Tag: pick up patterns

Backstrap Weaving – Therapy

Long time no see. A lot has been happening but at the same time not a lot has been happening.

In the “a lot has been happening” category I’ve undergone a dramatic change of scene:

It’s certainly dramatic for someone who has been living in a landlocked country for the last twenty-seven years. The following might give you a clue as to my whereabouts….

I pass this mural on my way to the shops.

Yes, I’m back in Australia for good after having talked about making this move for years. But I’m still in transition mode as I will be staying with my brother and sister-in-law in this beachy area on the mid north coast of NSW until mid November when I will then move to my own place in the Blue Mountains.

It’s a lovely area for strolling in bushland and by the shore. I walk around the block to a large open field where kangaroos come to graze in the late afternoon. They’re far too shy to allow me to photograph them. We stop still and stare at each other for a good five minutes after which they nervously return to their grazing. However, I only have to take one very cautious and almost imperceptible step closer and they’re off.

I have these guys waiting to greet me when I step out in the late afternoon to bring in the laundry.

Kookaburras create quite a racket when I take a stroll around the neighborhood but will instantly pipe down the moment I turn on my camera to record them.

I had long planned to fly out of Bolivia on April 28. I had my accident with the four-legged black torpedo that I described in my last post one month prior and it almost messed up everything. Needless to say it was tough leaving after thirty-two years in South America and all the fuss after the accident didn’t make it any easier. I was in need of both mental and physical therapy by the time I reached my brother’s place on May 4.

I’m alone now house-sitting for my brother and his wife who are away traveling for two months. I watched the bag I wove and sewed for my sister-in-law back in 2006 head out the door for yet another world adventure…

Here they are in Alaska on this current trip where Deb’s using it to hold her binoculars….

It’s always so nice to know that a gift has turned out to be so useful.

The best mental therapy during this newest transition period has come in the form of sitting on the beach in the sunshine, inhaling the sea air while listening to and watching the waves roll in. It reminds of this weaving I did some years ago….

I always like to see the white string heddles in this picture as foaming waves rolling onto a yellow sand beach. And there’s a big ol’ sun there in the foreground.

Now it’s humpback whale migration season and on the next clear day I’ll head to the lighthouse to see if I can spot them.

Other forms of therapy…..smelling eucalyptus leaves burning as folks rake the fallen ones up to burn in the cool evening air (such nostalgia!), walking along accompanied by all the magical birdsong that I recognize from my younger days in Australia, making new friends which has turned out to be super easy in this wonderfully friendly community.

Scenes from strolling around the neighborhood.

One such friend that I met at the weekly craft group happened to mention in conversation that she had lived in Papua New Guinea. I immediately asked her if she had seen the bilum bags that artisans there make from plant fiber. The stitch they use is exactly the same as that used by the Ayoreo people in Bolivia although the plant material used is different. I remember my Ayoreo teacher being fascinated by the fact that these people on the other side of the world are making bags using the same technique.

The main difference is that the bilum bags are stitched much more loosely. The looping is very much more open, even more open than the work by the Wichi artisans in Argentina. The bilums are also worked as a continuous round and are, therefore, seamless whereas the Ayoreo artisans work a row from left to right and then flip the work and return, once again working from left to right. Jey brought a bag to show me that she had collected fifty years ago. I’m guessing the colors are from natural sources and it’s amazing how vibrant they are after all these years.

The Ayoreo work is so much tighter that, when set next to the bilum, it’s very difficult to see that the looping technique used in both is indeed the same. It was very exciting for me to be able to see this work and I can’t wait to send a photo to my teacher in Bolivia. Jey tells me that she even used to have a small hammock made in this technique for one of her babies.

What do I do when I go along to these weekly craft group meet-ups with my rehabilitating hand? Well, I’m just about able to put enough twist into my takli spindle to spin some of my brown cotton. There’s progress because when I first arrived here I couldn’t do it at all…couldn’t even grip the spindle. It’s not the most comfortable thing in the world and I can’t do it forever and a day as I used to.

There are issues with my wrist and I’m not recovering the range of movement that I had hoped. It’s taken me this long to get an appointment with an orthopedist here and I’ll see him on Wednesday to find out what’s going on and if there’s any reason for concern.

My occupational therapist dresses up my hand in the most interesting ways! The tape pattern was designed by a Polynesian tatoo artist. While wearing this on my skin I’m thinking that maybe something like this will seep into my weaving one of these days…..a fun souvenir of this slow rehab.

BUT I have been able to weave! In my last post I showed how I had trained my left hand to operate the loom and do pick-up. In this way, the hatband I’d started before the accident slowly got finished and my friend did a fabulous job of attaching it to his hat after I had already left Bolivia.

Well, now I can do all that using my injured right hand. I’m able to wind a decent warp, make string heddles and weave narrow bands with pick-up using medium weight cotton thread. I’ve never before thought about what role each of my two hands plays in my weaving process. When I’m using two sets of heddles, it turns out that it’s my left hand that does the twisting and rolling action on one set while my right only needs to pull the other set straight up. It can manage that and do the pick-up!

So, I’ve been making some key fob thank-you gifts:

First one for Jey for lending me her bilum to play with.

This band got folded in half with its ends clamped between the jaws of the key fob hardware. Then I made another for one of my physiotherapists who I felt had gone above and beyond. I found out that she has two much-adored golden retrievers that have their own Instagram page and so I wove a fob with their names.

I used the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave which produces a quirky kind of lettering.

I think it’s fun that the lettering matches the rather unsteady and quirky writing on my hand-written thank-you note! Fortunately, my former bank in Bolivia has been the only place so far that has insisted on my producing a perfect signature.

The other side of the band just has paw prints and is shown here sitting on top of a very rustic woolen backstrap that I got in Peru.

Alison Irwin created a chart of letters in this structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave which was published in the Winter ’22 edition of Little Looms magazine. I sometimes need to make adjustments to the letters in order to create the ideal spacing in the particular words I’m weaving. The chart for the paw prints can be found in my Complementary-warp Pattern Book along with two other versions.

