Tag: natural dyes

Backstrap Weaving – Seasons

Daylight Savings is over and we continue what feels like a rapid slide into cooler temperatures here in the Blue Mountains. I welcome snuggling under multiple layers on these cold nights but don’t care much for having to climb out from under them in the morning. We didn’t have Daylight Savings time in Bolivia and I was surprised by how long it took for my stomach to adapt! I kept finding myself restless at 11:30am with my stomach complaining that it hadn’t yet been filled. I still do a large cooked lunch in the way to which I’d become accustomed in South America. And that post-lunch drowsiness is hard to kick too. I can’t blame the tropical heat for it any more.

With the cooling temperatures came the rolling down of shirt sleeves and the layering of coats. I’d have to put away all my wrist cuffs for a while.

In their place out came my woven scarves and neck gaiters that I’ve been accumulating all these years. It was never cold enough in Bolivia to wear them. Sometimes I’d take them traveling to the northern hemisphere spring and fall only to drag them out of a packed bag looking like pieces of crumpled rag and too ugly to wear.

The fall temperatures here have been perfect for wearing things like this light cotton scarf that I wove about eight years ago and never ever got to wear.

I wove this with handspun cotton singles that I’d bought in Guatemala back in 2008. I used my bamboo reed to achieve the sheer open look and used the same cotton as supplementary weft to weave in patterns. It’s a style that I had been wanting to try ever since I bought a sample from the Coban area of Guatemala.

I enjoy my woven book cover in naturally dyed silk even more now that I am actually living amongst these colors. I was very spoiled by being able to visit Vermont on the Columbus Day weekend many years ago and experience the fall colors there. It’s nowhere near as stunning here but it feels special because I’m living it rather than just visiting.

This little book along with others that I made is now settled in my new home next to books about textiles from this side of the world, places that perhaps I’ll be able to visit some day.

I finally finished the project in which I used my Bolivian teachers’ handspun wool. That project traveled through an entire year of seasons with me and I named the resulting bag Four Seasons in One Bag. The wool went from the sheep of the central Bolivian highlands, washed in mountain streams, into the hands and spindles of my weaving friends and teachers.

I’m pretty sure that the wool was spun during the October spinning event in 2024 in which my teachers and other ladies in the community compete for prizes to see who can spin the most wool. I bought three balls of the doubled singles and dyed some of it with indigo while I was up in the highlands visiting with Maxima during my last Bolivian summer.

It traveled with me to Australia where I spent some of the winter and spring dyeing it with Australian plant materials. The following summer, I moved here to my new home in the Blue Mountains and started the long task of plying.

While I love spinning with a drop spindle, I can’t say the same for plying. I find it downright tedious and I just wanted the task to finish. I’d ply at my craft group gatherings, on the train, at the Arts Society gatherings, at the spinning and weaving group….it just seemed to go on and on.

When I had just about finished all that plying, an Ashford Wee Peggy spinning wheel together with a bunch of accessories became available on Marketplace at a bargain price and I was able to buy it. There it sits waiting to be spruced up a bit until I next need to ply. Perhaps I’ll use it for spinning too. Who knows. The wheel came with lots of bobbins, a niddy noddy (I’ve never owned one), hand carders (I’d had to leave mine behind in Bolivia), a flicking tool and even an apron. A friend at my spinning group has supplied me with a new spring and hooks to replace rusty ones.

I managed to squeeze in some time at the loom between hiking trips. It took two attempts to wind a warp to my liking from all those fabulous natural dye colors but I had to face the fact that I just wouldn’t be able to get them all into the one piece.
Four seasons motifs in progress. The heddle arrangement may look awkward but it works well. I had seen weavers in Bolivia use similar arrangements for their double weave pieces.

Here’s the finished cloth…

The figures as well as the colors are meant to represent the four seasons. The yarn I had dyed with cochineal just didn’t belong here. It can wait along with the greens for another project.

Once I’d decided that this cloth would be a bag, I set about weaving a strap….

I didn’t want to use the handspun wool as weft for either of these pieces and used instead some unidentified soft and very loosely spun ”stuff’ that a friend had given me. It worked well except for the fact that it was somewhat slippery and wanted every now and then to slip out of the shed at the edges rather than lie there snugly. I’d had that very same experience with luscious alpaca yarn that I’d spun once upon a time.

Then came the usual dilemma of deciding which face of the fabric I preferred. The bag would be lined and so one of the two faces would never be seen again. I knew which face I had decided would be the “good” one. The problem was that when I asked others for an opinion, they always chose the other! I stuck with my original plan, though.

