natural dyes – Page 2 – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Tying and Stitching

I have been enjoying some stretches of quiet time in which I have been sewing and tying tape onto a new ikat warp.

The sewing part of my reward time was about converting the long strip of cloth that I recently wove on the Karen backstrap loom into a table square. I cut the strip into five pieces so that they could be joined side-by-side into an almost-square piece of cloth, roughly 24″ x 24″. I think that it is something I can use on tables to display my workshop samples.

I wanted to lay the strips side by side and join them edge to edge using one of the decorative stitches that Bolivian weavers use when they join their woven panels. There are many varieties of these joining stitches and I chose one of the simplest one. The needle and thread follow a basic figure-eight path. The needle emerges from bottom to top a certain distance away from the edge of panel A. Then it dives down in the gap between the two edges of the panels and emerges from bottom to top the same distance away from the edge of panel B. Then it once again dives down in the gap between the edges of the two panels and starts again from the beginning.

I used this joining stitch a couple of times before when I connected wool panels to make lap blankets. Here’s one of the two panels of the purple blanket on the loom…

And, here it is connected to its partner with the decorative stitching…

I took care of raw edges by eventually covering the perimeter of the blanket with the woven band you can see below…

The red and brown blanket got the same treatment. Above you can see the two panels sitting side by side before I sewed them together.I used a contrast color for the join which made the stitching practical as well as decorative. This blanket also had its perimeter covered and raw edges protected with a woven band.

I guess the hardest part is making sure that the needle always pierces the cloth the same distance away from the edge. Cotton seems to demand a higher level of accuracy and I wasn’t confident enough to go with a contrast color for the stitching. I matched the color of the sewing thread to the cloth and the little inaccuracies give my stitching a fairly ”rustic” look.

Stitching in progress. There were four joins to cover.

I covered the two raw edges with cross-knit-loop stitches and left the two selvedges uncovered….

I kept the cross-knit-loop stitches as close together as possible. This gave good coverage and meant that I could just turn the raw edge over once and feel confident that the stitching would cover and protect it.

My other non-weaving activity was time spent tying a new pattern into my next ikat project. It’s another short warp as I am still at the stage where all I am hoping to do is learn and improve my skills before I launch into a ”real” project.

The base colors show against black in the last silk ikat project.

I again used the naturally dyed silk sample skeins that I had been given.

This warp is made of a different kind of silk to that which I used in my last ikat project. It is different in that it is finer, more slick and has a higher twist. I guess it more closely resembles the silk that I eventually hope to use in the real project, whatever that might be.

A major difference is that this kind of silk absorbed the natural dyes in a very different way too. The colors in my last warp were more muted and “sad” I suppose you could say. These colors are brighter and clearer….almost too bright for my liking and I might over dye the project later to sadden the colors if the contrast against the black dye is too high.

It’s the differences in this thread that are of interest to me. Will the fact that it is finer and slicker make it more difficult for me to achieve good firm ties when I apply the ikat tape? Will the black dye bleed under the ikat ties? Will the threads shift more freely out of alignment when I weave because they are more slick than those I have tried in other experiments?

To make it all a bit different to the last ikat experiment, I plan to add two panels to either side of this piece when the time comes to weave it. I hope to be able to weave motifs with supplementary weft in those two panels that resemble the ones I have created with the ikat tape.

When I posted pictures of my last experiment in online forums, questions arose about the tape I am using. It was given to me years ago by my weaving friend Betty. You can see a roll of it at left.

I don’t know where she got it from but the only place that I have seen selling anything that seems to be specifically designed for ikat is Maiwa in Canada.

I used cassette tape with some success before I was given the ikat tape. It worked very well when I was using cold water dyes on cotton. It failed in hot water, though. It held knots well but you had to be careful when pulling knots tight as it could snap. The ikat tape has never snapped.