There’s a long list of people to thank. I’ll be busy at the loom making gifts and that’s yet another form of therapy. Luckily the guest-room bed has a wooden base and I’ve been able to anchor my loom to it in much the same way as I did in Bolivia.

It might be a while before I can get into this though….

This just a part of the big box of luscious silk that weaving friend Laura sent me from her stash in Canada. Such generosity. She shipped it quite some time ago and I could hardly believe it when I got to Australia and finally got to see it.

Some of it is insanely fine but I do enjoy weaving with fine thread and…..silk! I can’t even imagine untying those skeins and winding the thread into balls. Actually, my hand could probably manage that but right now I can’t trust it to wind a good well-tensioned warp with such fine stuff. I wouldn’t be able to maintain a steady grip on the thread. That’s something to aspire to. I think I’ll have to take on working with increasingly fine material in slow steps as I slowly recover function in my right hand.

At craft group I also got to meet up with the lady who two years ago had given me a skein of gorgeous variegated silk. I’d sent her photos of what I’d made with it but now I could take the finished piece and show it to her in person. You might remember this project…..

Now she’s teaching me how to crochet winter slippers. Remember that it’s winter down here. I’m so slow though that I’m not sure I’ll have these finished in time! There’s wrist rotation involved in working the hook and I can’t do that yet. So, I hold the hook steady and move the work around instead. It seems to be working! We’re just using scrap wool for this initial sample while I get the hang of it.

I love that things that I’ve been weaving over the years are now coming out and being used on a daily basis. I never used this bag in Bolivia and now it goes with me everywhere!

When I tell people that I weave, at least I have something I can show as an example.

I was having a bit of a down day at the radiologist having my wrist x-rayed when the receptionist admired this bag that I happened to be using that day. She was quite bewildered when I explained that I’d made it myself…..from scratch. No, I hadn’t bought the fabric. I took yarn, tied a pattern onto it, put it into two different colored dye baths with more tying in between, removed all the ties, wove it into fabric on a simple loom of sticks, then sewed the cloth into a bag, wove a strap and edged the flap. Sometimes I forget what this must sound like to a non-fiber, non-weaver person! And then the inevitable question…how long did it take? After all that, she may have regretted having complimented my bag but that simple compliment had made my day ❤️.

So, while I’m excited about the fact that my hand can tolerate my making a couple of key fobs, the thing that has made me happiest is that there is a new backstrap weaver in the making here in Lake Cathie. Courtney, who comes along to every second session of our craft group meet-ups, showed up today with this….

She had just finished crocheting a stunning mochila bag when I first met her and was, as a never-ever weaver, busily researching how to weave a strap. Well, you know that I can’t help myself and I took one of my key fob warps along to show her. She was immediately hooked and went off with links to my Backstrap Basics article and my Basic Warping for Backstrap Looms video class which are both free and available here on my blog. What a great job she’s done rounding up the bits and pieces and getting herself set up. She made my day when she brought this this morning to show me. How I miss in-person teaching!

Do I miss Bolivia and the folks that I have left behind?…of course I do! Oh my aching heart. I had a teary moment on my way back here when I visited a mega supermarket in the States. I noted the rows and rows of neatly and attractively arranged goods, the lack of raucous cumbia music, the wide open spaces, the comfortable controlled temperature and immediately missed the chaos of the Santa Cruz street markets with their dirt, heat, crowds, odours and noise! (And prices, I might add. Phew, that has been an adjustment!) But, sigh, choices have to be made.

So, that’s all for this post. My hand is saying “enough!” (and unfortunately I had quite a painful and restless night as both hand and shoulder protested against my having typed all this at my laptop). They’re much happier weaving.

I’ll leave you with something I spotted at the beach the other day. Nope, I’m definitely not in Bolivia any more.

Backstrap Weaving – Accidents

There’s been weaving happening at my backstrap loom but this has been a bit different from a standard band-weaving project. A recent incident turned this into an interesting challenge.

Regular readers of my blog may recall mentions now and then of the fact that I literally fell into weaving after taking a fall while out mountain biking in Colorado. That incident back in 1995, which left me on crutches for six weeks in a Colorado youth hostel, started a chain of events that created the backstrap weaver that I am today. If you’d like to know more, I can tell you that during the pandemic British weaver Stacey Harvey-Brown invited a few dozen weavers to tell the story of how they got into weaving for her Loom Room blog. It’s fascinating reading about the different paths the various invitees have taken to arrive at their looms. Here’s the link to mine.

The reason I’ve taken this little trip back in time to think about an accident thirty years ago that became a life-changing event is because a couple of weeks ago I once again found myself down on the ground thinking “Ouch!”

While in 1995 my first thoughts were about how all my plans to hike and camp in the Utah canyons had been ruined (hiking was my passion at that time), this time my first thoughts were about weaving and all the other fiber-related activities I do that require an intact dominant hand. Darn it, I had broken my right wrist and it required surgery. Was this also going to be a life-changing event?

This screen shot from security camera footage shows white-headed me walking away in the distance while a happy-go-lucky dog bears down on me. It kept going and ran right into the back of my legs taking me out like bowling ball hitting a pin!

Anyway, I’m determined not to let this slow me down too much while remaining sensible and giving myself time to heal. First up was a visit with my Ayoreo teacher, Rocío. She’s been teaching me about the traditional process of stitching bags using garabatá thread as well as about the patterns that identify the various Ayoreo clans.

Rocío showing me how she connects two lengths of thread without using a knot.

The last time I’d seen Rocío I had still been practicing the basic stitch using crochet cotton. Since then, and without Rocío’s knowledge, I’ve been scavenging bits of garabatá thread from various sources and working entirely with that material.

The most recent piece was this bag that I stitched during the Carnival break…

My indigenous weaving teachers have never been in the habit of expressing much enthusiasm when I show them my creations. Sometimes it’s a little crushing but I know it’s just their way. My current Guaraní teachers are particularly cool! So, of course I was glowing with pride when Rocío reacted so joyfully to the things I showed her. I think she was shocked. She particularly liked the red, black and white bag with the woven backing I used. I showed that in my last blog post.

