Montagnard – Page 5 – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – A New Anniversary and Past Lives

Never mind that I am back home here in Bolivia with Christmas lights in the palm trees and ninety plus degree heat and that I spent my entire childhood having summery Australian Christmases… I still think of snow and glowing fireplaces at Christmas time, particularly so this year. Perhaps it is because I just came back from the US where I got a good taste of the wintry chill or maybe it is the constant talk on the news of the big white that has hit Europe. My brother was piloting one of the QANTAS flights that was supposed to land in Frankfurt while one of my best friends from high school just flew to New York from Sydney in the hope of meeting and spending Christmas with her daughter who has been studying in London. All of this has kept snow very much in my thoughts.

Believe it or not I spent much of my twenties, one of those “past lives”, here for Christmas…

This is part of the old village in the ski resort of Val d’Isère in the French Alps. Nature usually cooperated and gave us a nice cover of snow for Christmas. I spent five months of the year every year for five years here.

We lived in the lower level of this old stone farm house in a village just outside the resort. In the old times the animals would be housed there for the winter and we had the original stone feed troughs in our home which the owners had covered over with wooden slats and converted into sofas/beds. The small building on the left of the farmhouse is the chapel in which a small service was held on the night of December 24th attended only by those in our village. After the service everyone would place large candles in the snow between all the houses. It was magical!!

This is how it would look early in the season. There I am at the front door ready for a day of skiing. And then the BIG SNOW would come!

Here you can just see our door and windows. Fortunately there was another well protected entrance. My friend, who was a heavy smoker, would go out in any weather and conditions to smoke his Davidoff cigars!

And then this would occasionally happen…

We would get cut off from the resort due to avalanche danger. The first time we got stuck for three days with little more than potatoes to eat. We always made sure that we had supplies after that.

Christmas day would be like any other. We were all ski bums there living without our families and so we would just get up and go skiing. I have kind of gotten used to not celebrating Christmas and we let it pass here in Bolivia as if it were any other day.

I got back last week from my US trip buzzing with ideas. There had been plenty of time on trains and in airports to think about what I wanted my next projects to be and so I didn’t waste any time getting warped up and back into my backstrap loom when I got home.

starting montagnard — I wanted to put the weft twining I had learned with Montagnard weavers Ju and Ngach into practice and I decided on a table runner using their traditional colors and designs. I want to twine both ends of the piece. The Montagnard weavers usually twine only one end of their skirts and blankets. I warped for two strips of pick up designs and planned a traditional supplementary weft motif for the very center.

warping wide — People often ask me how to keep the warps in better order when warping for a wide piece. The picture on the left shows how chaining doubled yarn as you warp can help do this. It also helps you keep place in your count. I didn't, however, chain this Montagnard warp. I find that simply using thick cross sticks and binding them well together helps keep everything in reasonable order when I take the warp off the warping stakes.

I placed a piece of cardboard in the warp to leave enough room for the twining and got the weaving underway. I then returned to twine a little.

I will do this first twined edge on the loom. I plan to take the weaving off the loom for the final edge and suspend it on a stick as my teacher Ngach does. See previous posts here and here for details. This way I can compare both ways for speed and neatness. On-loom twining appears to come out neater but it is SLOW!

The off-loom twining that I did with Ngach wasn’t as neat with small gaps appearing now and then between the “stitches”. I don’t seem to have developed the knack as yet of preventing these gaps. In any case, I can’t wait to put my new bobbins to use.

You can see the little cement bobbins that I bought from Ngach alongside the larger and heavier ones made by Ju’s husband. Ngach told me that heavier ones worked better and so I bought another pair from Ju.

At left you can see the warp float design with the supplementary weft motif in the center. At right is the first part of the weft twining. I am using the same Cebelia number 20 thread that my Montagnard teachers use. This first part of the design is the same motif that Ngach and I twined together in our classes. I am going to do another design taken from other Montagnard textiles that I photographed for the next part.

I found I needed a break from the twining…several hours just to do seven rows! and so I went on to finish the woven part of the table runner…more like a table center piece really.

Then I returned to continue the twining and you can see that I am more than halfway through the main motif. The piece does widen with the twining and I think that twining around larger groups of warps may be the solution to that problem. I did notice this same problem on the skirt that Ju had just gotten back from Vietnam on which her sister had done the twining. There was a slight rippled effect on the skirt edge.

Now all that is left to do is twine away! Once the first row of design has been done, it all becomes quite mindless and I can use the time to plan my next project….There are several projects in my head all fighting to be next. Some were inspired by all I saw and learned at the Tinkuy de Tejedores (which you can read about here and here) in November…tubular bands, discontinuous warps and the tocapu designs on which Mary Frame spoke.

More recently, my friend Lisa sent me a link to this amazing documentary video on the Li weavers of Hainan Island.

(EDIT: I have heard from a blog visitor who can’t view this video. Here is the YouTube link just in case)

I had taken a picture of the loom pictured below at Pam Najdowski’s Textile Treasures stand at Convergence. Pam confirmed that this is indeed a Li loom. She has these looms to sell as well as other implements from Chinese minority groups. Although they are not shown on her website you can contact her here and ask about them. I bought a couple of bamboo reeds from her. Which reminds me…that’s another project on the list.

She was also kind enough to share pictures taken at the Folk Art Market in Santa Fe. That settles it! – I am definitely going to this market next year, not to buy anything…just to marvel!!

Well this led me on a little hunt online for other Li textiles and Chris Buckley, who is a collector in China, allowed me to use this image of a Li blanket he has which I love and can see myself reproducing, perhaps not in its entirety…it’s so big…but at least a small part of it.

Which brings me back to those “past lives” and a saying my friend David told me…”Youth is wasted on the young”(or something like that).

Would you believe that I spent six weeks in China and made two trekking trips to Nepal in my world wanderings back in my “youth” and didn’t go out of my way to seek any weavers? That was in my life before weaving. I was into running up and down mountains in those days and I did the three-day trek up the stone steps on one of the seven sacred mountains in China staying in monasteries along the way. It was a wonderful trip in itself, but imagine all those wonderful textiles and weavers that I didn’t notice!

Well, it wasn’t all about mountains in China. We did and saw a lot in those six weeks including these rock-cut Buddhas near Datong at the Yungang Grottoes which were constructed in the 5th and 6th centuries. There are over 51,000 stone Buddhas in this site.

After the mountain adventures in Nepal, I did go to see a workshop where yarn was being prepared for weaving and rug knotting. We even bought a rug, which got stolen, but that’s another story!

So, now I try to make up for the wasted weaving opportunities through the wonders of the internet and books but I have to say that I have no doubts that I will get back to these countries one day (as long as my brother keeps working for QANTAS, that is!)

Here are a couple of books that I bought fairly recently…Spiritual Fabric by Japanese author Sadae Torimaru was recommended to me by a Weavolution buddy and is subtitled “20 Years of Textile Research among the Miao People of Guizhou, China”. The book covers an enormous range of textile topics and the photos are beautiful. It is not quite a “how-to” but is certainly inspiring and gives a lot of information about the techniques with numerous photos. The author herself states “My only regret at the time of publishing this book is that the scope of my research has become so much broader than I initially expected that it has compromised the depth of my probe”.