The two faces.
I somehow always find myself on the floor at the planning stage. I didn’t have a choice in Bolivia but I’m in a bigger place now with table space. I still end up on the floor.

I rounded off the flap of the bag…always scary cutting into the cloth…and covered and protected the raw edge with coil stitches. The sides then had to be woven, lining attached and everything sewn together…the most challenging part for me.

Here ‘s the completed bag being displayed at the Blackheath Arts Society members’ Easter exhibition. It was so much fun seeing it out there on display!

I managed to also get it in at the last minute, thanks to a kind friend from my spinning group, to the Hawkesbury Show where it won a blue ribbon. I was never able to enter shows like these when I lived in Bolivia and I am very excited about this ribbon!

A buddy from my craft group went to the show and surprised me with this photo while she was there….

So, you will have gathered that my hand and shoulder are now allowing me to be busy at the loom. The one-year anniversary of my accident has passed and things are improving. My wrist at the carpal tunnel level is still clogged and blocked by scar tissue which I don’t believe will ever stretch. My hand is a block of wood first thing in the morning but here I am typing, weaving, spinning cotton and plying. My shoulder is thawing very slowly and my range of reach out to the side to pass shuttle and insert sword is improving.

I am, however, in easy reach of all of this beauty and I just have to ask myself every day what I have done to deserve it!

I’m in a couple of hiking groups and get to go out at least twice a week.

I wonder if some Blue Mountains scenery and colors will start creeping into my work. I have a long-ish list of things I want to weave, some of which I spent a great deal of time designing last year when I couldn’t weave at all. I remember starting out charting with my left hand and the great deal of concentration that was required to fill within the lines!

I’ve actually started sampling for that large project now that I’ve decided on the thread that I will use. I need to get an ends per inch reading and also make sure that the proportions of the woven figures match those of my charted ones.

The “real” project will be much wider than this.

I started off the year weaving various narrow items just to make sure that I didn’t overdo things, Last year I had jumped back into weaving too early and messed up my shoulder as a result.

The Canberra Guild of Spinners and Weavers asked me to weave bookmarks/award ribbons for their AGM. This seemed like a great way to start the year even though they weren’t due until March. It’s extremely rare for me to take on commissioned work but the guild folk had made it easier by choosing and providing the yarn and being very specific about the layout. I got to choose the patterns and I had a lot of fun with that. I used the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave.

I wove a name tag for myself once again in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave which produces a quirky style of lettering. The lettering on the award ribbons is less so because the letters are capitals and well spaced. I have joined so many new groups up here that it is a struggle to remember names. At least this tag will help them to identify me and then I can embarrass myself by not being able to identify them in return!

I live above the Aboriginal Health Services office and one day while chatting with the ladies, I admired their lanyards with their indigenous art print. The next thing I knew, one had been popped into my mail box. So, I replied with a woven keyfob. I love these kinds of exchanges.

I had no trouble at all finding a place to set myself up for weaving on my backstrap loom. The previous resident left one of those huge Ikea book cases with 25 cube spaces. I have it filled now with cubes holding pretty much everything I brought over with me from Bolivia. I place C clamps on the edge of the lower shelves and can place my warp beam behind them. It’s a good sturdy anchor point.

Here I sit weaving with some of my late mother’s treasured possessions. She would have had to make the tough decisions about what to take and what to leave behind, just as I had when leaving Bolivia, when she left India in 1962 to come and live in Australia. These things had been in storage waiting for me since my mum died in 2013.There’s a biscuit tin with images of places of interest in Bombay, a pressed tin trinket tray with images of Hindu deities and her sewing basket…all selected by her as being too precious to leave behind. I love that I am able to have them here near me as I weave.

And…one more thing I wove….I converted the pouch I’d made from my handspun llama yarn into a phone carrying pouch for my hikes by weaving and adding a strap…

Between weaving and hiking and other activities, I try to turn this flat, which had been left in a somewhat shabby state, into a cosy home. This town of Katoomba in which I live is Op Shop heaven and I have acquired most of my things there or via Marketplace. Op Shop is the Australian term for a thrift or charity store. There have been a few flat-pack furniture purchases too. Assembling them on my own made me feel like I was playing a game of Twister.

Would you believe I got these Indonesian ikat pieces at a local op shop for the equivalent of US$ 3.50 each?!

I couldn’t believe that after having admired the Indonesian ikat textiles for so many years, particularly the ones from Sumba, that I should run across these in an op shop?!