She immediately called her husband to come and take photos.

The idea of my visit was to have her show me how to spin and ply the garabatá fiber that she had brought me. While I won’t be able to use my hand to do it myself for some time, at least I can turn it over in my mind in the meantime. A friend came with me and took video. The most valuable thing was seeing how Rocío joins lengths of spun and plied thread during the stitching process without having to use a knot. I hadn’t been successful doing it and had been resorting to using a dab of glue as backup. Rocío was not impressed when I confessed that! We really focused on it this time and I’ve learned a thing or two that had previously escaped me because I simply hadn’t been ready for it yet.

Showing Rocío some woven rather than stitched garabatá.
The fiber is spun and plied by rolling it along the upper leg. Both hands need to be involved so I’ll just have to be patient.

As for that hatband project, I decided that it was time to smarten up my left hand. I really needed to at least try.

It was a little discouraging at first because this is the distance I was able to weave after three consecutive days of spending one to two hours at the loom.

The gift project had a deadline and I didn’t see myself being able to complete it. But my left hand got smarter and faster and I found that once the cast had been switched to a brace, I could at least insert the pinky of my right hand into the shed to hold it open while I inserted the sword.

One-handed pick-up. I’m just holding the sword here for the photo. I couldn’t rotate my wrist to be able to insert it in the shed.
In progress on the loom and finished. I wish I could complete the gift by attaching it to my friend’s hat but I don’t think either hand is up for that kind of sewing right now.

And then came a visit with my Guaraní teacher, Eldina.

Eldina working on a warp just wide enough to be able to demonstrate for me the technique the Guaraní weavers call Moisi.
I forgot to bring my swords so we used scissors to separate the threads that needed to be heddled. Three sets of heddles are used for this structure. Eldina’s 5-month-old baby girl is never far away when she’s weaving and teaching.

Eldina had to call her mother to be reminded of how threads are selected to go into each set of heddles. Grandma Clara is the Moisi expert while Eldina tends to focus on Karakarapepo. According to Eldina, pick-up for the Moisi style is much more complicated than it is for Karakarapepo. If you’ve read my posts from long ago when I was studying with my very first Guaraní teacher, Angela, you might remember that I soon realized that the structure that I call Intermesh and which I first learned from an Ayacucho weaver in Peru in 1995, is the same as Moisi. This allowed me to easily replicate some of the lovely patterns that Angela had been weaving to make cell phone pouches. Replication is always one of my first steps in learning.

A cell phone pouch that I wove using the intermesh structure back in the days when phones were small and cute.

Hopefully, Eldina will eventually take on all of Clara’s skills and knowledge and maybe pass them on to her baby daughter some day.

Mother and baby busy at the loom!

Clara has been working on samples of jaguar skin print using the Moisi technique for a project that a wildlife photography guide is planning. While this sample is not exactly what the guide has in mind, I’m so in love with this Moisi piece. I think it’s stunning. Hopefully the guide will be able to communicate more precisely his vision for this project but he is, of course, paying for materials and compensating Clara for the time she has spent so far. Commissioned work is hard!

It’s really interesting for me to discover that the thread arrangement while warping and the thread selection for heddles is really different from the way I was taught in Peru. Once my hand is back in actIon, I’d like to set up a warp for my backstrap loom in the way Eldina and Clara set up on their vertical loom. I’d like to see if there’s perhaps some slight difference in the structure that I’m missing. The woven results certainly appear to be identical.

So, my backstrap loom is just a bunch of sticks now. I might give left-handed warping a go eventually to see if I can manage the Guaraní style of set-up for Moisi. But for the next two weeks at least I’ll be giving my wrist a chance to quietly heal. Maybe I’ll dig out the files in which I’ve started writing new books and get my thoughts reorganized on those. I’m in a transition period right now having sold my old apartment and not in a position to set up for photo shoots but at least I could work on the overall plan, chapter headings etc. A good introduction always gets the ball rolling. Let’s see….

And, speaking of my books….the hatband pattern, or at least something very similar, is in my More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns book. There are so many versions of the snake pattern which is basically an embellished zig-zag and I’m often adapting them to suit the number of threads with which I’m working.

If you’re a regular visitor to my blog and have at some point thought about perhaps buying one of my books, maybe you’d like to take the step to buying one now at taprootvideo.com. The accident and resulting surgery have been a significant financial blow and every little bit helps! I’d really appreciate it!

Backstrap Weaving – Highland Holiday

I’ve been up to the highlands and am now back again in the hot tropical lowlands. Yes, I’m still in Bolivia. Australia is there waiting for me and I’ll get there event-u-a-lly…..

I meant to write a blog post yesterday but once I got into sorting and editing the photos, I found myself completely overwhelmed. Lest that happens again today, I’ve decided to make this just an overview. Anything that doesn’t make it into this post will probably show up now and then in future ones as well as in my Facebook and Instagram accounts.

So, on this ten-day visit to Independencia , Cochabamba where my weaving teachers live and where Dorinda was also vacationing, here’s a run down of some of the things I did…..

I took the five-hour minivan route to Independencia from Cochabamba instead of the eight-hour one by coach. I’m guessing that the minivan is capable of traveling on roads that are perhaps unsuitable for the larger bus and that the bus remains in service because it’s required to service many tiny communities that are scattered along its longer path. The minivan route is no less scenic than the one I traveled last time by bus. In fact it may be even more so.

From the town of Quillacollo just outside Cochabamba city we head straight for the mountains and in under an hour we had zig-zagged our way up to around 3700m leaving the city of Cochabamba a mere blur in the distance on the valley floor.

From there it’s a journey along slopes of deep narrow valleys high above lively rivers (it’s wet season). Water cascades down the slopes above, crosses the dirt road ahead of us and continues tumbling its way down to the green valley floor. Then we go up over passes to continue along the next valley, up again and so on. I was sitting in the second last row and it was like riding a bucking bronco back there with every descent from the passes. I gave up trying to take photos and instead just tried to imprint the scene on my brain.