The book on Nepalese Textiles is a new acquisition and I haven’t looked at it closely yet. I wish I had had it with me when I met the weavers from Bhutan last month. As we did not share a common language, showing them pictures from the book would have been a nice way to communicate. I am assuming that there is probably some kind of resemblance in techniques and designs between these two neighboring countries.

Swinging back now to this side of the globe and a country in which I have had some weaving adventures…I was recently gifted this….

It is a Guatemalan loom and was given to me by Lorraine in California. She contacted me through this blog with her wonderful story of having learned to weave in Guatemala in 1979. This loom was given to her by her teachers and it is a real treasure. There are loom bars (two of which are not in this picture), heddle rods, shed rod and four wonderful wonderful swords of different widths. Included is what I have seen used as a spindle but which Lorraine was taught to use as a shuttle. The shed rod, the thickest piece you see there, is especially beautiful. It is a good size to hold open the warps for that shed without being heavy. I am not sure what kind of wood gives it these handy properties. The very finest sword is also a beauty and will work beautifully when I want to weave four-selvedge pieces.

Also included in the large box that arrived for me in Maryland were copies of Lorranie’s notebook with all her instructional notes and sketches as well as all her letters home during her stay which her mother kept and typed up. The cover of the booklet of letters shows the huipil that she wove with her teacher in Todos Santos Cuchumatán and the letters themselves tell the delightful, amusing and often moving story of a twenty-two year old girl and her discovery of a simple life amongst dangerous times in the Guatemala of the late 70s.

I will be warping this loom soon with a special project for Lorraine.

I have been doing some housekeeping behind the scenes on this blog organizing the tutorials. I have extracted the tutorials that had been embedded in posts and put them on separate pages so that they appear in the tutorial list on the side bar. You can still use the TUTORIAL tab at the top of the page to find them all. Another FAQ has also been added.

And for all the Spanish-speaking visitors another tutorial has been translated into Spanish.

Now you can find the instructions for Supplementary Weft Patterning in Spanish. Thank you for your patience.

El tutorial “Diseños con Trama Suplementaria” ahora está disponible en español. Pueden encontrar los enlaces para todos los tutoriales que he traducido a español hasta ahora aqui. Gracias por su paciencia!

And what about the “New Anniversary” I mention in the title of this blog? That is my blog anniversary. I announced this blog to the world on December 13, 2009 after it had sat for a few weeks with a couple of posts and me agonizing over how to get it started with a bang. Finally, I got the thumbs up from my brother who told me to pretty much “just do it” and then I had all my Weavolution buddies come along and give me their fullest support. And from there it went on…Thank you all!

And to end, I am waiting on the arrival of the Jan/Feb 2011 issue of Handwoven where I contributed a tiny piece on the meaning of cloth. I hear that Carol Ventura also contributed and I am looking forward to reading that. Carol is the one who got me into online weaving groups in the first place which pretty much started this whole adventure. It sounds like a great issue with many projects displaying ethnic influences.

I had a fair bit to say on this topic of “Meaning in Cloth”, obviously WAY too much as only a very small portion of my article actually made onto the printed page. The magazine editors have allowed me to place the article in its entirety here on my blog. If you would like to read it, take a look HERE.

A topic opened up in one of the online weaving groups this week – a Christmas gift wish list for weavers. It started off with small and simple gadgets and worked its way up to entire looms. I had a think about this and am pleased to say that I have my sticks, my string, my World Wide Weaving Guild via the internet and, most importantly, TIME and so I simply can’t think of anything weaving-related to put on a wish list. Lucky me 😉

HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYONE!

Backstrap Weaving – Back from the 18th Century

I’m back, after having a wonderful week in colonial Williamsburg at the invitation of my friends David (aka Dr D, historian and super guide), Janet and Claudia. There wasn’t a blog post last week…no internet in the 18th century, you see. 😉

Colonial Williamsburg is “the restored 18th-century capital of Britain’s largest, wealthiest and most populous outpost of empire in the New World.

In the 301-acre Historic Area stand hundreds of restored, reconstructed, and historically furnished buildings. Costumed interpreters tell the stories of the men and women of the 18th-century city – black, white and native American, slave, indentured and free – and the challenges they faced.”

The challenge I faced was the COLD! It was not quite what I am used to in hot and steamy Santa Cruz Bolivia. It was interesting to note yesterday that the temperature was the same here as in Bolivia – around 34 degrees – except that the temperature here was in Fahrenheit while it was in Centigrade in Bolivia.

Here is what the colonial Williamsburg folk were wearing outdoors in the cold winters…

And here we are in our down, goretex and thermals…

It was a week of flames…candles, fireplaces and burning braziers in the streets after dark. It was COLD! and I made friends with every fireplace in every building along the way and became a big fan of hot cider.

We stayed at the historic Powhatan Plantation which is named after Chief Powhatan of the Powhatan tribe and father of Pocahontas.

I had wished for snow and there I got a dusting on the morning of day one. That was enough for me, thank you very much! A week of glorious clear blue skies followed. Above you can see the plantation Manor House and kitchen building which is now an intimate elegant restaurant. I don’t know what kind of awful weather in Canada has the geese flying down here to happily set up camp on the frozen ponds.

The Manor House came complete with a cannon ball lodged in its chimney and resident ghost Eliza.

Walking from place to place around the historic area and visiting every single place that was open to the public, we managed to keep ourselves warm, quite often forgetting the cold all together – everything was so absorbing and interesting with the constant reminder that we were walking the same floors, visiting the same stores, climbing stairs and grasping the same banister rails as people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry.

Only Sunday evening had us sitting still and huddling down against the cold as we waited for the “Grand Illumination” – a tremendous fireworks display which marked the start of the holiday season. Large blazing braziers lined the streets and groups gathered around in the darkness for light and warmth.

Forgive this photo – we don’t have squirrels in Bolivia.

Doors, windows, shutters, fence posts and walls were adorned with wreaths – no two were alike, some pretty, some just plain quirky – candles flickered in windows and carol singers gathered on street corners while horses and carriage clopped by.

I have inserted tiny pictures of just a few of the wreaths throughout this post.

As idyllic as this all sounds, this swinging sign outside a private residence of colonial Williamsburg with its hung effigy of who was, most likely, Governor Dunmore shows that not all was well in the colony around the 1770s.

Indeed, we heard snippets of gossip and rumor from the various store, tavern and coffee house keepers about the general discontent with the British Government and its taxes. There were even whisperings of “independence”.

The vast majority of the interpreters stayed faithfully in character and it was fun interacting with them.

Of course we had to pursue the fiber trail which took us to the workshop of the weaver and spinner and out to the pastures to find the Leicester Long Wool sheep, one of the breeds known to have been raised in these colonial times.

This image from a website called Sheep 101 and the reproduction of a children’s toy in Williamsburg clearly show how this breed of sheep earned its name.

We eventually tracked down a half dozen LLW sheep in one of the pastures and saw some of the handspun wool on sale in one of the stores.

According to various pieces of literature that I picked up here and there in Williamsburg, most colonists bought fabrics imported from England from the local milliner.

However, those who could not afford these or who had very large households produced their own cloth.

On plantations around Williamsburg, the work of growing, combing and spinning flax into linen yarn for weaving usually fell on slaves or domestic servants.

