pick up patterns – Page 3 – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – The Odd-shaped Bag

I once created what I called the “yurt-shaped” bag from woven cloth. The hand-dyed and painted reeled silk warp had been given to me by Sara whose weaving and dyeing studio is a yurt. It seemed appropriate to weave cloth from her warp and shape into a yurt!

**Sara’s yurt-shaped studio in the woods.**

**Sara gave me the warp ready to go and I adorned it with a pattern in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. I am sure that many of you will recognize Sara Lamb’s color palette.**

It wasn’t a terribly long piece of fabric but it turned out to be just long enough to form the walls of a cylinder with circular base. Adding a drawstring at the top completed the yurt-ish look.

**The circular base with tubular edging challenged my limited sewing skills. Cutting into the fabric was stressful!**

**I added tassels and a braided strap. I’ve never been happy with that strap and one of these days I’ll weave another.**

The reason I am looking back at this old project is that my current project….a bag for my cotton-spinning tools was meant to be the same shape. I chose that shape because the mortar that I use to support my takli spindle is round-based and so a round-bottom bag seemed like a good idea.

However, once the fabric was off the loom with circular base sewn in place, I decided that I would lose too much height with a draw-string top. I added a band of fine cotton to the mouth of the bag. I figured I could sew a channel along its center to hold the drawstring but even so, I felt that I was sacrificing too much height. I wanted to be able to fit a good amount of cotton sliver in the bag along with my tall mortar and spindle. And so, the “odd-shaped” bag was born! I have been trying to find something to which I can liken this shape so that the bag can have a better name. I haven’t come up with anything. If you do, let me know, please. I am thinking that once it has its strap and is being carried cross-body wise, it may look less odd.

**My bag for cotton spinning tools awaits its strap.**

You’ll see that I went with a zipper in the end. The cotton band that I added at the top is woven from 30/2 indigo-dyed Guatemalan cotton that I got from Mayan Hands at a conference many years ago. It’s lovely stuff and I have used it in the past to weave covers for books. It was the perfect color for this project.

**Weaving cloth from Guatemalan cotton to cover a small journal. My friend Claudia’s initials, CS, were placed to sit on the spine** **of the book.**

That indigo-dyed cake of thread has sat on a shelf far away from windows for years. It’s amazing how much the color has faded. I had to pull thread from the center to find the original rich blue. However, I do love the unevenly faded stuff too and will definitely use it in a project one day.

In my last blog post, I showed you my progress with the spinning-bag cloth on the loom. Here’s a slightly different view of it resting on the floor.

This was just before I added the final band of patterning which would be made up of woven words. The darkest blue sections that you see in this piece are warp-faced….a complementary-warp structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. The other horizontal bands in various shades of blue are weft-faced. I have basically turned the Andean Pebble Weave structure on its side and woven it as complementary-weft instead. This means that I can weave it in any color I like. I chose to use various shades of blue and teal in this piece.

The woven words that I chose to use are “Spinning Cotton” and ” Hilando Algodon”. This is the first time that I have woven letters using the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. I showed you many others structures that I have used for lettering in my last post and I wonder if any of you were inspired to try them. I used the letters that Alison Irwin designed and published in the latest issue of Little Looms magazine. Letters in Andean Pebble Weave are naturally quirky. The nature of the structure doesn’t allow them all to sit along the one line. That makes them seem to dance jauntily along the warp. Because I wove them as complementary-weft rather than as complementary-warp, the words I wove run width-wise across the warp rather than along the length as Alison has woven them in her article. I think they perfectly suited my jaunty little bag. Okay….I’m liking that…The item formerly known as The Odd-shaped Bag will now be called The Jaunty Bag.

**I altered a couple of Alison’s letters to better suit my layo**ut.

I always love the moment when the cloth is off the loom and I get to see the detail on the other face. In this case I don’t have to try to decide which of the two faces I prefer because of course the words are backwards on the reverse. Still it’s nice to enjoy looking at it before I sew and it gets hidden forever inside the bag.

I was able to continue weaving once the lettering was done and the bag cloth finished because I had enough warp left to enable me to weave a piece that could be cut into the circular base of the bag. I stabilized it with heavy interfacing before cutting and that gave me a nice sturdy base for the bag.

I hadn’t planned on adding a strap to the original draw-string bag idea. It was just going to be a storage bag for my spinning tools that would go into another bag when I was out and about. However, I felt that the jaunty bag was asking for a strap. No problem. I was happy to have a reason to continue practicing combining warp and weft-faced structures in the one piece.

I wound a warp for the warp-faced strap using only one color instead of the two that I would normally use for Andean Pebble Weave projects. The warp-faced sections would be one solid color and I could play with weft colors for the small weft-faced sections. That way, the strap would not be too loud next to the rather busy bag.

I’ve been conservative in my color choices in this project. Perhaps in the next I’ll weave a solid black band with a variety of lively weft colors for the weft-faced patterns.

Take a look at this colorful warp-faced hair sash below from Jacaltenango in Guatemala. The weaver has made good use of the fact that she is free to change the color of her supplementary weft at will. Complementary-weft doesn’t allow that much freedom but I could still create some quite lively spots of weft-faced color along the length of a warp-faced band in which the weft is normally completed hidden.

Speaking of hair sashes of Jacaltenango, Carol Ventura will be giving a free Zoom lecture on them on Friday the 11th. Follow this link to register.