And then we stopped so that the driver could negotiate the carrying of some freight for a couple who had flagged us down and it was one of those perfect moments for getting a nice shot. We happened to be on a relatively flat and open area with the setting sun casting a golden glow on the hillsides and I was able to hold my phone steady for a change and get a photo of the peaceful scene. I thought that if I just get one nice photo from the five-hour trip, I’ll be happy.

So much for this just being an “overview”. I’ve already spent too much time just on the van trip! Back into overview mode….

On the surface, the town didn’t seem to have changed much since my last visit….

How such a wickedly steep street can look so mild in this photo is beyond me!
These rocky streets in town become slippery with mud after rain but dry up miraculously quickly.

However, some things had changed….Maxima was now living in a house of her own with a lovely view and even had wifi.

Charqui (jerky) on the washing line in the patio in front of a nice view across the valley.

With Dorinda, my teacher Maxima, (long time followers of my blog will know them), her daughter, Vilma and the grandbabes, we dyed a bunch of skeins of handspun yarn with indigo in a banana-based vat.

I mashed overripe bananas with Maxima and little Mayra for the indigo dye bath.

I think this was only the third time that Maxima was attempting to dye with indigo. The second time had apparently failed and so I spent a lot of time wondering…are we doing this right? Will it work this time? Well, it did and I got to keep one of the skeins. I can’t wait to use it in a project on my backstrap loom. The skeins are made up of the ladies’ doubled handspun wool singles. Once dyed, the doubled threads are then tightly plied. I’ll get to ply my own skein which pleases me because I’m not fond of weaving with the high amount of twist that these weavers typically put into their yarn.

Maxima and daughter, Vilma, showing off the aguayo (carrying cloth) Maxima wove for a custom order from the USA. Indigo-dyed yarn from the first attempt can be seen in the stripes. This cloth is gorgeous! The colors are so rich and Maxima has included a stunning variety of figures. It’s all Maxima’s work except for the tubular edging.
A close-up view of a small section of the center of the aguayo where you can see some of the indigo-dyed yarn in the decorative joining stitch.
We made skeins. I’d never made skeins just on my hands before and was happy not to have mine end up in a tangled mess. The singles yarn immediately kinks back on itself when not under tension and can make things difficult to control.
Immersing skeins in the indigo dye pot with Dorinda, granddaughter Emily and little Mayra always there in the mix. We wore gloves but still managed to get the dye on places where it didn’t belong.
First results once again against that lovely backdrop. One of those skeins became mine 🙂
On the following days, Maxima continued experimenting on her own and tried over-dyeing some naturally-dyed yellow to produce that pretty green.
And yet more on another day. This time over-dyeing a cochineal-dyed skein.

So, I came home with this (below). The mug is for scale more than anything else because those balls of yarn I bought are huge! I bought those two balls from one of the weavers from the outlying community of Huancarani that I visited on my last trip up here. The ladies from Huancarani come into town on the weekend to sell their produce in the market. We attempted a trip to Huancarani on the preceding Thursday for a weaving get together much as I had done on my last visit but it had rained heavily all through the night and a landslide had shut the road.

Plying all this yarn will keep me busy for a while. As if I need even more stuff to lug back to Australia but who in their right mind could resist?

Here’s a flashback to that Huancarani trip and the fun day we’d had all weaving together…

When not dyeing, I would visit with Max and weave with her as she had asked me to teach her some new patterns in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave.

When I was walking in the market street on the Saturday, I was stopped by one of the Huancarani ladies who asked “Where’s Berna?” That’s the name they know me by. No one calls me Laverne in Bolivia. Bs and Vs are pronounced virtually the same and they don’t recognise that the La is part of my name as La is often placed before any woman’s name when referring to her as a third person. So, here in the lowlands I’m Verny and up there I’ll always be Berna/Verna. The Huancarani ladies had been expecting my visit on the Thursday and so now that they were in town, they were looking for me. Of course they didn’t recognise me as the lady with long dark hair that had been to their community to teach patterns seven years ago!

Back in 2017 I went to Huancarani and can be seen here with that long dark hair guiding Maxima’s sister Narciza through the steps to weaving a pattern from my More Adventures with warp-faced Pick-up Patterns book. It’s a motif from a Central Asian textile that I had adapted to the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. It had caught Narciza’s eye and she was keen to learn it and not let me go until she had conquered one repeat.
We just managed to get through one repeat before it was time to leave and I left wondering if she would ever use the pattern. I did leave behind a woven sample just in case.

You can see the unique way weavers in these communities in this part of Bolivia manage their warps. They don’t attach them to their bodies with a string or backstrap. Instead, they have the warp suspended between an index finger and a toe. Together with the middle finger they form a picking cross of the two “pebble” sheds and then do all the pick-up and loom operation with just the one free hand. It’s amazing to see! I did this with Maxima back in 2011 when I visited her in Cochabamba. Even though the structure is the same as the one with which I am thoroughly familiar, this method of weaving it was completely foreign to me and it took me some time to get used to it.

So….back to the lady in the street market who stopped me. Once I told her that this white-haired person was indeed Berna, she pulled out a couple of bands to show me, one of which is pictured at left. Sadly, Narciza hadn’t been able to come to town that weekend as she has a herd to attend to but it seems that Narciza spread knowledge of the new pattern to other ladies in the community. How happy that made me!

And Maxima had taken advantage of the copy of my book that I’d left behind with her on my last visit.

Maxima and a group of weavers are seen here studying and discussing images in the book shortly after my visit.

Maxima showed me what she had woven from the book….

It’s a belt that she wove for daughter, Vilma, to wear on festival days. It’s woven in the bright tightly twisted acrylic yarn that the weavers here love to use.
The ladies love to be able to show off “new” patterns in items they use for special occasions.

