Tag: iPod pouch

Backstrap Weaving – The Bands Play On

The bands play on…

In a time when my weaving goals are geared toward going wider, finer and longer, there is a surprising amount of narrow band-weaving happening on my backstrap loom. I guess I am satisfying the desire to go finer and longer, if not wider, in some of these projects. At least the 110-inch band that I wove as an edging for my wool blanket falls into the long and fine category.

Two years have passed since I took the panels for the wool blanket off my loom and now I have it finished at last along with its red and brown partner.

Now….bring on the cold weather so that I can snuggle under these!

I stayed with fine thread for the next band project which only satisfied one of my three goals. I wove a strap for my new iPod neck pouch. First came the tubular bands for the sides of the pouch followed by the neck strap. I  set up the warp for the strap with four sets of heddles and zoomed along.

I was able to fit three of the four cat patterns from my latest pattern book on the back of the pouch. After attaching the tubular edgings, I sewed coil stitches to cover the raw edges at the bottom of the pouch. The mouth of the pouch ends in selvedges that don’t need protection. I want to re-do the coil stitches as the needle I used was too thick for the weight of wool and I think I can make the coils more compact with the finer needles that I have.

And then it was back to 60/2 silk for another band with lots of pick-up. I am using only two sets of heddles this time and so my pick-up stick is getting a good work out.

This band is for my friend Tracy who makes the most adorable sprang pouches.

I asked her if I could buy one…they are just so darn cute and I loved the colors. I know that it is hard to put a price on these kinds of handmade items and so we came to an arrangement to make a swap…a silk neck ribbon for a sprang pouch. Tracy surprised me by delivering that pouch quick smart. You can see it pictured above.

I am afraid that I am sadly lagging behind on my end of the deal. I am so happy to have this ribbon underway on the loom now.

I am using the same snake pattern that I used for a neck ribbon I wove for myself some time ago. I hang a pendant on it and use it as a necklace. This is a pattern that I adapted to fit the number of threads I am using from a pattern woven by my Guarani weaving teacher. When I showed this to some online friends, one of them pointed out the little red “rubies” that appear in the bends of the snake when you look at the other face. I hadn’t noticed that before.

So there have been a handful of narrow projects on my loom while I have been contemplating my next big project. This one will be wide. I will be on the road again before I can even hope to get this next one started. Besides, I think I need to buy more thread for it and I’ll bring that back with me when I return.

I have played around with a handful of what, for me at least, are wide projects in the past….

This was the first time I tried 60/2 silk as warp.

Another wide-ish one in 30/2 cotton. I’d like to stress that these are only ”wide” in terms of what I normally weave on my backstrap loom. They are not at all wide compared to the pieces that are routinely woven on backstrap looms in S.E Asia! Take a look at these images of backstrap weavers from Laos and Vietnam with their tremendously wide warps (used with kind permission from the folks at Above the Fray Traditional Hilltribe Art.)

I felt I needed to stand to get my friend Janet’s wide wool warp started unlike the gentleman in Ecuador who skillfully works at his wide and very heavy wool warp while seated…

 A Peruvian weaver, below, stands and “dances” with her loom as she manages her 39-inch light cotton warp…

The challenges of going wide…firstly, there’s the equipment. Long beams, shed rods, cross sticks, coil rods and heddle rods are no problem. There no end of wooden broomsticks and such things down the street in the market. What I am lacking are swords of the right length. I rummaged around and pulled out my biggest ones…

Only one is the length that I feel I need. I could have some made for when I return (make them myself?…I am useless at that sort of thing!) But then I started thinking about the double-width cloth that many floor loom weavers make when their looms are not wide enough to accommodate the width that they want to weave. They weave half the width in two layers which then unfold to make one wide piece.

Time to experiment.

I have no idea if the following small experiments will really give me any clue as to how easy this will be to handle with many more warp ends. I guess I was more curious at this point to experiment with sett and how that affects the fold in the cloth.

What I liked while making these experiments was the ability to cut off a sample and clamp off my warp. That way I could wash and press the sample, take notes, plan changes and then continue using the same warp for the next one. The width of the warp you see on the loom below is half the width of the woven cloth.

I suspect that these wooden clamps that I inherited from a guild were home made. I have searched on Google for similar things but haven’t turned up anything yet. I have two of them and they work well at holding the threads while I cut off a woven sample. I clamp one to the unwoven warp while it is under tension and then cut off the woven cloth. I lash the clamp to a dowel when I want to start weaving again.

You can see the first two samples above. I calculated the width I should produce with this number of ends of 60/2 silk based on pieces I have woven in the past. I wove the first small piece at a closer sett. It’s not the width that would normally be produced in my hands and I had to work to stop the cloth from widening.  That resulted in uneven selvedges. The density also made the sheds that much harder to clear. However, of the three samples I wove, this one was the only one where the fold in the cloth was not noticeable at all.

