern area to negative space, the colors that are being used, and just how much wrapping, unwrapping and re-wrapping you want to do. I had been hoping that the border and the rest of the negative space would be significantly different tones of brown….a solid dark  brown on the borders and a reddish-brown in the other negative spaces. They are different but not so much as to be really noticeable.

I cut and hemmed the ends. The 60/2 silk is fine enough to allow me to hem without creating too much bulk. I’ll add some small snaps, two at each end. I usually add ribbon crimps to cuffs that are too bulky to hem. Jump rings and lobster-claw clasps finish them off nicely. As with any kind of bracelet, attaching the clasp with one hand can be tricky. I have done it often enough now to have a method that works well. That’s something that you might want to consider if you are planning a cuff of your own.

I hemmed and used snaps for these bands in 60/2 silk. There are some very low profile plastic snaps out there but I actually find them quite hard to do up and am sticking with metal ones for the time being.

I also like using a button along with a braided loop. The metal ribbon crimp has a built-in loop through which the braided cord can be passed and knotted to make a loop. The crimp covers and protects the cut raw edge of the band. The other ends of my bands are usually selvedges. Weaving bands like these on my backstrap loom allows me to start with a selvedge and so I can sew a button directly to that end. I don’t have to worry about a raw edge unraveling.

If a band has two raw edges and you want to use a button and loop, I think that adding a ribbon crimp to protect both ends would work well. The button could still be sewn to the band to overlap the crimp (and therefore hide the loop in the crimp.). I have since found out via a Facebook friend that you can buy ribbon crimps that don’t have the loop. One of these days, I’ll get some of those via an Etsy store called TwilightsFancy.

One of my favorite ways to finish a cuff is with a woven tubular band that is woven and sewn to the fabric at the same time. The weft becomes the sewing thread. The tube encloses and protects the edge of the band and really becomes part of the piece rather than just perching as an addition along the very edge. These kinds of tubular bands need to be used on fabric that is quite sturdy. In these two examples I used an eye-pattern tubular band.

I used the tubular band to cover and protect the raw edge of these wool bands. The band on the left is 20/2 worsted spun Mora yarn and the one on the right is my hand spun yarn made from from some particularly nasty llama fiber that I bought in the highlands way back in 2002 when I didn’t know any better. The center color comes from cochineal. The button is made from tagua nut from Ecuador. 

The use of magnets as closures for these kinds of cuffs has been discussed but I can’t say that I trust them unless they are lockable. I would hate to lose my hand spun cuff and the tagua nut button which is a souvenir of my travels in 2005. One Facebook friend laughed about the fact that she has walked away and left bracelets with magnet closures attached dangling to metal cabinets.. Maybe a magnet closure with a safety chain would work although I do remember one weaver whose safety chain was attracted to the magnet and was therefore always stuck to it in a crumpled mess!

I have set up what could be the last 60/2 ikat experiment for a while (I say “could be” because I do have colored 60/2 silk a-plenty and as long as I have dark colored dye, I can continue to create ikat patterns. In fact, I already have some ideas!). This latest project is for the sash wall hanging…a long-ish narrow warp which I am doubling so that I can wrap two layers at once and create a pattern repeat.

First some scratchings on paper….

That’s the basic pattern that will be repeated as a mirror reflection of itself length-wise. Other bits of pattern will be added later if all goes well. And here’s the warp extended on its frame and the start of the wrappings….so far, so good.

My plan to use autumn colors has changed. I would like to try two tones of blue. I love some of the Indonesian textiles I have seen where the ikat artisans tie a pattern and then dip the warp in indigo to create a pale shade of blue. Then they tie more patterns into the pale blue and dye the warp a much darker blue. The challenge is to see if I can adjust the blue dye I have with maybe some bits of black or grey to get the kind of blue I have in mind and then create a light and dark shade. Considering the fact that none of the colors I have used so far have turned out as I had envisioned, I am thinking that this plan is quite unlikely to succeed. I will have black dye on standby to cover up any mess! I haven’t had to resort to this Plan B yet. Fingers crossed.