On our first morning weaving together, Maxima chose to use some of the crochet cotton that I’d brought. I think her unfamiliarity with the material left her a little frustrated. These weavers create a very tight weave, squeezing the weft into place with a tremendous amount of pressure. The cotton thread just wasn’t behaving the way her handspun wool or re-spun acrylic thread would. Those materials have a certain amount of stretch which the cotton simply doesn’t. While she was able to weave the little motif she had chosen correctly, it just didn’t look right with that tight, tight beat.

Maxima preparing a cotton warp for our first session together. The end of the warp is temporarily tucked into the waistband of her skirt while she uses two hands to make heddles, Later the end will be suspended on her index finger. Anything that happens to be lying close by such as this comb can be called into use to hold the cross.
Starting with a little plain pebble weave.
Meanwhile Mayra and Ana who seem to see all forms of household chores as play, were happily washing their toys. At one point I saw them playing chop-the-head-off-the-chicken-for-the-pot with the cat!

My second session with Maxima was completely different. She used her re-spun acrylic thread this time and the results were completely different. She confidently chose larger and more complicated patterns from my Complementary-warp Pattern Book (all the patterns therein are in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave) and her joy at watching the figures appear and then reaching the stage where she could predict what was to come next, was apparent.

Starting with a fresh warp of respun acrylic thread for wider, more complicated patterns.
The young ladies on this morning were on chicken duty…..that is, keeping the chickens from wandering from the yard into the kitchen.
One of the four running-horse patterns that creator Deanna Johnson calls Elmy’s Mustangs, is almost complete.

Here’s a video clip of Maxima doing the last row of pick-up for the horse pattern….

She also selected the viscacha pattern from my book. I’d charted that pattern from a fragment of pre-columbian cloth that I’d seen online. I’d been able to track down the owner of the fragment and get him to send me close-ups so that I could decipher it.

The cat figure,also from pre-columbian textiles, that Maxima chose was not completely successful but I know it will be in her next attempt now that she has understood how to weave the eyes of the viscachas.

This is what I was doing in the evenings to entertain myself. I was using Alison Irwin’s idea for weaving letters in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave to make a key fob for the lady who ran the hotel in which I was staying. Inti means sun in the Quechua language and Wasi means house.

I also wove a bunch of patterns to leave behind for Maxima to study and attempt in her own time after I left. When I showed Maxima the hotel key fob, she loved it and so I offered to make one with her name as well as for her daughter. Her husband then laughingly asked why I wasn’t offering to make one for him. I was happy to oblige. Dorinda took this photo of Maxima after I left as I wove the fob on the last night and wasn’t able to deliver it in person.

I think she liked it!

And then it was my turn to learn some new weaving thing. I noticed that the large aguayo that Maxima had woven was edged with a patterned tubular band that is known in some parts as nawi awapa. The weavers here call it chichilla or simply nawi (nawi meaning eye). Maxima handed that task off to another weaver as she has forgotten how to weave these patterned tubular bands. She generally edges her carrying cloths with crochet. The customer in the U.S however, wanted the more traditional patterned tube. What I noticed in this particular tube was that the color arrangement would flip back and forth along its length. The zig-zag would change colors every now and then as would the inner eye color and I was mad keen to meet a weaver who would show me how ro do it. Maxima’s sister Narciza knows how to do it but she hadn’t come into town.

So, on Saturday market day I visited with the Huancarani ladies in the street and asked if any one of them knew how to do it and if they would be willing to teach me. Of course no one just happened to be carrying colored yarn and besides, all except Justina said that they didn’t know how it was done. I invited them to come up to the hotel so that I could show them a nawi awapa band that I had started and also show them some other bits and pieces that I thought they might find interesting.

Squeezed onto the balcony of the hotel, I showed the ladies any woven thing that I happened to have. Here they’re examining my double weave belt with its Bedouin patterns which are completely foreign to them.
I brought out my cotton spinning bag and everyone fell in love with the tiny takli spindle and wanted to take it home. Only Justina was “brave” enough to try spinning cotton with it and she did a great job.

Justina examined my ñawi awapa warp which was set up in the way I had been shown in Chinchero, Peru. It turns out that while the results are exactly the same, the weavers in this part of Bolivia set up their warp for the ñawi awapa in a slightly different way. It’s slightly different but different enough to be confusing to Justina who said that she wouldn’t be able to teach me using this warp. I was a disappointed but interested to know exactly what the difference was. Time didn’t allow further exploration but Justina returned the next day and agreed to teach me if we created a new warp from scratch. I was thrilled!

Gathered the next day in Vilma’s sewing workshop with Justina deciding that she had enough time to teach me if I could bring some yarn. So, out came the crochet cotton again to the rescue…not ideal, but good enough for learning.
Creating a fresh ñawi awapa warp while Maxima went out to look for a forked twig to use. It holds the cross….more about that later. On the floor you can see another stick that is used to save one of the picked-up sheds for later use. The weavers here call this stick “el muchacho“.
Justina guiding me. Yes, I learned it! Maxima and Vilma looked on. I wonder if Maxima absorbed enough by watching to be able to do it on her own. Wouldn’t surprise me. I offered to let her sit in my place and try but she declined.
When I got home of course I had to weave one straight away. I still have lengths of fabric that I bought from the ladies back in 2019 and I used some of Verna’s cloth to make a little pouch that I could edge using the Huancarani set-up and color-changing method.

Justina told me that they call the forked stick illawa, which is the same word used for string heddles. Perhaps these weavers use the word for any device that enables them to create sheds. I do love the name for the other stick….el muchacho, which strangely is in Spanish rather than in Quechua.

A closer look. You can see that the color arrangement in the tube along the base of the pouch is different from that along the side. This is a much nicer photo of the beautiful natural dye colors used by the ladies in these textiles. I used commercial wool from my workshop stash for the edging.

I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed this visit. On certain afternoons Dorinda and I would walk up and up and up above the town to get some exercise. I was suddenly very much aware of my calves. I was really pleased with the way I was dealing with the altitude.