Domestic fabric production increased with the eventual boycott of all English goods, including textiles. Strategies proposed to deal with this sudden end to the availability of fine English cloth included the following declarations set down in the Continental Association of 1774…

“We will, in our several stations, encourage frugality, economy and industry, and promote agriculture, arts, and the manufactures of this country, especially that of wool”…..and…..”use our utmost endeavors to improve the breed of sheep, and increase their number to the greatest extent.”

The additional labor of raising the sheep and carding the wool and cotton would go to the slaves who were now clothed in “Virginia cloth” instead of imported English fabric. Weaving, spinning and dyeing became necessities and patriotic duties.

We visited weaver Max and spinner Karen more than once as, on each visit, they had different interesting tidbits of information to share. In fact, you could probably visit all the tradespeople in town several times over and learn something new every time. None seemed to have limited themselves to a set well-rehearsed speech for the visitors and their enthusiasm for their work was evident.

Karen showed us her Saxony and walking wheels while Max was reproducing an antique blanket woven in overshot for a client, a piece of which can be seen draped over Karen’s spinning wheel. While Karen wound quills as you can see above, she told us that children would be tethered to the equipment to perform the tasks of loading shuttles and winding the quills.

Let me take you on a short photo tour of several highlights of colonial Williamsburg…

Above left is Bruton Parish church, completed in 1683, where we attended an evening concert of Christmas songs ranging from pilgrim songs of the 15th century to jazzed up versions of twentieth century tunes. The Williamsburg Courthouse, on the right, is the only building we didn’t enter but we did try the stocks on for size. You can just make them out on the right.

The reconstructed Capitol building. The Capitol building was the center of political life in Virginia for most of the eighteenth century and is where Members of the House of Burgesses met. it was here that Patrick Henry delivered his “Caeser-Brutus” speech against the Stamp Act on May 29, 1765.

street scenes — Private homes and stores in the historic area.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — A carriage pulls up under what we were told is a majestic willow oak.

street scenes 3 — We encountered all manner of folk in the street.

street scenes 1 — An actor plays out a scene from Sheridan’s School for Scandal and a group sings carols for passersby.

palace garden — The gardens of the Governor’s Palace were particularly beautiful even in the wintry weather.

The kitchen gardens flourished despite the low temperatures and frosts.

My favorite places were the workshops of the various tradespeople.

The blacksmith was working the bellows and beating out an ax head.

The visit to the seamstress’s shop gave us a chance to see some of the fabrics that were in fashion in the 18th century as well as some examples of the handstitching. My immediate reaction was to marvel at how someone had managed to work stitches by hand so perfectly that they resembled machine work. I then realized how stupid that was when reminded that machines were built to try to speedily replicate the perfection of hand stitching.

The wig makers at left were a fun couple with a lot of jolly banter between them and a witty comeback to every comment and question from the visitors. The brick kiln was being fired up for a restoration project. I was wondering how on earth they were going to slide all the bricks within when I realized that the kiln itself was built from the very bricks that were to be fired.

The basket maker was making containers from white oak, a hard task for the hands in those low temperatures.

The printer and shoemaker. It was interesting to see the font that the printer was using which included different forms of the letter “s” depending on where it was placed in a word.

We learned a little about silver smithing and also visited the cooper, wheelwright, joiner, cabinetmaker and gunsmith. At the cooper’s it was interesting to see the amount of work and precision that went into making a simple wooden bucket, cutting pieces that fit together so perfectly in order to make the piece completely watertight.

It was very surprising for me to pick up a musket at the gunsmith’s and find that it weighed as much as 8 pounds.

The apothecary was a favorite of mine with its strange mixtures in exotic-looking bottles and jars and herbal remedies for all manner of ailments.

One of the highlights of the week for me was going into the historic area after dark to walk with the entire Fife and Drum Junior Corp as they marched and played along Duke of Gloucester Street accompanied by flaming torch bearers.

It was such a powerful sight in the darkness with the torches casting their orange glow over everyone.

The onlookers were completely hushed in awe.

Two members of the senior corps played at sunset at the manor house on the plantation where we were staying.

We stopped by the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum but the exhibit really was too much to try and take in in just one visit. I was a little uncertain about what exactly constitutes folk art and so a quick google search cleared this up. Folk art is defined as being…

that which is produced by an indigenous culture or by peasants or other laboring tradespeople. It is an unsophisticated art which is supposedly rooted in the collective awareness of simple people and reflects the traditional values of a society.

Here are a few pieces that were easier to photograph that caught my eye on my brief visit.

folkart 3 — I particularly like things like the piece on the right that capture a slice of life.

On the left you can see the signature of coverlet maker David Haring on his double weave coverlet made with white cotton warp and weft and blue wool warp and weft. The figure on the right is called Mr Nobody and apparently is the fellow in the household who is blamed for all that goes amiss.

Part of the folk art collection had been originally used to decorate Bassett Hall, the twice yearly residence of the Rockefellers in Williamsburg. It was Abby Aldrich Rockefeller’s husband, John D Rockefeller Jr., who we have to thank for financing the return of Williamsburg to its eighteenth century aspect.

And now let’s wander back ON TOPIC…

I have a few more things to show about my visit with the Montagnard (Vietnamese hilltribe) backstrap weavers a few weeks ago which I wrote about here and here.

A local church has kindly allowed Betsy and the weavers to use their space for weaving get-togethers and demonstrations.

On a second visit there we were able to address the first challenge which was to find a place in the church where several weavers could tie up their backstrap looms at once as well as set up the foot braces against which they like to push to increase tension on the warp. The large piece of bamboo that you can see in the photo with some screws and rope did the trick. Khin joined us on this visit as translator and weaver. She said that she had not woven in at least twenty years and was a bit unsure about picking it up again.

Ju gave her a few pointers and she was on her way looking and feeling completely at home in the loom. Of course now she wants her own loom and is thinking big…she is already planning a skirt as her first project. My twining teacher, Ngach, arrived later and also gave Khin some tips.

A local nun, Sister Gretchen, dropped by and brought a collection of blankets that have been gifted to her by people in the Montagnard community over the last ten years. She is keen to have them identified by tribe and to have them out somewhere on display. There were some pieces there that were quite unlike anything I had seen made by Ju or Ngach. Nagch was very pleased and proud to identify one of her own blankets in the collection.

This heavy blanket caught my eye, not only for its lively red and blue pattern and the fact that it is white (you may have noticed that the Montagnard use a lot of black in their work), but for the band along its edge. This is not twining. It seems that the blanket was woven on a backstrap loom and then somehow the warps were used as weft to weave a warp faced band across the bottom of the piece. Three warps are used as a single weft. You can see that there is some puckering in the blanket where some adjustment in the number of warps used for at least some of the weft passes should have been made. I have been trying to imagine how this could have been set up.

I could see myself first weaving a narrow warp faced band passing my weft through a shed and extending it out and around a post some meters away so as to create a warp for the blanket. Once the band was finished I would then turn it around and somehow attach it to a loom bar and weave the blanket.

I guess I could figure out a way to do the blanket first and then the band but it seems that that would be much more awkward. One day I will meet the weaver and find out!

This piece was amazing! I liked it better from a distance as, on close inspection, I saw that the floats were very long on both faces and that it would only really work woven in very fine thread. All the weavers present had thoughts on the tribal and/or regional origin of this piece but nothing has been confirmed as yet.