I let the second sample go wider than I normally would, which made shed management much easier. I also practiced a new pattern that I had charted in supplementary weft. The fold in the cloth was quite obvious in this one. It wasn’t noticeable when the cloth was just lying flat but it certainly was when held up to the light. The warp ends were spread further apart at the fold, enough so to create what I would consider a fairly weak spot in the cloth. Again the selvedges were not tidy because I was forcing the cloth to be a width which was not natural in my hands. The only advantage had been that the slightly more relaxed sett made opening the sheds easier.

I let the final sample sit at its natural width…yay, selvedges I like at last. The fold is only slightly noticeable when the washed and pressed cloth is held up to the light but I don’t believe that it affects the integrity of the cloth. It’s amazing how much variation there can be in width while still producing good warp-faced cloth.

Each sample had its advantages…1. invisible fold line, 2. easier loom operation, 3. a more natural rhythm for me and neat selvedges. It’s a toss-up between numbers 1 and 2. I won’t have to decided until I get home from my next trip. Most likely I will want to weave more samples. In the meantime, I can think about colors. Or…if I don’t go with double width, I’ll come home to some new long swords.

As usual, I have some pieces to show you that were woven by my weaving friends. I will limit the selection this week to four different techniques…

Ann wove this wool band using a backstrap set-up and one of my favorite patterns. I discovered this one on a pre-columbian fragment that I was shown and it is charted in my second book (you may have gathered that I have lots of favorite patterns)…

I think it is magical how the pelicans flow from light on dark to dark on light. Of course, you may not be seeing pelicans. You might see cogs and gears, as one weaver remarked. Ann wove this using a temporary picking cross, manually selecting threads for every weft shot.

Kristin’s beauty is based on an adaptation of a central Asian pattern that I charted. Those colors!!! This is stunning. This pattern allows the optional use of two sets of “pebble heddles” and I am pretty sure that that is the method she chose for her backstrap loom.

This is Nicole Stronge’s warp-faced double weave using the two basic sheds on her inkle loom. I have more projects from Nicole to show in which she has continued to create her own patterns, beautifully personalizing her bands for the intended recipients. I will save them for future posts.

Martina has created a really cool set-up for her backstrap weaving in her home. She’s using the backstrap she wove herself and is creating a band decorated with patterns in supplementary weft.

Cut into lengths, the band was made into key fobs and a book mark.

There are free tutorials for the last two techniques right here on my blog. Follow the links I posted above. I am also producing a pattern book and dvd on the double weave technique which extends and deepens the basic tutorial I have provided here.

Now it’s back to my loom and my wee silk ribbon. I also want to follow through on all my good intentions and surprise friends by weaving the bookmarks and ribbons that I have had in mind for them. Goal: get these finished before I hit the road again.

By the way, Australian friends….If you live in the Newcastle area I will be teaching two workshops there in August. There are spaces available! Contact me if you are interested via a comment on this post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Backstrap Weaving – Musical Bands and a Bunch of Looms

My patient piano-playing friend will be waiting for his music-themed bookmark. He’ll have to wait a bit longer. What I have ended up with is a band that is too long to be a bookmark but not long enough to be anything else. It will go on my table of samples next time I teach a workshop on warp-faced double weave. It was a lot of fun to weave and I would really like to weave more music notation with more complex figures while aiming to create something a bit more useful.

The piano keys wove up quickly and the whole process was made easier with the use of four sets of string heddles and some thread markers. Using markers helped me to quickly pick up the right number of threads for the black keys without having to do any counting or rely on eye-balling. I have used marker threads before in other projects. I just tie a colored thread around the heddles that raise certain warp threads in that shed or around the threads themselves if they happen to be in the other shed.

In my last blog post I had just finished the piano keys and started on the bass clef and key signature. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to fit a treble clef in the space in which I was working.

I chose a simple piece of music written for “easy piano”. I wasn’t sure about being able to represent rests well and so I chose something that didn’t include them.

Charting out the notes was fun. Because I was weaving with 60/2 silk, I had a lot of threads to work with in a small space and could produce  quite a good impression of curves.

But then, I started running out of room and I wasn’t sure if I could squeeze in the last measure. I had, after all, only measured out enough warp to be able to comfortably weave a bookmark.

But, I did manage to squeeze it all in…phew…enough to be make the melody recognizable. Do you know it?

While still in “band mode”, I decided to resurrect an old project that had never been properly finished. This was one of two lap blankets that I had woven two years ago. The brown one has been completed. The two panels were first aligned, ready to sew together…

The patterned edging band was woven. About 110 inches were needed…

Then the band was hand-sewn to the perimeter…

The other lap blanket, the purple one, has been on standby awaiting is edging band. The problem is that the lap blanket is just as warm to use without its edging. It was not the weaving of the band that had me procrastinating. It was the hand-sewing to the edge of the blanket that had me pushing it to the bottom of my “to-do” list.