And now I get to show you what my online weaving friends have been doing…

You may remember that last year I spent a weekend with some of my backstrap-loom-enthusiast friends during which we focused on preparing wide projects. Here is Ann last year making heddles after a day of planning and warping….

Aunt Lydia’s size 10 has some bold and beautiful colors and Ann combined them so nicely.

Ann has had time to finish this project during time spent at home. She noted that it took a year to get through the first half and only a week to finish the rest! She’ll be sewing the fabric into a bag.  I know that Ann is really skilled at the sewing machine and that this will be something awesome.

Sally Backes has more than one band project on the go. This one is on her Windhaven Fiddle loom and she is creating a pattern from my More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns book. If you have studied either the Andean Pebble Weave method or the complementary-warp pick-up methods that I teach in my books, you will be able to weave the patterns in this pattern book. I love the red and white border arrangement that Sally has chosen.

Karen Rein chose flower and leaf motifs to decorate her first warp-faced double weave band. These motifs form part of the 11/12-thread set which are designed to fit on the first learning band. There are also sets with 15/16 threads and 19/20 threads. This was woven on an inkle loom using the instructions from my Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms book.

In the double weave book I recommend using a loom that gives you, as an absolute minimum, five inches of working space. That is the distance from the weaving line to the heddles. However, where there is a will there’s a way. My weaving friend, Kate, had to run some errands which involved some sitting about and waiting. She took this tiny loom along with her as it is the most portable one she has. Another online weaving friend of mine owns one of these and says it fits in her purse! There isn’t what I would call a comfortable amount of working room for doing pick-up on this loom, particularly not for double weave, but Kate made it work and wove the little llama figure from my book while she was out. This wasn’t Kate’s first double weave band. She wove the first one on a much larger inkle loom that gave her a much more comfortable amount of space in which to work. The little loom is adorable!

I am so pleased to see that Susi Saparautzki has got to the stage where she is comfortable weaving warp-faced double weave and has moved on to designing her own patterns. One of the things I have emphasized in the book is just how easy it is to do this. Susi created a motif with dolphins and I love the splash of background on which she has placed them.

Stacy Holder’s Andean Pebble Weave band is stunning. I often forget when I am planning my projects that one can use something other than white as the lighter of the two pattern colors. I love this combination. This pattern along with several other knot-work motifs is charted in the More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns book.

Wendy has been out backstrap weaving again with her clever self-contained set-up. For this band she has been using beautiful reeled silk from Bhutan as warp and supplementary weft in jewel colors and plans to make a wrist cuff…..

Vonnie Galusha’s first Andean Pebble Weave band was used as inspiration for members of the Sacramento Weavers and Spinners Guild in their recent news letter. Vonnie worked with my Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms book.

And, finally, back to the backstrap loom. Here’s Jennifer Kwong’s set-up and first ever band in complementary-warp pick-up. It’s a beauty. We love her clever use of a crepe spatula as a sword. (Complementary-warp Pick-up book…also available in German).

That’s all for now. Mask up, if you can, and stay safe, please.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Backstrap Weaving – How warp-faced are you?

I have to remind myself now and then that there are varying degrees of “warp-faced-ness’. Goodness knows that I have told my students this many a time when they have asked me to help them figure out the number of warp-ends they need to create a certain width. I can only give a ball-park figure because my warp-faced may be very different to theirs.

I often give the same warp (same material, same number of ends, same length) to a group of weavers and then have them compare their woven bands. All will turn out good warp-faced bands but the differences in width in the bands can sometimes be quite surprising. There isn’t a correct width as far as I am concerned, as long as it is indeed warp-faced. You just want to have a consistent width. If the band gets too wide, the weft will be exposed. If it’s too narrow, the weaver won’t be able to get a good straight beat as the threads will be crammed and may even be trying to climb one on top of the other. I encourage them to compare bands because in the early stages, before habits are formed, they can easily adjust their methods if they happen to prefer the way another weaver’s band looks.