Ju brought along her twining frame and is twining designs on the edge of some bags she is making. On the left you can see the design that she is copying. She seems not to consider twining one of her strengths as she often sends her woven piece back to Vietnam with a traveler where her sister does the twining and then returns it.

Pictured above is a skirt which had arrived back from Vietnam the previous day. Ju’s sister did the twining and bead work. This she gifted to Betsy along with a matching blouse. She gave me a beautiful narrow piece to use as a scarf and then had me cut up a similar long narrow piece into thirteen pieces so that she could sew them into glasses cases and pouches. She handed me the piece and a small pair of paper scissors and had me cut it up then and there! I can tell you that I was not really keen on the idea, especially not with a pair of paper scissors, but she trusted me to know the right lengths as I had shown her the small pouches that I had constructed at home.

Winter is a time for weaving for Ju as there is no work to be done in her very extensive vegetable garden. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she has already finished all thirteen pouches.

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My friend Lisa has started weaving again on her four-shaft floor loom. I thought she was making scarves and then she surprised me with pictures of this lovely fiber tool bag that she made…

She used the cross knit looping/Van Dyke stitch to edge the bag and embroidered a “running dog” design.

There is a video tutorial for the Van Dyke stitch as well as photos of how the Montagnard weavers use it as a joining stitch in this blog post.

She is still contemplating what kind of strap to put on it….perhaps a braid?

I love the colors and the contrasting edging and tassels.

EDIT: I have since heard from Lisa who says that this was never meant to be a tool bag. It turns out that her chosen yarn created the warp-from-hell and that she had had to abandon the original project but found she was able to salvage enough fabric to make something useful. Her less-than-perfect selvedges which resulted from her battle with the warp were nicely concealed within the Van Dyke stitch.

Claudia revived the backstrap project which she had warped up ages ago in a combination of variegated and solid colored yarn. She is using a scarf with cord now as her backstrap until she completes this, her very own woven one. I never think about using these variegated yarns and I should really try them out. I have a variegated roving that Lisa gave me ages ago that I need to spin and try out on my backstrap loom.

I am pretty much done with the cold weather now. It snowed last night and is blustery and windy today…nasty! I am ready to head back to the jungle and will leave tomorrow. It’s the usual story…standby flights which the airline tells me are fully booked. Fingers crossed that I don’t end up sleeping in Miami airport.

Happy Holidays to everyone!

Backstrap Weaving – Different “tribes”, different customs.

Different places, different customs…are you one for grits, biscuits and sweet tea or bagels, lox and giant mugs of coffee for breakfast? I love seeing all these different things when I am traveling. Different “tribes”, different places, different customs…

Christmas, Hanukkah or Festivus?

I had fun the weekend after Thanksgiving helping to decorate the tree in Claudia’s home and then we ran into this Festivus sign (for the Seinfeld fans out there) in Poolesville. Maybe the Festivus pole will make its appearance soon.

I am enjoying the cold weather here in the US getting wrapped up in scarves and gloves. It makes me nostalgic for my skiing days. I have been invited to spend a week in colonial Williamsburg with Claudia and friends and I hope it snows.

In the meantime, I have more to show and tell about the time I spent with the Montagnard weavers in North Carolina. They are all grouped under the general French title of “Montagnard” but Ngach, a Jarai women, tells me that the hill area of Vietnam is home to over sixty different tribes with their many similarities and differences in customs, textiles and weaving styles. I was able to meet people from the Jarai, Rhade , Bunong and Koho tribes during my stay.

My twining classes were with Ngach from the Jarai tribe and Ju who is Rhade. I ended up spending more time with Ngach who seems to have had more experience with the kteh technique and whose eyesight is better able to deal with the fine threads that are used.

We twined this small border design on a child’s skirt as that is all that time would allow. Normally this would be followed by a large central design three to four times the width of this one and then finished with the same border. Ngach was a wonderful teacher, as I said last week, with a quick eye for catching my mistakes and a lot of attention to detail.

She would start a row and work it to the midway point and then let me take over and finish copying the design while she went back and started the next row. So, pretty much the entire left side of the work is Ngach’s and the right side is mine. You can certainly tell the difference between the two halves.

She asked me a lot of questions about Bolivia and was pleased and surprised by the similarities in climate, vegetation and food between the hills of Vietnam and lowland Bolivia. I showed her pictures of llamas from the highlands, weavers and weavings of Peru and Bolivia and told her about the custom of chewing coca leaves. She would ask me again and again to repeat the words in English so that she could tell, I imagine, all the stories to her husband when she got home.

She then shared a story with me about how she had learned the kteh technique at the age of ten.

She was visiting her sister-in-law in her village who happened to be doing kteh that day and immediately fell in love with the designs and insisted on being allowed to sit and watch and try it. She stayed all morning instead of going home to prepare the rice for lunch as was her duty.

Eventually, angry messages and threats of slaps, in Ngach’s words, started arriving from her mother who had come home to find that lunch preparations were not underway. Both Ngach and her sister-in-law decided that it would be better for her stay on and pratice the kteh in the hope, I suspect, that her mother’s anger would pass. I don’t know what happened when she got home but Ngach soon became the one to whom other weavers would bring their finished loin cloths and other woven pieces so that she could make the intricate twined patterns. she would be paid with a leg or pork or sometimes cash.

She told me of one time that she stayed awake all night thinking about and planning her design and then got up in the morning to go straight to the store to buy her thread so she could get to work.

I think I really lucked out having Ngach as my teacher!

And she softened and finally agreed to sell me two of her lovely cement bobbins. She also has wooden ones from Vietnam but I have not seen her use those. The cement ones are a little heavier and feel really nice in the hands although they can be a bit rough on the thread.

And here is the design finished with only the border stripes to go…that’s the easy part.

final twining session — Dear Ngach working at the kteh and then the two of us celebrating the end of the design.

Betsy Renfrew, who is working with the Montagnard weavers and who made all this possible for me, has several books on the textiles of the hill tribe weavers of Vietnam. I had just been admiring a particularly beautiful piece, which was labeled as Maa in one of the books and which unfortunately was not detailed enough to allow me to see the technique, when in came Rah and her daughter Sel who are of the Bunong tribe (Betsy has found many variations of the spelling of this name), armed with a woven basket full of Bunong textiles. There was a piece with the very same technique that I had been squinting at in the book.

Above you can see the work on the central panel of Rah’s gorgeous skirt.

Rah understands English quite well but has difficulty expressing herself.

I don’t think she had any problem understanding my excitement over this piece and my desire to learn how to do the patterning technique.

However, her fourteen year old daughter Sel told me that, although her mom would love to teach me, unfortunately she had not woven this particular piece nor had she ever learned this kind of patterning.

It had been sent over from Vietnam. Sel was happy to show off the baby carrier that her mother had made for her – a piece for which she has an obvious strong attachment and affection. Her blouse was woven by her mom too.

There are examples of Bunong skirts on the Tribal Trappings website where the structure is described as “a soumak-like technique”. As I am now the happy owner of Marla Mallett’s wonderful book on woven structures, I am hoping to perhaps be able to pin it down from her pictures and descriptions. It could be countered soumak but I need to look at this more closely. Any thoughts from my readers would be very much welcomed.