I set up a warp to weave the 110 inches of band with a very simple pattern in the center. The blanket itself is quite busy with pattern and so I wanted the edging band to be relatively quiet. It was a pattern that could be set up with four sets of string heddles. Rather than just have the four heddles in the center for the pattern, I set them up all the way across the band. I find that sometimes little bunches of heddles in the middle of a piece can get sort of swallowed up by and entangled in the rest of the warp threads. Then they are just annoying rather than helpful.

Here’s the band as I approach the end. The last sheet of paper has just rolled off the end beam.

Now I need to wash and press it before sewing it along the edge. Luckily we are having cooler temperatures in what passes for a winter here in the Bolivian lowlands and it will be pleasant having the blanket on my lap as I sew.

And then, another sort of music-related project came to mind. I had woven a zippered pouch for my iPod and charger and decided that I really needed a neck pouch for only the iPod when I want to carry it around to use as a camera. I should mention that I don’t have a single piece of music on this iPod. I bought it for taking photos and for being able to access Instagram.

The need for a neck pouch was apparent when I took the Maid of the Mist boat trip at Niagara Falls on my last visit to the USA. I wasn’t able to get to my pockets under the big plastic poncho that we were given and I was fearful the whole time that my wet hands would drop the iPod overboard. It would have been nice to have been able to pull out a neck pouch and deposit the iPod, which I was using as a camera, safely within.

I set up an Andean Pebble Weave warp in 20/2 wool with plain-weave borders. I added the yellow wraps to the tiny heddles to keep help stop them from getting swallowed and messed up by the neighboring warp threads, as I mentioned earlier. They worked beautifully. It is an idea I got from looking at a picture I took in Peru of a warp with several bunches of heddles that controlled various patterning structures within the one warp.

Bunches of string heddles control the colored layers of warps on the horizontal loom of Taquile Island, Peru.

I used the Weaver 2 pattern from my latest book of patterns, Complementary-warp Pattern Book. It can be woven by doing pick-up using two basic sheds…one that holds all the dark threads and one that holds all the light ones. This makes the method ideal for inkle looms, rigid heddles and other kinds of band looms. Or, it can be woven using additional sets of string heddles as I have done here.

Maja in Germany had designed the patterned called Weaver 1 and contributed it to my book. She allowed me to make small changes to her original pattern to make a new Weaver 2 pattern so that I could include two options in the book.

I had never woven the pattern in wool. All my samples for the book had been woven with cotton. The figure on my sample warp came out more elongated than I had expected.

Well, that’s the purpose of sampling and I was able to adjust my beat for the real project in purple and teal 20/2 wool. I also widened the pebble area and reduced the width of the border.

I swapped the plain-weave border structure for the ”thick border” that I teach in my Andean Pebble Weave book. I felt that the pouch needed that kind of sturdiness across its width. However, I have to confess that now I am just confused and am not sure which of the two motifs I prefer…the long one or the more squat one.The band has a selvedge at its start which will be at the mouth of the pouch. I will leave you with some pictures of bands that were woven on other kinds of looms by online friends using the instructions and patterns from my Complementary-warp Pick-up book…

From Mog using her Gilmore Mini Wave loom. I like the way she has woven the border and main patterns in the same colors.
From Marsha, also using a Gilmore Mini Wave loom in cotton and tencel.
From Nancy who used the Better Loom pictured below…

Alison Roddham is using what she tells me is a reproduction of a Medieval box loom with a rigid heddle.
Kathy Amabile used her Louet Erica, a sweet table loom, to weave this band for a camera strap.
Kathy (aka drygardening) wove this band on her Schacht inkle loom. She tells me that she alreday had a warp on the loom when she got my book and used it to weave some smaller patterns on half the warp. I like the effect of the horizontal stripes next to the motifs.
Penelope is using a Jonathon Seidel card loom to weave her first ever complementary-warp pick-up band using a rigid heddle.

And, of course, there are backstrap weavers too. Sonja has been learning to do complementary-warp pick-up and use a backstrap loom while making a series of key fobs as gifts…

Tracy has multiple backstrap looms set up on her deck.

It’s nice to see the patterns on Tracy’s black warps that now feel like “old friends” to me, published way back in 2010…two of three of a set of original patterns I created for my Andean Pebble Weave book.

Martina has been doing some striking plain weave using a backstrap loom to make her own backstrap using the instructions in the WeaveZine article I wrote that dates back even farther than my Andean Pebble Weave book…all the way back to 2009.

It’s so interesting to see all the different kind of looms and set-ups people are using to enjoy creating patterns in the complementary-warp structure.

I am heading back to my backstrap loom now to weave the other face of my iPod neck pouch. The patterns have a sort of weaving theme. The other face will have cats and balls of yarn which seem to be a fairly common theme among weavers. 🙂

Until next time….