One afternoon, Sandra, the hotel manager, took me down to her orchard. So that was a down, down, down walk with the harder part coming at the end of the day. I was happy to see custard apples growing for the first time and to be able to pick quinces which Dorinda later made into jam. We took back apples and Dorinda made a pie. How spoiled was I? The biggest thrill was seeing a hummingbird nest with two eggs in the orchard. The photo needs something for scale. The nest and eggs are tiny!

There was time first thing in the morning to hang out on the balcony with hotel cat, Garfield, and watch some young girls herding their flock of sheep onto the football field. Stray dogs would arrive to romp and freak out the sheep who would bolt out the gate and into town with the little girls running screaming behind them! It would happen pretty much every other day.

Got my nose burned on day one in the high altitude sun and so did not go out hatless ever again after that.

We got stuck in the mud on the way back to Cochabamba. The mud sucked the soles right off my sandals and I never saw them again. Then we got caught up in protest roadblocks as we neared Cochabamba and it was quite a saga getting from there to the airport. It involved walking with soleless sandals through shin deep water and taking the train that was packed to the gills. It was so difficult getting on and even more so getting off! If my flight had not been delayed, I might have just missed it. To be honest, if the road had been closed due to the landslides and I had been stuck in Independencia, I might have chosen to just stay on until Dorinda’s visit ends on the 10th. It was a glorious visit and I really had no need to leave when I did.

We all got filthy. The quiet sleepy group of passengers up to this point turned into a happy chatty group after successfully getting the van out of the mud and back on its way. How was I going to get on a plane with my feet in this filthy state? Never mind, there were flooded streets to walk through further along once we hit the outskirts of town and had to get out and walk due to the roadblocks. Feet were squeaky clean by the time I got to the airport.

And the scenery on the way back….could it get any better? Yes, it could. It was and had been raining a lot and in the red rock sections the waterfalls that had sprung up and started to flow down the other side of one of the valleys, were running bright pink! Mud and rain-streaked windows made decent photography impossible but I burned those images into my brain!

Back in Santa Cruz and once I’d woven and documented the color-changing nawi awapa, I turned to other projects. I’d taken some garabatá fiber to Independencia to toss into the indigo dyepot.

The top left bunch of thread was dyed in the indigo pot. At bottom right you can see a tiny pouch I made using the Dosapey pattern. That tiny bag holds a tiny booklet and mini pencil. Now to decide how to combine colors in a new project. Roció, my Ayoreo teacher, contacted me for a class while I was away. I’ll have to let her know that I’m back.
This is the start of a larger Dosapey pattern that I finished just before traveling to Independencia. I dyed the black for this project.
I just had enough garabatá thread to create one face of a pouch. I wove the other face in cotton and sewed the two together. This pouch held my passport, tickets and money purse and went with me on the trip. I used the edging stitch used by the Weenhayek artisans along the top.

And now I’m working on something a little unusual. An expat gentleman who runs wildlife tours here with a particular focus on the endangered jaguar asked me if it would be possible to weave a jaguar skin pattern. He would like to commission Guaraní weavers to produce small bags with the print to offer to his clients. He is and always has been keen on promoting the handwork of the artisans that live in this lowland part of Bolivia. He showed me a tapestry pattern that he’d found online and I took it as a challenge to try to reproduce it in one of the warp-faced structures that the Guaraní weavers use. With this I can show him how much pattern can fit into the dimensions he has in mind. He can sketch out his ideal pattern and then approach the weavers with a proposal. This way they won’t have to waste time and yarn sampling and experimenting. Besides, you know me….always looking for an excuse to weave.

Using the Moisy technique which is one of the two pick-up patterning structures that the Guaraní weavers use. I set this up all ready to go before I left on the highland holiday.

So, the overview grew somewhat as I settled into writing and felt less overwhelmed! I hope you’ve enjoyed these tales from the Highland Holiday.

Until next time…..

Backstrap Weaving – What’s My Style?

Many years ago an online acquaintance told me that she could instantly tell which of the images of woven pieces that had been posted to one of the online groups were mine. I thought that was fun…wow, it seems that I’ve developed a “style”. However, as I think back to some of the things I have woven over the years I’m sure that’s not true at all.

I’m thinking that perhaps my work was so easily identifiable back then because it stood out as being warp-faced in a group where the vast majority of work wasn’t. Also, in those days I did seem to weave a lot of patterns that could be described as big-and-bold and decidedly “ethnic-looking” at a time when replication was a big part of my learning process. The products were hardy belts, straps and shoulder bags. The thread I used was locally-sourced 8/2 cotton which was almost all I had access to here for this kind of work.

Now, I’m not quite sure that I want my work to be so easily recognized. It feels like that would mean I was not branching out and trying new things or heading in new directions. And that might very well have been the case if I hadn’t been given so much yarn by weaving friends over the years….yarn that I probably never would have chosen on my own…like the cones of 140/2 silk I was given by two friends, eeeek! Who would ever contemplate weaving with that? It was offered to me, gratefully accepted, and eventually I used it (and loved it!). I can only hope that I wove something worthy of the lovely gift.

One of the projects using the 140/2 silk as warp was the last two panels in my Within These Walls series.

I suppose that if there had to be something that somehow categorised what I do, or my “style” of weaving, I would like it to be the fact that I use a backstrap loom. For me, the process in most cases is more notable than the product. I’m rambling on about this a bit because of a couple of things that I have seen in my online groups recently. One was a comment on a photo of my latest warp…

The commenter asked me to make sure to eventually post the finished project because she is fascinated by “backstrap weaving”. The thing is, once the fabric is off the loom, there’ll be nothing to indicate that it was woven on a backstrap loom. It could have been woven on any kind of loom that allows one to create 18- 1/2″-wide warp-faced cloth. For me, the product isn’t “backstrap weaving”….the act of creating it is.