In many ways the patterns resemble those that are created using one of the warp wrapping techniques I learned in Guatemala. The main difference is that the Guatemalan style is worked in a shed on a warp faced ground weave and does not show on the back of the piece. The Bunong piece has a balanced ground weave.

rah with skirt — Rah wearing her traditional Bunong skirt. Betsy tells me that Bunong textiles generally stand out from those of other tribes for the use of green in the designs.

Here is the beautiful “backpack” ‘basket in which some of the textiles had been brought to Betsy’s home…

Rah enjoyed watching videos that Betsy has made of Montagnard weaver Ju Nie at work at her loom. Sel said that Rah had had a loom at one stage here in North Carolina but also said that some of the loom parts had been confiscated by airline security when they had attempted to bring them over from Vietnam. We are hoping that she may feel inclined to take it up weaving again and that even Sel may decide that she would like to learn.

One more look at that gorgeous skirt piece, this time showing some of the other float patterns…

I loved this next piece too – a bag that Rah and Sel brought to show with all-over supplementary weft pattering on the body and supplementary weft patterned figures on the flap…

As I mentioned earlier, I was happy to be able to swap my Andean Pebble Weave book for the first edition of Marla Mallett’s book with someone who had recently purchased the second edition although I must say I am itching to find out what I am missing from the updated version!

I simply haven’t had time to take a close look at it but one thing I did notice is that the cross knit looping ”stitch” which is often used by the Montagnard weavers to join their blanket and skirt panels or edge bags is a well known stitch in the world of embroidery known as the “Van Dyke stitch”. After seeing Ju’s blanket panels so effectively joined with this stitch I used it myself to join two of my woven pieces to make a tool bag.

A closer view…

For those of you who would like to try this on your own work, I found a great video tutorial on Van Dyke stitch and I particularly like the way she starts the stitch which is not at all like the way I was taught by the weavers in Bolivia.

Marla Mallett shows an example of it on a south Persian bag. It’s amazing how these techniques show up across the globe. The Bunong weavers use it too and Rah’s bags were edged with it.

My visit with Betsy also included an afternoon at the Seniors Center where a group of Bhutanese ladies and gents, recently brought here from refugee camps in Nepal, have English classes with teacher Mary Ellen. Betsy had organized to give a weaving demonstration during their class and so we took along the loom on which Betsy has been learning from Ju and a narrow double weave piece still on the loom that I have been working on while on the road. Again, Betsy is hoping to find weavers in this group who may like to take up weaving in their new home here in the US.

The demonstration certainly aroused a lot of interest and chatter with two ladies in particular very keen to help Betsy manage her loom. Betsy is learning to weave a narrow band on a very large loom which is not at all suited to this size of weaving. The loom, therefore, is very unwieldy. Ju weaves two bands at once side by side on these large looms to help overcome this problem.

One of Betsy’s helpers indicated with gestures that she weaves much wider pieces in Bhutan and showed the way she throws the shuttle across the warp. She patiently sat by while Betsy explained that she was just learning and still having problems opening the sheds until, finally, the urge to lend a hand became too great.

Above Ranmaya and Bhimaya Gurung are helping Betsy to open that nasty heddle shed.

Poshupati (I am guessing the spelling) came along to act as translator.

He told me that he used to be the director of an artisan training center in the refugee camp that taught weaving and leather work amongst other skills.

Once most of the class members had returned to continue their lesson of “family” vocabulary with Mary Ellen, we were left alone with Ranmaya and Bhimaya and our looms and got along just fine without our translator.

I was surprised to find that I could remember a few words of Nepali from my two trips there in the eighties like the words for “finished”, “thank you” and “sister” which seemed to be a word used for any female companion.

One of the big problems with Betsy’s loom was the fact that the heddle stick kept falling out. This was not due to poor heddle making but rather to the fact that the loom bars are so wide that it is difficult to manipulate the sheds without tipping everything from side to side.

I told you all in a previous post about how Ju and Ngach set up their heddles during the warping process rather than later once the warp is on the loom. It is a tremendous time saver but I am far too fond of my string heddles with their extra hitch to adopt this method. I did, however, try it at home just to see if I understood how it is done.

Here is a short video clip that I made on my last visit with Ju in August in which you can see her winding the warp and making her heddles as she goes. The stick she is using ensures that the heddles are of equal lengths.

BACK IN MARYLAND…….

Claudia has been coming along well with her tubular woven bands to the point where she doesn’t need my help any more. I suspect she will have the directions memorized soon.

I made another trip to the Textile Museum so that I could revisit the Central Asian ikat exhibit with a guide and use the museum’s library. The tour was good, our guide enthusiastic, but I was disappointed not to find any information on what appeared to be warp twined bands on the edges of some of the garments. I seem to be twining mad at the moment.

In the library I got to see David Fraser’s work “A Guide to Weft Twining and Related Structures with Interacting Wefts” which, sadly, can’t be had for under $300 these days but, then again, there it was in the library for me to peruse for free. It was quite a coincidence to find a mail from a Weavolution member a couple of days after with a link to a site which gave a virtual version of the talk which David Fraser had given on the weft twining in what he calls plateau bags at the Textile Museum in August.

There is a great photo here on the same site which I really like of a woman twining a bag in much the same way as I have been doing at home with the piece simply held in her lap…no loom and no tools, except that she twines with the warps extending away from her.

Upstairs in the Education Room at the museum, the only place, the guide told me, where one can take photos, I was able to clear up my confusion about the different kinds of ikats.

This is weft ikat where horizontal resist dyed yarns are predominant in the fabric.

Both warp and weft yarns can be resist dyed separately and then used to create independent designs in a balanced weave fabric. This is called compound ikat.

In double ikat the weave structure is balanced and resist dyed warps and wefts meet to produce a single design.

I don’t think I had ever seen a piece of just weft ikat fabric until once again along came someone at Weavolution with a link to a gem of a video on traditional Laos weaver Bounxou Duoheuang and her inlay work. Wait until you see the piece of weft ikat that she prepares towards the end of the video.

I will finish off here by showing once again the wonders of the online Worldwide Weaving Guild which is, by the way, the way I first found out about Betsy’s work with the Montagnard weavers. This week I would like to show you what Tracy has been up on her backstrap loom in Qatar. Check this out!!

I was going to give you the whole story here but Tracy has covered it on her blog with lots of background and details so you can read about what it took to produce this gorgeous piece.

Above is a sneak peek at the work in progress but you really need to read the story of how this all came to be. Note the plastic tape that she uses for her heddles.

And here is the amazing backstrap that a friend gave her as she took her first steps in backstrap weaving. Does anyone have an idea about its possible place of origin?

Next there’s a balanced weave piece on the loom that I know is already off the loom and done.

I am saving a few more stories from the Montagnard weavers for next week’s writings from colonial Williamsburg. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

I have a million thanks for Betsy Renfrew and Andrew Young who hosted me during my stay in North Carolina and made all these encounters with the Montagnard people possible.

Backstrap Weaving – Weft twining with the Montagnard backstrap weavers.

But first a look at gorgeous rural Maryland where I am currently staying with friends on the first day when it has felt really cold out. There has been talk of snow on Friday…I hope so as we are putting up the Christmas decorations here that day! while Santa Cruz Bolivia in the meantime experiences a “cool” change with temperatures dipping below 30C (86F). Most of the leaves have fallen here and it’s interesting to see the turkey vultures perched in the gaunt leafless tree across the street every morning.