Everyone eventually settles into their own version of warp-faced-ness. Mine tends to be on the more open side with perhaps a hair’s breadth space between the threads. I see these differences even among my indigenous weaving friends here in Bolivia. These ladies have been weaving most of their lives. I buy bands from the weaving co-op that my teacher Maxima runs in the central Bolivian highlands. Several of the bands woven by women in the same community will have the same motif but look different, even if ever so slightly. I can see each weaver’s version of warp-faced. Is the motif long and narrow or wider and more squat?

For me, the important task is knowing exactly how wide my project is going to be on the loom so that I can make sure that I get started on the right foot. While planning, I will use measurements from previous projects to figure this out. As my projects get wider and the thread I use gets finer, I find that there is another important task that sometimes gets overlooked. That is, making sure that the threads are equally spaced across the width of the warp. That’s a big task when you are working with 1600+ ends. I can measure my warp before starting to weave and see that the width is spot-on. However, I also need to check that the threads are evenly distributed across that width. They may be more spread in one part and much less so in another but still give me that perfect width. Believe me, when you have a bunch of brown or black threads spread before you, it is not that easy to tell!

Having stripes in the warp makes the task so much easier. My warping notes tell me the number of threads in each stripe. I can calculate how wide each stripe should be and move threads around until they are all sitting as they should. I can take an entire morning to do this! I sit there pushing threads around, measuring, pushing them around again until I finally feel ready to throw the first shot of weft. I’ll keep measuring and checking until I have at least an inch woven.

When there aren’t any stripes, you don’t have any kind of visual aid. Just eye-ball it? That’s not recommended in my case. I have no talent whatsoever for eye-balling things.

The first give-away of uneven spacing when using a warp with no stripes can come when you weave supplementary weft motifs that span the warp. The little leaves that run across the bottom of this solid red piece varied in girth and showed me clearly that the threads were pushed slightly closer together in some places than in others. I consoled myself with the fact that identical leaves are probably pretty hard to come by in nature! Another sign that would suggest a more serious difference in warp spacing would be if you were unable to achieve a straight weaving line. If one part of the cloth is advancing more rapidly than others, one possible reason is that the threads in that area are sitting closer together than they are in the rest of the warp. I have had that happen and I know just beating harder on that one spot doesn’t help!

Of course, there is a way to check in the absence of stripes. It’s just a little more fiddly.  Tie off the warp threads as you wind the warp in even sections. Figure out how wide those sections should be and then measure each section as you spread the threads out ready to weave. Easy!

The last ikat project I did had stripes. This had not been intentional but ended up coming in handy.

Once the plastic ties had been removed from the warp, I could use the thread-count in the stripes to help spread the warp out evenly across the beams of the loom. As a result, the repeated patterns in that project were evenly distributed across the width of the warp.In my excitement to get my very latest ikat experiment underway, I neglected to consider the way the threads had been distributed along the beam. Firstly, I had to recalculate the target width because you may remember my mentioning a certain mishap with scissors in which a chunk of ends got cut when the warp was on the ikat wrapping frame. I caught that error just in time because I had been busily spreading the threads out to the original width calculation. I guess I was too distracted with congratulating myself on picking that up to remember to check the distribution of the threads! It’s not disastrous. But you know how it is… you, the weaver, can see it when most likely no one else can. In any case, this gives me a chance to point out to you this idea of varying degrees of warp-faced-ness which might help you in your own projects.

Here’s what the warp looked like after it was dyed…

It’s back on the wrapping frame so that I can unwrap. You will see that there are more ties on the horizontal bar on the right than on the left. The left bar is at the starting end of the warp. I wrapped two layers together to create that bar. For the other bar, I wrapped the two layers separately so that I could open out the warp to its full width and leave those wraps in place while I wove.