Next on the agenda is dyeing with lichen. A friend gave me a jar of lichen that she had collected from fallen branches on the coast. It’s been soaking in a mix of cloudy ammonia and water for almost two weeks now and the color it’s releasing is amazing. I still have some of the Bolivian wool left. I just have to wash it and then give this color a go. I hope to find lichen locally that will perhaps produce other colors although I doubt that anything could be quite as astounding as this.

This photo was taken after one week. It has developed even further since.

The sun is streaming in through my sunroom windows and I feel so guilty for being indoors on such an utterly gorgeous day. But at the same time, I have been feeling bad for having neglected my blog for so long.

I want to thank everyone for making purchases before Taproot Video closed at the end of March. I really appreciate your support and hope to have the PDFs back up for sale elsewhere soon. I thought that launching a new publication would be a good way to introduce my new point of sale but I don’t see that happening quite quickly enough. Hopefully it won’t be too much longer before I have my publications available for sale once more. The flurry of purchases at the end of Taproot Video will help keep me afloat until then.

For those who don’t see my blog banner on their particular device, here’s what it says….Stay tuned.

Backstrap Weaving – My Books!

My Books, My Books, My Books…..I have been researching my options for a new home for my books between settling into my new home, finding new community, rehabbing my frozen shoulder and wrist, which is all stuck up with scar tissue again and, and, and…..!!!. So….I haven’t settled on anything yet…. but am getting close!

If you have no idea of what I am talking about, you may have somehow missed the announcement emails that the folks at Taproot Video, who sell my books, have been sending to their entire customer base these last months telling everyone that the website will be closing on March 31, 2026.

No need to panic if you’re hearing this for the first time.

If you’ve purchased one of my books in PDF form and downloaded it to your device, there’s nothing you need to do. If you haven’t yet downloaded it/them, you need to do so before the website closes. You have until March 31.

If you’ve purchased the PDFs that come with supplemental video clips, you don’t need to do anything either. You will continue to have access to the videos by clicking on the link to the folder of clps that you’ll find in the chapter titled Videos. Access to the clips will continue after the Taproot Video website closes.

There are four titles that come with clips:

  • Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms
  • Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms
  • The Eye-pattern Tubular Band and Other Decorative Finishing Techniques
  • The Eye-pattern Tubular Band of the Peruvian and Boliviain Highlands

ACTION NEEDED FOR THE FOLLOWING:

If you purchased a printed copy of one of my books that comes with supplementary video clips (‘those listed above), you will need to download the clips to your device before March 31 if you haven’t already done so.

Access to these clips is provided via a link on the Taproot Video website. Naturally, that link will no longer be available to you after the site closes. So, if you haven’t downloaded the clips yet, please go to taprootvideo.com and…..

  • Log in.
  • Click on the Purchased Items tab.
  • Click on the title of book you purchased. That will take you to a page with the link to the folder of videos.
  • Clck on the link.
  • Download the videos to your device.

These instructions are also outlined in the books themselves in the chapter titled VIDEOS.

There are only two or three titles now at Taproot Video that have remaining copies of the printed books. I won’t be selling printed books again after Taproot Video closes. My books in PDF form will soon be available elsewhere and I’ll let you know as soon as that’s up and running.

In the meantime, yes, I have been weaving! And so, I ‘ll finish this quick post by showing you what I’ve been up to using the handspun wool I purchased from my Bolivian weaving friends in the highlands in January last year. You may remember that we dyed some of it with indigo while I was there. I dyed the rest in Australia last year with local plants. I love that my new community of friends in my transition home up on the mid north coast contributed so much to that project with their contributions of mango leaves, silver dollar eucalyptus leaves, local info on where to find a peppercorn tree, onion skins and rusty nails for my iron water.

This a celebration of connections made in what I’ve left behind and where I now find myself. The images depict the four seasons considering that now that I live in a place that truly experiences all four. We had two at best in my tropical home in Bolivia! I’m going to make this into a bag so I can carry those connected memories with me.

Bye-bye Taproot Video and thank you.. Thank you to all those who have purchased my publications over the years and supported me through following my blog as well as leaving me kind comments and reviews here and on my other social media pages.The blog will continue. I have a lot saved up to post! You’ll be hearing again from me soon.

Backstrap Weaving – Dyeing to Weave

Well, hello…….. Here we are well into 2026 and yes, I’m still here. And here is a long overdue blog post. Typing at this laptop keyboard was not doing my shoulder any good while I was still unable to rotate my wrist into a full palm-down position. As a result, I am still stuck with a frozen right shoulder and a wrist that turns most of the way but which I fear will probably never recover its full range of motion.