Others in the forums have mentioned using flagging tape and cut strips of plastic grocery store bags when they have taken ikat workshops. One of the features I like a lot about the ikat tape is that it can be split and torn vertically into strips as fine as you like. I am not sure if that is a good thing if you are trying to use the entire width of the tape to wrap a very large area. I think it in that case that it may have a tendency to split when you don’t want it to.

This is probably one of the last ikat experiments that I did using cassette tape….

I know that you probably can’t make out anything here but this is the pattern that I am currently tying. I mark the pattern with a charcoal pencil and I use a paint brush with stiff bristles to “erase” mistakes in my marking.

I am finding straight horizontal lines the hardest thing. I tie each bundle separately and just hope that the plastic wraps line up well enough to give a smooth horizontal. I have been tempted to put several bundles together and bind them all at once but I know that if I were to grab my bangs in a bunch and cut straight across, I wouldn’t end up with a straight line.

The other thing I did in my reward time was to cover the journal with the last ikat piece and add it to the collection of little books with hand woven covers.

I was pleased that the three motifs in the middle ended up nicely seated on the spine of the book.

I have actually finished all the tying part of the latest ikat project. Now I just need to carefully inspect it and make sure that I didn’t forget any parts. You can see in an old experiment in the picture below that the top left motif is missing one wrap on its extreme left. It went into the dye bath like that. So, I will be looking very closely over my current pattern to make sure it is complete!

It will go into the dye bath tomorrow. Fingers crossed that all goes well!

Backstrap Weaving – Something from Scraps

I was motivated by the announcement that the summer 2019 weave-along (WAL) in one of the weaving groups on Ravelry would be “Weaving with Hand-dyed or Painted Yarns”. The WAL for the last couple of summers has been about band weaving and although I happily participated in those, this newest topic is much more interesting and challenging for me.

I decided that it was a good time to try ikat using silk for warp and started scratching around in my silk stash which includes cones and skeins of 30/2, 60/2 and 140/2 thread. I figured I would be wise to start with the heaviest 30/2 thread even though that still seemed very intimidating. I have mostly used cotton for my ikat experiments in the past, the finest being this one with 20/2s.

I was able to turn this experiment into something useful…a nice draw-string bag for my Kindle…

I had been using cold water dyes for these cotton experiments. Now was the time to take out the lovely Landscape and Jacquard brand dyes that I had bought a few years ago in the hope of dyeing wool and silk for some of my projects. I had all I needed: the ikat tape, the right dyes and a selection of silk from which to choose, but I still hesitated.

Ikat projects are such a big undertaking. There’s all the time spent designing and then tying a pattern, not to mention all the measuring and care to make sure that the pattern gets tied on straight. My eyes always seem to to tell me something completely different to what the ruler is indicating. Then you can never really be sure if you have wrapped the yarn well or tightly enough. There’s always a chance the dye will seep into the wrapped yarn and spoil the motif. And, finally, even if the initial tying and dyeing stages have been successful, you can never know just how much the threads will shift on the loom to possibly blur the pattern out of recognition.

The fineness of my silk in my stash was intimidating. So, I was quite relieved to discover in my scratching around that I still had scraps of naturally dyed silk left over from other projects. This silk is much heavier and seemed like it would be much more manageable for my very first ikat experiments with silk. I had been offered all these tiny dyed skeins of silk by a guild when the guild member who had created them had passed away. No one else had seen a use for them, but I knew that I could use them for small projects on my backstrap loom. This was what I was able to bring back home with me to Bolivia….

You may remember that some time ago I used them to weave four pieces which became covers for journals…

These are the remaining scraps I found in my closet…

Ikat Cat by Budi Satria Kwan fineartamerica.com

There are two quite different kinds of silk rolled up in these tiny balls. I opted for the heavier of the two for my ikat project and decided to wind a crazy multi-colored warp. I wanted to weave a piece that would cover a journal that I had left over from the other project. The warp only needed to be nineteen inches long to give me enough fabric for the cover as well as a comfortable amount of working space on my backstrap loom.