What I’m trying to say is that I think that the term “backstrap weaving” is suitable for describing the act of weaving on a backstrap loom…. I’m out in my back yard today backstrap weaving, for example. I don’t think it works as a word to describe the cloth that comes off the loom and I have a feeling that this is the way many people use the term. I suspect that the person who asked the question is interested in seeing the cloth (and of course that’s fine) thinking that somehow it’s exclusive to the backstrap loom. If she had been interested in “backstrap weaving”, the activity, I think she would have asked to know more about the loom, my set-up, how it all works etc..

It makes me wonder, as I have often done in the past, what people think “backstrap weaving” is. And it makes me regret not having made it clear when I decided to name this blog Backstrap Weaving almost fifteen years ago. Maybe I was unclear about how the term should be used myself back then or at least unaware of how it might cause misunderstandings. I know that in the past I have been guilty on my many occasions of referring to my cloth as “my backstrap weaving” as a quick way of saying “pieces I have woven on my backstrap loom”.

One clear indication of misunderstanding was when someone posted that they were doing backstrap weaving on their inkle loom (simply because they were using a pick-up patterning technique that is often used by weavers who use backstrap looms in the South American highlands).

So, here I am “backstrap weaving”. The cloth that I’m weaving is in a balanced doubleweave pick-up technique known as Finnweave which can be and is woven on other kinds of looms. I don’t think anyone is going to pick up my finished cloth and identify it as “backstrap weaving”.

The fact is that, with will and skill, so many different kinds of fabric can be woven on a backstrap loom (with obvious width limitations, of course). The fabrics don’t have any particular characteristic that make the backstrap loom the only possible piece of equipment. The product could be weft-faced, balanced, warp-faced. It could be cloth where all structural and pattern elements are created by pick-up, or the loom could have been set up with multiple sets of string heddles and other aids to make those elements completely loom controlled, or a method that lies somewhere between those two could have been used.

A weaver from Pitumarca that I watched at Tinkuy 2010 creating weft-faced fabric on his backstrap loom.
A weaver from San Ignacio de Loyola in Peru has made the weaving of her warp-faced pattern totally loom controlled by using multiple sets of string heddles.
My weaving friend Sharon Kersten is currently sampling balanced cloth on a backstrap loom using a 15-dpi rigid heddle. Note her cool temple…push pins in a length of balsa wood.

By the way, I seem to have been asleep the last few years as far as rigid heddles go. I had no idea that they’re now available in 15 dpi. Sharon says that unlike other weavers who tend to have shaft envy, I on the other hand have dent envy.

This gorgeous sheer cotton cloth was woven on a backstrap loom by a weaver in Mexico. It’s yet another kind of fabric that I think is more accurately described as having been woven on a backstrap loom rather than with the blanket term “backstrap weaving”. The range of achievable structures and techniques is wide! (Image from the Flickr page of Teyacapan and used with her permission).

The other thing that had me pondering what is meant by “backstrap weaving” was a question in another group: “What is the best book on backstrap weaving for beginners?” It leaves me wondering if they’re referring to the activity or the product. Do they want to know how to make, set-up and use a backstrap loom or do they already have one and just want to learn the patterning structures that are most often associated with this kind of loom? Are they looking at “backstrap weaving” as the process or the product? I haven’t asked but I am curious to see what other people reply as I think it will give a good indication of how others understand the term.

Anyway, let me get on with what’s currently on my loom…..I’ve been working on my latest project with the latest gift of yarn from my friend, Will, in Australia….some lovely variegated 10/2 silk which sits alongside some luscious white 20/2 silk that Susan had given me many years ago. I have admired work done with variegated thread but never thought to branch out and buy any because I really had no idea what to do with it. With the gift of this lovely mother-of-pearl thread, I’ve been given the push that I needed to come up with something.

My piece is all kind of soft and feminine-looking which might shock you if you’ve come to think of my style as big and bold. This is another example where gifts are ensuring that I don’t fall into any particular style box in terms of product. The common factor is the loom. It’s all about the loom.

It’s always lovely when the threads have all been settled into place and I can get started on the pattern.

The colors in the variegated thread have aligned themselves quite differently from the way they did in my much shorter sample. In the sample there was less space between the darker threads across the warp which meant that there was higher contrast between the leaf shapes and the surrounding white supplementary weft. The effect in this longer warp is much softer. I’m doing some white-on-white patterning with supplementary weft on the sides. (This isn’t the “mad” idea I mentioned in my last post. I decided I wasn’t going to take a chance on trying that in this “real”project).

That’s the extent of the foliage pattern. I’ll weave this band of pattern again at the end. I am, however, continuing with the white-on-white along the sides.

I’ve had to keep an eye on the width because I broke one of my rules and didn’t sample the doubled 20/2 silk on the sides to get a width reading. That’s the price I pay. I guessed how those threads would want to settle and now I have to keep an eye on them in case they decide otherwise.

And now a hummingbird and flowers start to make their appearance. This might be the only motif I weave between the upper and lower strips of foliage….keep it clean and simple, perhaps. We’ll see.

I’ve just joined a hummingbird group on Facebook and it’s so much fun seeing the joyful posts as people announce the return of their friends after their winter away.

Before I switch off the bedside lamp at night, I take a quick look over the edge of the bed to see my loom with its limp warp lying on the floor. I love the way this looks in the soft yellow light. I wonder if I can get silk thread in these colors?

I’ll leave you with this photo that Kate sent me after having read my post last time which touched on the subject of width. Kate recently returned from a trip to Mexico in which she was able to visit with backstrap loom weavers and received permission to share this photo. As I sit at my loom quite pleased with my eighteen-and-a-half inch warp, I am in awe of the forty-eight inches (by Kate’s estimate) this weaver is managing…..and that’s wool! The fabric she produces is used for a very unique kind of cloth which is used as a man’s garment about which I’ll tell you more in my next post.

A backstrap-loom weaver from the Chamula municipality of Chiapas in Mexico.

Backstrap Weaving – Belt Up

It’s just a short one this week as I’ve had other projects going on lately that have limited my time at the loom. I’m giving myself a bit of time off to write this post and then I’ll be back at them.