So I’ll attempt to fill you in with just a little of what has been happening starting with way back last year when I joined a group called the Fiber Artists Network up on the mid-north coast of NSW. What a group! Such an incredible collection of talented women who use a mind-boggling array of techniques to create their textile art works. I wasn’t sure how exactly my work fit with this group but I enjoyed every opportunity to get together with them and soak up inspiration. And here I am now moved to my home in the Blue Mountains where I can only continue to see their work from afar.

Another new member to that group, Dale, immediately after joining, invited a group of us to her home for a day of natural dyeing. Everyone was there to do some botanical printing except me. I’d brought my own pot, which I’d lugged all the way over from Bolivia, and was planning to dye some of the wool I’d bought from my teachers in the Bolivian highlands on my final visit (sniff!) in 2025.

I took along the dried cochineal bugs that I’d got in the market in Santa Cruz (and before you ask, I did declare it when I arrived in Australia. I had hardly even begun explaining when the bored officials waved me through). This caused much excitement in the group and although the focus remained on botanical dyeing, I ended up with quite a mix of fabric and thread in my dyepot alongside my wool skeins.

Dale provided a nice variety of plant material from her own garden for the botanical printing.

This included leaves from what is commonly known as the Silver Dollar gum tree which produce a gorgeous burnt orange color. You’d never imagine by just looking at the silvery leaves. She gave me some to take home. I posted messages in the local Facebook groups hunting for more and a lady drove over one day with a small bucketful for me.

Trying to stir and poke more fabric into the pot.

I was happy about the rosy red color we were getting from the cochineal after all the trouble I’d had in Bolivia with the very hard tap water there when I was trying to dye silk.

Later at home, I dyed another skein and shifted it to a bright red by adding lemon juice.

Next came the Silver Dollar leaves. I added to the supply by buying a few sticks of it from the local florist. The pretty rounded silver leaves are frequent additions to flower arrangements here particularly those that contain a lot of native varieties.

On top of a stunning color, it gave such an intense aroma of eucalyptus. Beautiful!

I was thrilled with the results but did have to ask myself if I was ever going to weave with so much orange yarn. A quick glance back at some of my past work reminded me that I have included this color much more than I had imagined.

Next on my list was leaves from the peppercorn tree. It’s a native of South America but was a popular shade tree at one stage used in rural areas of NSW. We had one in our school yard when I was a kid and we certainly enjoyed the cool of its shade and the aroma of his peppercorns on sweltering summer days. I hit the local Facebook notice boards again and was told of a tree offering its weeping leafy branches to passing strollers on one of the main streets of a neighboring town. Off I went. The search became a big part of the whole adventure. While gathering leaves, a silver-haired gent whose long beard was tied in a pony-tail told me that he too had had a peppercorn tree in the schoolyard. He and his mates would use the leaves to soothe the sting after a caning! Maybe the boys at my school had done so too but kept it a secret from the cane-wielding nuns.

The smell of the peppercorn leaves in the pot evoked a lot of memories.

Known as “molle” (which is part of its botanical name) by my weaving teachers in highland Bolivia, it gives a rich gold color. I was only using alum pre-mordant. I believe that my teacher Maxima and her group also use chrome during the process and achieve a much richer gold.

I had my friends in the local craft group collecting both red and yellow onion skins for me and was surprised at how much richer the color from the yellow skins was. I had been expecting the opposite. I didn’t use the alum mordant with the onion skins having read that it wasn’t necessary. However, the color was a bit uneven…but in a good way!

After connecting with a keen natural dyer up in northern Queensland on Facebook, I then tried mango leaves. They gave a beautiful buttery yellow in very little time. A second skein left in longer was more golden. I got a nice green by adding a touch of copper sulfate and some other tones using water and a bit of white vinegar in which rusty nails had been soaking for two weeks out in the sun.

Some results. You can see the indigo that we dyed up in the highlands last year. I added a natural white skein to this photo for comparison.
At last I get to keep some notes in the book with my handwoven cover.
I love these three together.
Playing with different color combinations. I have plans for this wool in my weaving but first I have to get out a spindle and ply. I’ve dyed skeins of doubled singles and have yet to twist the two single strands together. We’ll see how my wrist feels about that.

Other non-weaving activities involved updating, adding final touches to and improving some of my woven jewelry pieces.

My two boxes of jewelry-making bits and pieces made it over to Australia. I spent ten days house-sitting for a friend at Shelly Beach and needed an activity.