Last week I was down in North Carolina where the weather was mild and the neighborhoods were still awash with red, gold, yellow and brown.

I was down there revisiting the Montagnard (Vietnamese hill tribe) weavers whom I had met on a visit last August about which I wrote in this previous post. I had discovered Betsy Renfrew’s videos and photos on her blog about the group of Montagnard people in her community and her project to help them integrate and find sources of income by teaching them English and making it possible for them to gather the materials and resources necessary to build looms, buy thread and practice their traditional weaving skills. Betsy was more than willing to extend an invitation to visit. She has also allowed me to use some of her photos in this blog post.

last visit — Betsy and weaver Ngach together on the left during my first visit. On the right a scene from my first visit with Lisa and Maurice in Betsy’s home with weavers Ngach, Ju Nie and her husband Thomas. It was a chaotic afternoon with lots of chatter, sharing and interaction which cleared away all language barriers. Backstrap looms and textiles covered the floor of Betsy’s front room and, as this was my very first encounter with these kinds of textiles, it was impossible to wade through and take it all in during our short visit and I left with many unanswered questions knowing that I would simply have to return one day.

JU and me last visit — We got to see Ju warping and setting up her loom and Lisa and I both got to try out her warping technique where she adds string heddles as she winds the warp as well as weave on her backstrap loom. I tried to photograph as many woven pieces as I could – skirts, blankets, baby carriers bags and belts so that I could figure out the woven structures when I got home. Ngach put on skirts for us and Ju modeled the baby carriers. Many of the structures I immediately recognized and it was fun to show Ju and Ngach pieces woven with the same techniques in South America. In fact that was the most fun part of the visit…comparing and sharing our different experiences with the textiles, patterns, tools and looms and seeing for what purpose the textiles were intended. I was able to study and figure out some of the other less recognizable techniques when I got home.

Some of the different patterning techniques which include simple warp floats, cross knit looping, supplementary warp and weft can be seen below…

I like the supplementary weft patterned piece on the right as it reminds me very much of some flower motifs that I recently wove using Guatemalan supplementary weft and warp wrapping techniques. The similarities in the designs across cultures are astounding.

If you have been following my blog, you will know that the technique which really grabbed my attention was the following one which both Ju and Ngach, who are from different tribes, call kteh.

Above you can see two pieces with the kteh weft twining technique that Ngach has worked around the warps on the edge of her woven blankets. The upper left picture is a loin cloth which Susan Stem showed me when I made inquiries about this technique on the Tribal Textiles forum. I think that Ngach’s pieces are every bit as fine as the example photographed by Susan.

So this was the technique that I really wanted to learn more about and I got to see even more amazing examples on this most recent visit.

When I got home I was keen to try weft twining and made examples in different colors using Montagnard designs that I had photographed and seen online. (at left)

I learned a twining technique from books on Maori Taaniko..You can read more about this here and here.

I was surprised on my visit last week to see the use of yellow in the main design in one of the pieces as, by coincidence, I had chosen it to use in my own experiments at home.

All the pieces I had seen on the previous visit as well as in books and online had been patterned in only red and white with only the stripes done in green and yellow.

In weft twining, strands of “weft” are twisted around warps. When weft strands of two colors are used, patterns can be formed by controling which of the two colors appears on the upper surface of the piece after each twist.

Here are some more examples of Ngach and Ju’s work in kteh technique.

The above piece of kteh adorns the edge of an extremely fine skirt which Ju wove and which H Ni Buonya modeled for me.

Instead of being wrapped and tucked as traditional skirts are, this skirt had hooks sewn into its waist band which held the folds in place.

The twining was flawless and the selvedges impeccable. I think this was the finest of all the pieces I saw.

Eventhough I was able to reproduce the designs in my bulky cotton thread, I couldn’t feel convinced that I was on the right track until I could compare the reverse of the kteh pieces to my own twined work.

Besty sent me a picture of the back of a piece and I was finally able to see for myself on my visit.

What I really wanted to do was learn how to do the twining alongside Ju and Ngach and Betsy was able to organize classes for me with both ladies. Ju and Ngach, as I said before, are from two different tribes, the Rhade and the Jarai and both Betsy and I thought that it would be interesting to see differences in the way the two ladies did their twining.

classes with Ngach and Ju — LEFT: Twining class with Nagch at Betsy’s house. At right, Ju shows me how she gathers the warps in groups and sizes them before twining.

I first met up with Ju at Betsy’s house where a collector was coming to see and possibly purchase one of Ju’s woven pieces. Ju, who I gather never likes to have idle hands, had brought along a finished piece of weaving that was to be sewn into a bag. She was busy twisting the fringe dragging the warps through a wad of sticky cooked rice that she carried in tissue and then rolling them on her leg to set the twist. She would select four warp ends, divide them into two pairs and then, with one quick movement, roll the two pairs away from her on her leg and then swiftly roll the two twisted strands back toward her to unite them.

She used this same kind of sizing to twist and group the warps ends together for twining which, as a beginner, I found very helpful . Ngach on the other hand does not size the warp ends.

The first class was with Ngach. After having seen pictures of Ngach warping outdoors on Betsy’s blog it was nice to see the enormous tree where she does it in her front yard right on the edge of a very busy street.

Here you can see the different set ups that both ladies use. Both fold and tack the woven cloth so that it can be suspended on a rod or bar with the weft ends, or fringe hanging down. Ju, at left, has a lovely stand built by her husband especially for twining. Ngach suspends her work on a metal rod which she has supported on two chairs. Ngach is twining the end of a child’s skirt while Ju is twining the ends of two small bags, something which she is only doing in order to be able to teach me on a small piece.

Here are pictures of Ngach twining on warmer and brighter days courtesy of Betsy. The pictures we took this time around tended to be somewhat darker unfortunately.

The wefts are stored and carried on bobbins. Ngach says that they are made of clay in Vietnam while Ju used to use wooden ones. Both ladies have had to improvise their bobbins in their new homes.

Ngach has lovely bobbins fashioned from cement.

Ju’s were heavier and made from wood. Her husband bought a pestle from a Laos store from which he carved them. I bought a pair from her. Both use Cebelia size 20 thread.

Below you can see Ngach at work holding the warps under tension with her left hand while she twists the wefts on their bobbins with her right…one twist to change color in the pattern and two twists to continue with the same color.

Her movements are so fluid, graceful and rhythmical and she uses her one long thumb nail to separate each group of warps around which to twist the wefts. This was the part that really slowed me down…separating the warps into correct groups of three. What was nice was that Ngach and I could sit side by side and work together. I would struggle along trying to match her rhythm. We could both work simultaneously on different rows of pattern.

Here is a rather dark piece of video which will at least give you an idea of the movements. Ngach is making a pattern in red and white. Her movements are very graceful and I love the soft “clack clack” of the bobbins as she works. You will see her doing double twists when she wants to continue with the same color and a single when she wants to change colors. I have brighter but longer videos which need to be edited when I get home so I can upload in another post.