I was inspired by a picture of some fabric I had seen on the internet many years ago of the silhouette of a multi-color cat sitting on a dark background. I had saved it and kept it in the back of my mind. I wasn’t feeling brave enough to go for such an ambitious shape right now and decided to stick with some basic straight lines for this experiment. I had done some experiments with creating curved shapes in ikat some years ago too. They were quite successful but would have been even better if I had remembered to account for take-up when I tied the shapes. My circles had come out a little flattened!

I really liked the simple idea of having the multi-colored shape appearing on the black background.

Here’s the warp I created.

Next, I extended the warp on a frame so that I could start tying in the design. A friend lent me a small table that made a perfect frame for this.

Those light pieces of thread you can see in the picture are enclosing the sections of threads that will be tied. Most bundles were made up of twelve ends with a few evenly distributed ones that held fourteen ends so that I could cover the total of 270 ends across the width of the warp.

I wrapped the thread in ikat tape in several short sessions over three days. The frequent breaks are necessary as I tend to get sloppy with my measurements when I get tired.

Here you can see the warp off the frame and ready to be soaked before going into the dye pot.

Here it is after being rinsed and left to dry overnight…

And now on the backstrap loom, heddles in place, first section unwrapped and with weaving underway…

Rather than remove all the ikat wraps at once, I like to slowly unwrap as the weaving progresses. I feel that leaving some of the wraps in place helps reduce the amount of shift in the threads which gives a crisper design. I know that the shifting and blurring can be attractive but I have found that it is less so when the motifs have blunt horizontal edges as mine do. Shifting in motifs like these can sometimes create spots and/or lines of color that are totally disconnected from the main motif. The practice of not removing all the ties at once gives me a relatively small space in which to weave and operate the loom. I use fine swords and wrap my weft around a stick rather than the regular shaped shuttle that I prefer. I can slide the stick with the weft into a very small shed. I keep weaving until I absolutely can’t continue due to the lack of space and then I remove the next ikat ties to free up some space to continue.

Almost there…

I am hoping that I have planned this well enough so that the black squares in the middle of the center row of three motifs sit right in the middle of the spine of the journal.

Done!…

I am very pleased (and relieved!).

Ikat projects are always a big unknown for me. They can end up being a mess or a success. I’ll call this one a success.

It does seems a bit weird over-dyeing naturally dyed silk with chemical dye, but there really wasn’t a whole lot more I could do with the scraps of silk that were left in my closet except perhaps make some wrist cuffs. I already made the cuff you can see at left when I was sampling for the first set of book covers.

I am glad that this project still shows off the beauty of the natural dye colors.

There is probably enough of the other kind of silk that I was given to do some further ikat experiments. It is finer and slicker. Maybe I will make an ikat cuff or two. The more experience the better if I am ever to move on to my finer 30/2s and 60/2s silk thread!

I could have produced a very similar effect in warp-faced double weave without all the mess and risk. I was thinking about that. Double weave would have given me a thicker fabric for a start, which I didn’t want. Plus the two layers of cloth would not have connected in the areas of solid black. That can sometimes create a sort of ballooning effect between the areas where the layers are in fact connected. In any case, the more ikat I do the more confident I will feel about eventually reaching my goal of creating complex curved shapes…the kinds I wouldn’t be able to achieve in double weave or the other patterning structures that I use.

Now all that remains to be done is to look for some pretty paper to use on the inside of the front and back covers of the journal.

Between bouts of ikat wrapping, I started sewing together strips of the green cloth from my Karen backstrap loom project to make a table square that will be approximately twenty-five inches square. It will be another piece on which I can display my samples at my workshops. I’ll show you my progress on that in the next post.

And, this will be my last chance to remind you to make sure you have downloaded all your purchases from Patternfish. You have until the end of the month to do so.