All the dyeing paraphernalia had been put away and I spent my time refurbishing and creating pendants and wrist cuffs between walking around the deliciously cool nearby pocket of littoral rainforest and visiting the beach in the evening to watch the paragliders take off in the evening breezes.

While this strangling fig isn’t being very kind to this tree, it makes a very fascinating and eerie sight.

Lying crumpled up within one of the boxes of jewelry findings was a small strip of silk that I’d woven. It was the piece on which I’d been sampling the figure of a weaver at her loom to be included in a larger project. I was able to cut off the final version and turn it into a pendant. I couldn’t believe that I just happened to have the little hand charm to add to the bottom.

Other things that got refreshed and updated…my garabata pouch pendant and wrist cuff. I didn’t make the earrings. I bought those from an Ayoreo artisan.
It was never a good idea to wear jewelry in the streets of Santa Cruz. I learned that the hard way in a couple of incidents during my first months there. Anything was fair game. I’m enjoying being able to feel confident about wearing my things out and about here.

I spent a couple of very peaceful weeks there at Shelly Beach keeping Catherine’s beautiful garden watered. It gave me a chance to see just how independent I could be hand-wise and if I was indeed ready to make the bigger move away from my brother’s home to my real home in Katoomba. Spoiler alert: I’m there now….but more about that and my return to the loom in my next blog post.

And then came Christmas. A dear friend bought me a (quite expensive!) ticket to a wreath-making afternoon. I must admit that I was reluctant to go. Anyone who is a regular reader of my blog will know that I don’t do Christmas. But hey, this was my first one back in Australia. Let’s make it a memorable one in that I actually participate!

I did feel extremely handicapped. I didn’t have enough grip strength to handle the secateurs on the thicker branches and I struggled to work the florist wire and weave the stems in and out of the frame. But I gave it my best shot..I finished mine ages before anyone else in my group who spent so much more time selecting and planning. This wasn’t their first time and I should have probably slowed down and put a bit more thought into it. I was just a bit frustrated and disappointed with my hand and shoulder’s performance and wanted to get it all over with.

There was weaving involved and so I guess this does deserve a place on this blog….

I based it mostly on silver dollar leaves.

There was a Christmas party with the Fibre Artists Network group out in the beautiful lush Bellingen countryside. We played Secret Santa, or Kris Kringle, as they say here in Australia, and were charged with making a brooch for one of the other members.

Here they all are after being randomly distributed and unwrapped…..

I can see more natural dyeing coming up hopefully with my own handspun especially now that I have borrowed this book to peruse….

And here I’ll end this post. There’s so much more to tell as a whole new chapter has begun and is well under way but here’s a look at the beginning of that new chapter which marks the end of this long, long roller coaster of a journey from the other side of the world.

There lies within my life’s possessions!

The most I’ll tell you for now is that I am very happy!!

The brooch that I got in the Christmas exchange on the left…..and the result of another Christmas exchange in a different group on the right. In that exchange we were presented with materials and asked to stitch a Badge of Honor with a word that describes another person in the group. We drew names from a hat. I stitched Vivacious for Francie and Present was chosen for me.

I happily put on my badge for the group photos knowing that the time has indeed come to exhale and live in the Present and if that’s the impression I gave the person who stitched my badge, I am thrilled. Time to stop holding my breath and worrying about my future here in Australia. Time to stop feeling sad and doubtful about having left Bolivia.

Until next time….(.there will be weaving to show!)

Backstrap Weaving- Back to Black…..and Red

I’m going to keep this post quite short as I am house and cat-sitting at the moment without my laptop and am attempting to write this post on my phone. I am a fast two-finger typist on my laptop but a very slow single-digit writer on my phone due to lack of practice. I don’t even try the dual thumb thing that everyone seems to do.

The cat in question. This blue-eyed 19-year-old lady lived with me until I sadly had to re-home her due to the amount of travel I was doing. Now I get to keep her company while her carer is away.

We are on Day 27 of the citywide general strike with no end in sight. At least now the authorities announce the plan for the week for permitted supermarket opening hours so that we can all be better organized. Before this, it was mass panic when the stores were allowed to open with the whole city out getting supplies….only to have another shopping morning announced just two days later.

I got out on one of the mornings and managed to pick up more cochineal from the ladies that sell home remedies in the street market. The bugs only come in tiny packets as they are sold here as remedies rather than for dyeing. The last time I bought some, they were sold by the teaspoonful out of a large jar.

I also managed to find a store that sells cream of tartar to use as a color-shifting agent for my cochineal dyeing but had to buy a minimum quarter kilo.