Above, Ju is twisting warps on a piece so that I can take it home and practice. I really think both my teachers enjoyed showing me this. Ju, even with her very limited English, was very talkative and eager to show me the entire process while Ngach was very keen to make sure that I learned it just right, constantly correcting and adjusting the way I was holding the warps and not letting me get away with anything. At one point when I had made a mistake and untwined to fix it, I asked her if she always undid her errors. She looked at me over the top of her glasses and said “no mistakes!”. I am not sure if that means that she doesn’t tolerate them or that she doesn’t make them but there was definitely a twinkle in her eye. I liked Ngach!

Results:

We finished a tiny design on Ju’s small piece but didn’t get as far on Ngach’s larger one. However, I enjoyed working more on Ngach’s piece for some reason. I think sitting and working alongside Ngach made all difference as I was able to watch closely and try to follow her movements and rhythm.

Each twined row always starts on the left and moves to the right. When the right edge is reached, the weft ends are knotted and cut leaving a small “fringe”. This was something I had been very curious about as the instructions in my Taaniko book indicated that one needed to ambidextrous and twine in both directions back and forth across the piece.

Ju’s enthusiasm for showing me all about the weaving arts from her home in the hills of Vietnam didn’t stop at twining. After I had become tired from twining and the concentration it required, she brought out a wonderful spinning wheel that she had had sent over from Vietnam.

What a sweet little spinning wheel this is. It is made from simple bamboo wood and wicker and all held together with hand carved wooden pins.

Ju set to spinning cotton, which had also been sent over from Vietnam, with her foot thrown over the beam of the spinning wheel to anchor it down. She really seemed to be enjoying showing this to us.

Once she had finished with her small quantity of prepared cotton, she brought out a funny little tool that looked much like an archer’s bow to prepare more. Below you can see this tool and Ju skeining on a niddy noddy.

The following video will show you how it works. I would love to show this to the cotton spinners that I stayed with in coastal Ecuador.

On another day, I got to see a bit more of Betsy’s work with the Montagnard ladies. A few weavers gathered with their looms in a local church. Its congregation has kindly allowed its space to be used for possible weaving demonstrations. The idea was to see what would be required to enable the weavers to set up their looms in those facilities . Not only would they need a strong and stable place to tie up their looms but also a way to set up the foot braces against which the weavers push to tension their warps as they weave.

Ju and H Ni attended and finally managed to get their looms set up and foot braces in place. While I find a foot brace nice to work with, I am glad that I am not dependent on one and, therefore, have more freedom to set up my loom easily in different places.

H Ni is weaving two bands at once on her loom which will be straps for shoulder bags. Weaving two straps at once helps balances out the very wide loom.

ha nies awkward set up — H Ni’s set up was a bit awkward. We had to improvise adding books and bits to her bamboo poles in order to have her foot brace within reach.

I am thinking that one of those wonderful ergonomic benches designed by Synergo Arts with its built in foot rest/brace would be a solution to this problem. I wonder if they break down in pieces for transport.

A close up of H Ni’s two straps.

Ju was weaving a narrow pick up patterned piece which will be a scarf – not one of her typical woven pieces but it has occured to her that scarves may be popular small items that visitors to her demonstrations may like to buy as opposed to skirts and blankets.

The other purpose of the meeting was to give the weavers booklets which Betsy had put together with pictures and weaving vocabulary in English.

Khin attended the meeting to act as translator and it turns out that she too is a weaver. The problem is that many of the ladies in the community who have these weaving skills simply do not have the means to have looms made and buy thread to get started.

Betsy also made tapes for each weaver to go along with the booklets with the pronunciation of the English words for them to listen to and practice at home.

The idea is to have the weavers eventually feeling confident enough to be able to give presentations and demonstrations of their weaving to small groups in the future. I would love to return for the day when that happens and see these ladies enjoying sharing their skills with even more people with same good humor, generosity and enthusiasm that they showed me.

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Back to what I like to call the World Wide Cyber Weaving Guild….

It seems that the cold weather has brought on a flurry of weaving activity and so I am able to show you some finished projects from online friends who have visited my blog.

Anna (who is cycling from Alaska to Ushuaia and who is currently in Santiago Chile) sent me this picture of her latest pebble weave bands and Kim, whom I met at Convergence wove the pebble weave keyfob on the right. Both used the instructions from my Andean Pebble Weave book.

These are more of Kim’s bands on the left, again in pebble weave with one in simple warp floats in the middle, and Lavitaaj made this amazing supplementary weft sampler on the right using the pattern charts from my blog. There is also a section with a yurt band design in simple warp floats.

And finally, here is Marsha Knox’s band made with simple warp floats using two color combinations in the same piece while Helena in Brazil has taken the Bedouin patterning one step further with a large strip of diamond pattern bordered by the classic triangle motif. I will definitely add a tutorial on this technique to the blog soon.

UPDATE: Marsha uploaded a picture of her finished band. She reversed the scrolls and did them in brown. It looks super!

Last Sunday I got to quickly pass through the Central Asian ikat exhibit, which was stunning, at the Textile Museum in DC before attending Ann Rowe’s talk on ikat rebozos and ponchos in Latin America.

I hope to return next Saturday to take the guided tour of the exhibit, use the library where I want to look at David Fraser’s book on weft twining, and maybe pick up a few more Textile Museum journals in the gift shop.

There is hardly a journal there that doesn’t have something of interest to me. I think that eventually I will own them all.

This week Claudia and I had skills exchange. I taught her to make the tubular woven bands that I learned at the tinkuy and she introduced me to the wonderful Weavette. Yep, this was the first time I had ever seen one of these little marvels and Claudia even has an old Jiffy Loom in its original box and a plastic Weave-It. My eye was immediately caught by the cool long weaving needles that come in the kit. Aha…just the thing for weaving in the wefts for my four-selvedge warp faced pieces and so I ordered some online.

These would be just the thing for making little amulet bags…love them!

And speaking of learning new skills, here is DY, still in Peru, picking up some new techniques – drop spindling and backstrap weaving. I think she has been taking Spanish classes too.

Finally, a very happy Thanksgiving to all. I spent it Claudia and family and friends…only the third Thanksgiving I have ever had. We watched the Macy’s parade this morning and I declare the sweet potato casserole with butter, brown sugar and pecan topping my favorite dish of the day.

Backstrap Weaving – Spreading the Obsession:warp faced and weft twined

SAM_0836 — Simple warp floats in red and black by Eladio Salas Torres

WARP FACED AND WEFT TWINED

Three things have influenced the weaving I have been doing this week and they are spread across three very different parts of the world:

– a new book in my collection of weaving books on Bedouin weaving which has taken me on a fascinating trip through Saudi Arabia and other lands inhabited by the Arabian Bedouin with their colorful woven tent dividers, bags and camel adornments;

– the intricate weft twined work that the Montagnard weavers of Vietnam, that I met in the US, incorporate on the edges of their warp faced textiles;

– the beautiful combination of red and black in the backstrap woven piece by Eladio Salas of Mexico that I showed you last week.

First I took a step backwards as I had decided that I didn’t like the weft twined piece that I was practicing on last week. Fortunately I discovered that un-twining is a lot easier and faster than un-weaving. It is just a sample piece for skills-building but I just was not happy with the colors and motifs I had chosen and it had to go! Half of it got pulled apart and I did some searching on the net to figure out how I would like to continue. So now I am continuing with a swirl design from a Jarai tribal textile and will finish it off with other Montagnard motifs.