My stash of weaving materials has been reduced pretty much to one drawer now, most of it lovely silk in various sizes. I really didn’t have an idea of what I wanted to weave next. As you’ve probably figured out, my projects are born from a desire to just be at my backstrap loom weaving rather than a need for any kind of product.

I opened the drawer to see what would leap out at me and this is where I ended up…

This is the naturally-dyed cotton from Mayan Hands in Guatemala that Kate had given me many years ago. It was what she had left over from a towel weaving kit that she had purchased. The beautiful light blue thread was dyed with indigo. I love the washed-out look it has like a very faded old pair of jeans. The other colors were dyed by me using synthetic dyes….a variety of blues that I had used in other projects.

The light indigo-blue features in this bag for my cotton spinning tools and supplies along with the other shades of blue that I’d dyed myself.

Because my supply of this light blue thread was now so low, I’d need to come up with a smaller project than the tool bag. I decided on a belt using the same structures that I’d used for the bag fabric above.

That fabric was woven using both complementary-warp and complementary-weft structures, a combination that I’ve only quite recently been sampling and using. The darkest blue and light blue sections use the warp threads for making the patterns. In the other horizontal bands of pattern in other shades of blue the weft threads create the figures.

I used the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave for both. I turn the Andean Pebble Weave structure sideways in order to be able to weave it as a weft-faced rather than a warp-faced structure.

I started experimenting and sampling with this a bit over a year ago, first by alternating bands of weft-faced pattern with warp-faced plain weave….

I really enjoyed the way it allowed me to change colors at will. Then I decided to combine complementary-warp and complementary-weft in the one piece, rather than just doing plain weave between the weft-faced sections.

The orange and white sections are complementary-warp and the burgundy and yellow are complementary-weft.

The first challenge was to adjust the way I wove the warp-faced sections so that their width matched those of the wider weft-faced ones.

Then I was able to go on to weave the fabric for the tool bag….

Because both structures are complementary ones, both faces of the cloth show the same figures except that their colors are reversed.

The strap for the bag uses the same two techniques except that I didn’t weave any figures into the warp-faced sections. Using only one color instead of two in the warp-faced sections made the strap less “noisy” against the busy bag fabric.

Using a complementary-warp-float structure, even though it’s just in one solid color, between the weft-faced sections gives a thicker, sturdier band than I would otherwise get with just plain weave.

Now after all that introduction, we finally get to the latest belt project. I wove it in much the same way as the strap above….solid light blue warp-faced sections with no pattern alternating with patterned weft-faced sections. I had to alter the way I did the weft-faced sections so that my little hummingbird figures would be well proportioned. That meant passing my weft over and under groups of fewer warp threads so that the figures wouldn’t turn out stretched and “flattened”.

The little hummingbird figures that I designed in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave normally sit on my bands aligned like this, looking like they’re about to fly off the edge…

Weaving them sideways in the weft-faced structure meant that they would be flying along the length of the belt and be seen the right way up when the belt is worn. (BTW, I did actually try to design a different hummingbird aligned sideways on my charting paper but couldn’t come up with anything that I liked).

And there it is off the loom.

The first little fella’s beak was too short. I don’t think he’ll be able to get at much nectar with that. The split in the band at one end will allow me to accommodate the belt buckle’s “tongue”. This is the first time I’ve woven a belt and thought far enough ahead to weave that split. It certainly makes things easier when adding the buckle later. The other end is a nice selvedge, something that my backstrap loom allows me to easily create, so I don’t need to worry about hemming or otherwise stabilizing it.

I took a walk down to a local store called Hebilandia, which translates to Buckle Land. It’s in the narrow chaotic streets near my home which are packed with fabric and upholstery stores. I’m always glad that that the gentlemen there tolerate my requests for just one of this and one of that. They really are geared up to selling in bulk to professional belt makers.

There I got a buckle, a thingamajig to hold down the excess bit of strap, a metal tab to go on the end (although, it isn’t quite wide enough….not a problem because that end is a selvedge anyway) and some webbing that I used as backing. I always back my belts, even the heavier double weave ones, because I like them good and stiff. After having tried different things with belts over the years, I just go with gluing on the backing. Oh, and while there, I also got the holes punched. It’s such a great little store to have just a few blocks from my home.

Buckle, thingamajig, end tab and holes.

Now I’m pondering this….

Both of these are gifts from Australian fiber friends. Susan gave me that skein of silk many years ago and it caught my eye as a nice thing to dye to combine with the variegated silk that Will gave me on my last visit. I think they might both be 20/2. Now, I’ve never used variegated thread as warp before and I am not quite sure about the best way to use it. Many years ago I was given some stunning Just Our Yarn variegated tencel that I was using as supplementary weft. Most of it got used by my students in workshops and it was absolutely gorgeous as supplementary weft.

I love the mother-of-pearl colors in the thread that Will has given me and am thinking that perhaps I could combine it with a matching solid color in rep weave. But, I don’t know….does anyone use silk for rep weave? It seems like that chunky structure doesn’t suit the delicate nature of silk.

I’ve only ever done two rep weave pieces before in cotton.

But then there’s ikat. I think that dyeing a solid color over an ikat pattern in variegated thread could be interesting. You can see that the last thing I’m thinking about right now is the product! I really don’t need anything. Maybe it could be fabric for a pillow cover? I might have enough thread for the front, or at least part thereof, of a pillow cover which can be backed with something else.

Going through old photos the other day, I saw this one which reminded me that this silk ikat piece is sitting at the bottom of a drawer. The finer patterning is in supplementary weft.

Pillow cover came to mind for this piece too, something for when I am living in Australia, although I’m determined not to get into home decorating when I’m there. I’ll be starting from zero as far as furnishings go and want to keep things as minimal as possible. After clearing out so much stuff from my place here, it’s nice to see how little I need in the way of furnishings….as long as I have something to which I can anchor my backstrap loom!

I’ll keep pondering that variegated silk and let’s see where it takes me. Until next time….