My projects have been rather blue lately. I wanted indigo blues for my ikat experiments and have had fun using synthetic dyes for silk and cotton to create different blues. I can’t get hold of natural indigo here. Now I would like to try my hand at using a natural dye for an ikat project and cochineal is a convenient thing with which to start.

I even used blues for my recent silk hummingbird cuff bracelet but that was more about just making do with what was available in my stash of 60/2 silk.

This is what’s on the loom now and I found this red and black kind of shocking after all those cool and calming blues.

But I do need to remind myself that red and black has always been a great favorite combination of mine and something that I have used time and time again over the years and as recently as 2020 when I wove my four-part Within These Walls series.

The first ever motif I wove with my backstrap loom teachers in Peru back in 1996 was in red and black.

My latest project is a request from a friend….a woven sleeve for his quena flute. I had to scratch around in my stash for suitable yarn and decided to go with chunky Omega Sinfonia cotton. This yarn is from my workshop stash for creating warps for my beginner students. I have a lot of this standing by for the day I can teach in-person classes again. I knew that I could create something big, bold and striking with this thread.

But, as always, I wove a width sample first. My eyes just seemed to naturally go for blues for the sample. I got the information that I needed from it and I hope to make something useful from it. It’s a good size for a case for sunglasses.

The pattern request for the quena case was for something snake-like. My Guaraní weaving teacher many years ago showed me one of the motifs that she weaves using the structure that the Guaraní people call karakarapepo. I call it Andean Pebble Weave. She explained the role of the snake in Guaraní legend and added that the zig-zag pattern also represents the life-giving Parapetí River along which her community lives.

This zig-zag motif is woven in many different ways. It doesn’t seem to have a single fixed form and it has been interesting to see the various forms it takes during the years I have been here. It’s hard to find any two that are exactly the same. My zig-zag pattern is a modified and embellished version of the one that my first teacher had shown me.

I never lose the thrill I feel when seated at a new warp all heddled up and ready to go. I am using the very efficient two-heddle method that my backstrap loom teachers from Ayacucho showed me.

In this chunky yarn, the inches quickly accumulate.

I got this far and then it was time to pack up some things for the two weeks of house sitting. My plan had been to go back and forth each day but the strike has made it less than pleasant to be walking around the deserted streets alone. It wasn’t something I was going to feel safe doing twice a day. And so I faced the fact that I would have to just stay put at my friend’s place which meant packing up my weaving . Hooray for the portability of the backstrap loom.

Sticks, yarn, swords, shuttle, string and cable ties to help attach the far beam to something all went into the tote bag. After completing the first pattern repeat, I didn’t need a chart any more. But darn…I forgot to bring the backstrap…and I have at least twelve of them at home!

But guess what…the tote bag makes a pretty good backstrap in an emergency. I love the idea of a loom carry bag that doubles as a backstrap. However, I would create a thicker cushier one if I were to make something like that in the future.

You make do with what you have and this tote bag has been working just fine as a backstrap.

This weaves up so quickly! I will have to sneak back home on one of the supermarket mornings (when there are more people out and about and it feels less creepy) and put together another warp. Once off the loom, I will figure out how to put this flute sleeve together. I am weaving the two sides of the sleeve as separate bands so that each can have its own third selvedge. That will save a bit of hemming.

I found table legs that I could attach the far beam to at just the right height, piled a bunch of heavy things on top of the table, threw a cushioned chair seat on the floor, and was good to go.

I am very much used to the red and black now. How did I ever feel that it was shocking?

There was some hope that the strike would end today but it hasn’t. Today was a permitted shopping morning and so I walked home to pick up my dyeing stuff.

These are the colors I have so far on silk using cochineal, my hard tap water, and alum mordant. A bit of lemon juice produced the orange tones.

I am hoping that the cream of tartar will give me reds. This is what the pot looked like when I added the cream of tartar. Looks promising, right?

I have hung the skein to dry without having rinsed it. I am thinking that maybe the color needs time to “cure”. When I rinsed the first lemon-juice-induced orange skein in tap water (it was shockingly orange), all the orange color disappeared and I was left with purple! The only way that I found to save the color was by adding a bit of lemon juice to the rinse water. I am wondering, therefore, if I should rinse this latest skein in water that has a bit of cream of tartar in it. Well, it’s all about experimenting, isn’t it? I have yet to get hold of distilled water. That will have to wait until after the strike, I guess. It’s not a supermarket item here.

Well, I have managed to write this by pecking away at the phone keyboard while not making myself too crazy.