Meanwhile the Bedouin designs were calling to me…fabulous red, white and black warp faced pieces interspersed with bands of weft twining. I noticed that there was a small three color band of design that was common to many of the pieces which Joy Totah Hilden identifies as al-‘uwairjan pick up patterning and so I decided to sample that before launching into a big project.

In Hilden’s book I see that Bedouin weavers use staked out horizontal ground looms with their heddle bar suspended on forked sticks, rested on top of oil cans, cement blocks or other such objects or tied to sticks driven into the ground. The weaving is suspended just a few inches above the ground. As the weaving progresses, the work is not rolled up. Instead, the weaver sits on the completed work and inches her way along the warp to stay close to the weaving line. Weaving is even done inside the home with the loom bars and warp held under tension in ingenious ways. One picture shows the loom bar tied to another bar which has been lodged behind a doorway.

Images of Bedouin textiles and looms can be seen here and here.

Here was my chance to put the reds and black together and learn some traditional Bedouin designs. The main panel of my weaving is done in a technique which I believe is called warp substitution. This pick up technique creates long floats on the back of the textile. I have never been a fan of long floats and much prefer double faced weaving but I wanted to use the technique employed by the Bedouin. To eliminate the floats I could have woven the very same designs in double weave.

The center panel of my piece is woven with the warp substitution technique called “shajarah” (tree) pick up patterning.

This weaving also gave me the opportunity to try weft twining on the loom. Many of the pieces shown in Hilden’s book have not only weft twined edges but also several bands of twining at various stages within the weaving. I have been enjoying my off-loom twining experiments and was looking forward to comparing them with twining on warps under tension on a loom.

I have kept these first attempts at on-loom weft twining narrow and simple.

I had to consider how many warps to use in a bundle around which to twine the wefts as well as the right thickness of weft yarn so that the warps didn’t get spread too much thus widening the piece. Should I twine loosely or tightly? It took a few attempts to get it right. The warps did get spread slightly and so I had to work to get them back into place so I could continue with the warp faced weaving.

I plan to leave the weft ends on as a decorative feature. This piece will be a wall hanging. I was thinking about using it as part of a pillow cover but my cat, no doubt, will chew those weft ends off.

Feeling a bit more confident, I did a slightly wider weft twined band at what will be the center of the piece and added in a little bit of chaining.

It is lovely doing the weft twining on the loom and the added control that one has by having the warps under uniform tension allowed me to use a much finer yarn than I have been using on the off-loom pieces. I expect with more practice I will eventually be able to do fine off-loom twining too….some time in the distant future!

The motifs in the warp substitution band have been copied from images in Hilden’s book and from those I have found online.

You can see the bands of al-‘uwairjan pick up on the sides.

I am now just over half way through this piece and hope to finish it with a wider and more complex piece of weft twining.

I will add to the weft ends that are hanging from the sides to balance both sides and perhaps add some tassels.

Hopefully it will be ready to show next week.

There are many beautiful weft twined camel adornments in gorgeous red, tan and mustard tones that I would like to use as inspiration in other pieces.

While we are in red-and-black mode….

I promised you last week some more information on the lettering used by the Montagnard weavers in their bag straps.

Anyone who knows how to do simple warp floats as detailed in my tutorial here will pick this up in no time. The lettering is done in simple warp float technique with some variation.

In simple warp float technique you are using a shed of each color, for example, all the red warps in one shed and all the whites in the other. You weave alternating red and white horizontal bars and then go floating one of the colors over the other to form your designs.

The difference in the Montagnard method is that they have one shed of red and another shed of alternating red and white which you can see at left (with a two-warp red border).

In the red and white shed, they drop all the whites which exposes their black weft – you can see black dots on the above lettered band. They use twenty-nine warps in each shed to weave their letters, that is, twenty-nine reds in one shed and fifteen whites alternating with fourteen reds in the other.

When they want to weave a letter, they…

-open the shed with the reds and whites and drop all the whites except the ones that they need to form the letter.

-pass the weft.

-save those whites and add them to the red shed.

-pass the weft.

–open the red and white shed again and keep the same whites from the previous weft pass along with the whites needed to form the next part of the letter.

-drop all the other whites.

-pass the weft.

-save only the whites needed for the next part of the letter and add them to the red shed.

– pass the weft.

AND SO ON……

This will be double dutch to those of you who have never done simple warp floats. Well what are you waiting for? Here’s the tutorial! Become familiar with the simple warp float technique first and then try the letters.

NOTE:

If you use a red weft instead of black you will create the impression of a smooth solid color background.
This is not a double faced technique.
This technique does not produce the stiff band typical of true warp faced weaves.

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There was a question in the Inkle Weaving group on Ravelry about doing one-weft double weave on an inkle loom and so I warped up my Ashford inklette and have added some pictures to the one-weft double weave tutorial for this. I only warped up to take the pictures and wove a triangle as a sample. This morning I had some time to play around with the warp…

This is very easy to do on the inkle loom. One-weft double weave produces a thick band with sharp motifs on a solid background. It is double faced.

Flipping the loom upside down, this is what you see…

This is the first time I have tried this on the inkle loom. Weavers in the Backstrap Group at Weavolution have tried it but warned me that it is a bit stressful on the loom. I wasn’t sure if my inklette would be able to take it but I actually don’t find it stresses the loom at all.

You will warp your loom normally except that you will be using doubled threads.

See the full tutorial with all the details and more pictures here.

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You may remember my blog post about Anna who came to visit and learn backstrap weaving with me here in Bolivia. She and boyfriend Alistair are on their way by bicycle to Ushuaia after having started in Alaska in May 2008.

Well they have just completed the Lagunas trail in the salt lake area of Bolivia and Chile and are currently luxuriating in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. Anna described that riding section (which turned out to be more of a pushing section for the last five days…deep sand and a strong headwind) as one of the most physically demanding things she has ever undertaken.

Anna and Alistair teamed up with a couple of German cyclists for this part of the trip and Anna has been spreading the obsession by teaching new friend Carolin to backstrap weave. They are carrying printed pages from my Andean Pebble Weave download with them.

Here are some fun pictures of them weaving on the road…

2. uyuni, first weaving class — Anna on the left gave the first weaving class to Carolin in the town of Uyuni in Bolivia before heading off on the lagunas trip. The little table has been fashioned from "madera de cacto" (wood from the dead pillar cactus)

5. idem — Carolin with her tiny loom tied to her bike and weaving on the salt lake.

10 bike double weave back side — Anna designed a fitting motif with which to practice her newly acquired double weave skills.

13. idem — Anna warping in camp somewhere in the desert. She said her fingers nearly froze off! I recognize those pencils...

So nice to see my apprentice so enjoying her new skills! Apparently Carolin will be doing a long sailing trip after this bike journey so we can expect to see the backstrap loom being used in the middle of the ocean some time in the future!

Anna brought me some spindles and llama bone picks from Sucre.

I gave her very precise directions to the curandera stalls in the crazy campesino market which sell llama fiber, weaving tools and all kinds of home remedies.

She not only found the curandera area but I believe she bought the things at the very same stall at which I shopped when I was there.

I have sent some of the spindles to the Netherlands and the US and have one left if anyone is interested. I have a few llama bones left too.

Drop me a line if you are interested. 🙂