In my happy place: weaving has commenced and I am part-way through the first row of supplementary-weft figures in the first un-dyed section. You can just see the very edge of some of the pink wrapping tape at the far end of the warp. I was over-frugal when I wound this warp because my silk is in short supply. It’s a short warp and I didn’t leave myself much working space at the end.

This is what the supplementary-weft motif looks like….

I particularly like the appearance of “reverse embossing” (my made-up term) that is created on the back of the piece when I use this particular supplementary-weft technique…

Here it is fresh off the loom. There’s lots of fluff to be picked out (this silk is surprisingly fluffy…not all slick and smooth as you might expect silk to be). I also broke two warp threads which I had to replace with a color that doesn’t quite match. Luckily this happened outside the ikat areas. Those ends need to be woven in. You can see them in the lower part of the picture. The cloth has a very matte appearance at this point and is somewhat stiff.

I washed and pressed it….maybe you can see how that brought out the sheen…

Then I decided to add a warp-faced band to one of the ends using the un-woven warp-ends as weft. This is the way that some ikat textiles from Sumba, Indonesia are finished. The bands are applied to both ends of the cloth. I have been told that these textiles were typically finished with striped warp-faced bands in plain weave. In the 1970s some weavers started using ikat-patterned bands on these edges and I have also seen examples of bands with pick-up patterns. In examples that I have seen, the bands sometimes turn out to be slightly shorter and in some cases quite a lot shorter than the width of the cloth and end up pulling in and puckering the cloth. On other examples, the length of the band perfectly matches the width so that the cloth lies flat. I don’t know whether these different ways of applying the band have been intentional.

What I can tell you is that in my experience of having woven only two of these kinds of bands, it is really hard to prevent the puckering!

I have seen a couple of videos of weavers in Indonesia weaving these bands (I embedded one video that had been made by the late Kay Faulkner in one of my recent ikat posts). Here’s another which was filmed by David and Sue Richardson in which the weaver twists the warp ends that have been pulled through the shed.

Her textile was going to be worn and washed and the fringe, therefore, needed to be tamed.  In the videos I have watched, I have not seen the weaver using an additional weft thread that moved back and forth through the sheds alongside the bundles of warp-ends. Strictly speaking, I have been using the un-woven warp ends as supplementary-weft because I do use an additional weft thread to hold the band together. In my examples, adding the bundles of warp threads to the shed is what attaches the band to the cloth but is not what is being used to actually weave the band. As my piece will be hanging on a wall and, most likely, won’t be washed again or be subject to wear and tear, I will leave the fringe in its original wild state.

Let me try attaching these bands fifty more times and I just might be able to conquer the puckering!

You will see that the two ikat motifs that are supposed to be identical in proportions are not. After all I told you at the start of this post, you will know why. 😉

I have lots of things to show you from my online weaving friends. I continue to get woven feedback on my latest book Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms and was excited to receive a message from Susi in Germany showing the motifs she has designed in double weave on a band for her niece. Showing people how easy it is to design in this structure and encouraging them to do so was one of my goals in writing this book. I am going to save those pictures for the next post but would like to leave you with something bright and beautiful after all the dull brown I have been posting!

The backstrap loom is so versatile and this following project by Judy Kavanagh shows another exciting way of using these looms. This project is very different to mine in that it is not warp-faced, it is not woven using commercial yarn, it is not in muddy colors and it is practical rather than purely decorative….

Judy is using a rigid heddle and her own handspun wool and silk yarn to create a scarf. She uses a cardboard sleeve around the woven cloth to help her maintain a consistent width.

How gorgeous is that?! She used three strands of a 2/28 merino in dark fuschia as weft. I hope this has you all whipping out your rigid heddles.

And, here it is finished with twisted fringe. Thanks, Judy.

I am staying safe and well here. I sewed my masks and continue to build up my pantry in the hope of being able to spend even less time out of my home should things get worse here.

Take care, please.