Hopefully the next time I write, I will be back home, we will be strike free, I’ll have beautiful red silk skeins to show, and a successfully completed quena sleeve.

Backstrap Weaving – The Right Stuff

We’re standing still as we enter the sixteenth day of a city-wide strike but I have been pretty busy and entertained during this latest of the stay-at-home situations. It’s nowhere near as anxiety-ridden as the last time we did this for twenty-one days at the end of 2019.

This is what I have been up to:

SILK: soaking, scouring, squeezing, steeping, stirring

COCHINEAL: squashing, sifting, soaking, steeping, straining

DYEING: Sighing (over the dull colors), squealing (over the lovely ones), searching (for the right additives)

Dyeing experiments on silk with cochineal and alum mordant have kept me entertained during the strike.

But I don’t have the right stuff if I want to get the gorgeous reds normally associated with cochineal. Never mind, I’ll just pop out and get some. But of course everything is closed due to the strike. What I would like to have is cream of tartar and distilled water. The former is supposed to push the color towards a cherry red. Yum. My tap water is far too hard. I have read that dye molecules tend to adhere to the minerals in the water and not so much to the fiber. And that’s where the distilled water comes in.

Citric acid shifts the color to a strong orange.

The supermarkets have been allowed to open on two mornings a week from 6am to 11am. Imagine the whole city out trying to shop in those two time slots especially since the Day of the Dead fell right in the middle of it all. You would think that it would be a simple matter of getting some cream of tartar at the supermarket. I went to three and didn’t find it. I don’t have an oven and, therefore, don’t bake. I have never had a reason to look for it before. I found a place on Facebook that supplies commercial kitchens. Of course, it’s not open during the strike. I suppose I will have to buy a bagful! The distilled water will have to wait until the end of the strike too. In the meantime, I’ll just make do with what I’ve got and have fun.

This is the kind of red-ish purple that I got on my handspun llama with an alum mordant and tap water many years ago. I was really pleased with it. Many years ago, I used to have a softening attachment on my tap and I don’t remember if I still had it when I was dyeing this llama fiber. The company that supplied the cartridges for the attachment closed and that was the end of that. I know for sure that I hadn’t used cream of tartar.

In a way it’s a lot of fun making do with what you have on hand. Using coffee filters was suggested as a way to strain the bug particles out of the cochineal liquid. I don’t have any but I found that cutting two of the three layers out of one of the disposable surgical masks made a pretty good strainer. I could hang the elastic straps over two bottles to suspend the mask over a bowl. I had a little re-usable draw-string sack that can be used for tea leaves or yerba mate. That worked well for containing the crushed cochineal while the color was being extracted.

I got a few different purples…nothing terribly exciting….but adding lemon juice to the bath brought on a powerful zing of orange. Wow. Almost too powerful. I learned that I had to rinse the orange skeins in water that had a few drops of lemon juice. My first orange skein, rinsed under the tap, released a lot of orange liquid in the first rinse, a rosy quite attractive orange in the second, and then the skein magically turned purple before my eyes… and a very dark purple at that! Not a trace of orange left. How bizarre. I rinsed the others in lemon-y water after that and got some pretty colors.

Purple and orange and pink tones in silk from cochineal.

So, that’s what I have so far. I am looking forward to getting some reds when things are back to normal and I can get the right stuff. In the meantime I can start skeining and scouring and mordanting the next lot of silk. I have a new even greater appreciation for the person who prepared all these tiny sample silk skeins from natural dye experiments using all kinds of mordants and color-shifting agents.

Skeins of naturally dyed silk that were gifted to me.

I had so much fun combining those small skeins to weave book covers…

Hopefully I can get colors that work well enough together for a future ikat project.

As you can imagine, when doing this kind of thing there is a lot of time spent waiting for yarn to dry or soak or steep. I had to keep myself busy with other fiber pursuits so that I would stop impatiently poking at things in the pot. I am still spinning the brown cotton that is labeled as Cinnamon and am about to start experimenting with boiling small quantities of it for different lengths of time to see how that affects the resulting deepening of color. I first soaked one lot and allowed it to dry to see if the color changes at all from simply being thoroughly wetted. It doesn’t. Now it’s time to start boiling.

The color labeled Cinnamon is the uppermost one in this picture.

The other thing I did was weave a band in 60/2 silk to experiment with making jewelry…wrist-cuff bracelets and possibly pendants. I enjoy wearing these when I travel but am also thinking about possible income sources when I eventually return to live in Australia.

I added a hummingbird cuff bracelet to my collection of blue ones….

And then I unearthed a sample I had woven in indigo-dyed fine cotton from Guatemala. It will make a nice storage bag for the blue bracelets.

I finish my cuff bracelets in a number of ways. Sometimes I add a button to one end and a loop to the other. This involves finishing the raw edges of the band in some way. Usually the material is fine enough to turn under twice and hem. If not, I turn once and sew down after having sealed the edge with diluted PVA glue. This is not my favorite way as the dried glue can sometimes be scratchy against the skin. A more complicated but enjoyable way is to edge the perimeter with a woven tubular band. Using metal ribbon crimps and some sort of clasp takes care of the raw edges. However, cuffs with clasps like these are the hardest ones to do up. I have had lots of practice, though!

A tubular edging added to a wool band encloses and protects the edges.

Apart from enclosing and protecting the cut raw edges, ribbon crimps also allow you to wear the bracelet showing either of the two faces.

I wove my hummingbird design in warp-faced double weave. I love the smooth, solid color look of this structure. There are no floats and no spotted background. If you think that you would like to try double weave yourself, I have written a book which gives instructions via dozens of step-by-step photos, detailed explanations and video clips for those who like to weave bands on standard inkle looms. I think that it is a technique for those who have already tried and decided that they like the slower pace of weaving bands with pick-up patterns. It’s not the first-ever kind of pick-up patterning that I would recommend trying. I learned this structure in the highlands of Bolivia way back in 1997on a horizontal ground loom and have adapted the method to the inkle loom. Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms is available as a PDF or as a spiral-bound book at Taproot Video.

I made the most of every piece of this short band…

My friend Dorinda is back in the States now after visiting Maxima and all her other friends in the Bolivian highlands. Maxima runs a small grass roots weaving co-op made up of women from her town and neighboring rural communities far, far away from tourist trails. Pre pandemic, I was able to take and show examples of the ladies’ work that I own using their handspun wool and natural dyes and generate a lot of orders for them. The profits would go towards simple needs like buying supplies for their children at the start of the school year. If you were reading my blog during those years you will know that I got around a lot and there are now folks from Florida to Washington state who own some of the beautiful woven cloth. Although the ladies do sew the cloth into useful products, most of my weaving friends were interested in buying lengths of cloth that they could use in their own sewing projects.

Here are some of the youngest and newest members of the co-op who have recently graduated from the body-tensioned band loom to the leaning vertical frame loom on which they weave wider pieces. The youngest one has yet to graduate but will do so next year. Look at those lovely reds they get on the wool from cochineal. I need to get some of that good highland water!

Maxima’s sister, Narciza is one of my weaving buddies and is here showing the 4350 meters of yarn that she spun during the Spinning Week competition that Dorinda helped organize in October by seeking out funding for prizes.
Two groups of spinners competed for prizes. The first prize winners on the right are wearing their new skirts and the second prize winners received a knitted cardigan. Donated funds were used for the purchase of the skirt fabric and yarn and the skirts were sewn and cardigans machine-knitted by members of the co-op. 89, 887 meters of yarn were spun in the week! There’ll be plenty to go into the dye pots next season.

These ladies were the participants in the Spinning Week competition in the first week of October. It’s a very humble group of ladies living a simple rural existence deep within the highlands, growing vegetables for the Sunday market and raising livestock. There are no passing foreign tourists and no local interest in their woven goods in the nearest city nine hours away (it’s a spectacular bus journey!) Please do take a look at Dorinda’s blog, PAZA Bolivia, to read her fascinating stories about the lives of these women and their efforts to keep their spinning and weaving traditions alive. You might think about subscribing to automatically receive notification of her future posts. I hope that I can travel soon to promote their work and help out in my own small way as I used to. In the meantime, I’ll do my best via my blog.

I’ll leave you here with an idea for using ribbon crimps to make some tree ornaments. I show these every year! The bands don’t necessarily need to be holiday themed. I think any pattern looks good.

These are all woven using the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. If you would like to learn how to weave Andean Pebble Weave on an inkle loom. I have written a book that teaches just that: Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms. If you use any other kind of loom to weave bands you can still learn the method that enables you to weave these kinds of double-faced bands in this book: Complementary-warp Pick-up. The advantage of the inkle loom book is that it includes instructional video clips in both its digital and physical versions.. Both these books teach the method that enables you weave all the patterns in my two follow-up pattern books.

Hopefully, the strike won’t last too much longer and there will be a peaceful end and a solution to satisfy all concerned. Until next time…..