And now the thought has crossed my mind that perhaps I can line the Jaunty Bag…but not with my handwoven cloth. I’ve been thinking that I would like to try stitched shibori. For those who don’t know what that is, it is a resist dye technique for patterning cloth in which stitches are used to pull and shape cloth before it is dyed. The stitching creates areas that resist the dye and remain the original color. I’ve never done it before but was lucky enough some years ago to be in the area when Kris Nardello (and another dear lady whose name, forgive me, I have forgotten) were giving a workshop on it at the Textile and Fiber Arts Guild of Santa Cruz in California.. I wasn’t able to attend the whole thing but did bring home the kit which was made up of three sheets of scoured cotton cloth, needles, beads, thread and other bits thinking that one day I will take it up. The day has arrived.

The only things I have found from the kit so far are the sheets of cloth. I can decorate and line my bag with them and try something new…and if I make a mess of it, well, it will be hidden inside the bag, or I can just over-dye the whole thing. By the way, Kris kindly left a very helpful comment on my blog for me when I puzzling over my cochineal dyeing experiments a while ago. She is an expert in natural dyeing techniques.

This book cover will give you an idea of what stitched shibori can look like in expert hands….don’t expect to see anything like this in my next post!

The initial knee-jerk plan of action was to go looking on Youtube for instruction. But then it occurred to me that there will be highly experienced people who have devoted time and effort to writing books on the subject and that it would be nice to support them. As I have written a number of how-to books myself I know what it’s like to be in their shoes. Trust me…no one is getting rich from writing these kinds of books. The Kindle version of the one I have looked at is $35 and so I will need to give that some thought. If you own a book on the topic and can recommend one, please let me know. I have only just started to look. It will have to be a Kindle edition, though.

I hope in my next post to show you the finished jaunty bag with its accompanying sedate strap…and maybe my beginner attempts at stitched shibori. It will be one of those “mess or success” projects and no doubt, much will have been learned.

Backstrap Weaving – A Way with Words

With most of the messiness of the strikes and the disruptions of festive season holidays behind us, I finally managed to get an appointment with my Brazilian dentist which means that I can now offer you a toothy smile to welcome the New Year!

One of my favorite things about being at the dentist is reclining in front of her very large picture window watching the hummingbirds feed on the flowers in her garden. Hummingbirds have made their way back into my weaving as I decided on a garden theme for this fabric. I am hoping to be able to sew this into a cylindrical bag for my cotton spinning tools…hence the plant-like subject matter.

The warp is seventeen inches wide and quite short….just enough to make a draw-string cylindrical bag. I had a choice of making it long and narrow or wide and short. Long and narrow would have been much faster to weave….the horizontal strips of complementary-weft patterning that you see (the light blue and teal strips) are painfully slow to weave across seventeen inches! The complementary-warp sections (the darkest blue parts) zoom by in comparison.

**Warp of 1192 ends of cotton with two sets of heddles for the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. I later added a third set of heddles to hold groups of warp threads for the weft-faced sections.**

I was at first cursing my decision to go wide, but now that the project is underway, I am pleased with the way it looks, and have found that the small sample I had woven actually has given me enough information (I’d had my doubts), I have forgotten about the slowness and am thoroughly enjoying the process.

The warp is much longer than needed but it’s more comfortable to weave with this extra length and besides, I am hoping that I can squeeze in enough to perhaps produce an additional piece of fabric large enough to be the base of the bag.

I fiddled about for quite some time before getting this on the loom because I had to dye various shades of blue for the complementary-weft sections. I haven’t been very adventurous with that. I could use any color I want but am playing it safe in this project with shades of blue. Maybe I will get a little crazier in the next one.

My recent house and cat-sitting experience may have influenced my color choices. The band on the right is one that I was using as a sample during that time. I liked the colors in the bedding and then there’s kitty’s blue eyes. The gold would have been a nice “pop” color but I decided against it in the end. I can see something in that green, gold, and blue some day, though.

So, this is pretty much where it stands right now. I am weaving the figures upside down because the selvedge that I created at the start is going to be at the mouth of the bag.

This is my view while seated at the loom…

**The colors are not showing up very well here. The last strip of complementary weft (mountains and forest!) actually has bands of three different shades of blue.** **You can see the third set of heddles that I installed for the weft-faced sections**.

And now I have decided to weave some words into the last strip of complementary-weft….”spinning cotton” and “hilando algodon”. Lettering is not something that I have been interested in doing in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. Warp-faced double weave gives me much more freedom to design interesting letters. The supplementary-warp structure that my Montagnard weaving teachers showed me (tutorial here) allows very bold lettering (with the disadvantage of sometimes resulting in quite long floats on the back of the piece). That style has its place but sometimes can be a little bit too “loud” for my liking. The intermesh structure allows me to use most of the tablet-weaving charts that Linda Hendrickson created.

**Lettering in intermesh. Feathering on the edges of some of the diagonals can be distracting when heavier thread is used.**

**Lettering in weft twining (using two of Linda Hendrickson’s charts). The fact that there aren’t any floats gave me a lot of freedom when I moved on to designing my own letters in this structure.**

The style of lettering using supplementary warp threads that my Montagnard weaving teachers use. Some of the white floats on the back can be long, for example, between the longer vertical of the G and the first vertical of the following N.

**Warp-faced double weave gives me a lot of freedom for both simple and complex letter design….no floats**!

**I designed cursive lettering in supplementary weft. There are some very minor limitations because you have to consider the length of the weft floats.**

But lettering can also be done in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave in what I consider a fun and quite quirky style. Many years ago, my friend Ruth in Melbourne showed me lettering that she had been designing in this structure. She had woven a really cool name tag for herself. Alison Irwin in Canada has also done so and published a project with Andean Pebble Weave lettering in one of the recent issues of Little Looms (Winter 2022). I will be using those letters to weave the words along the bottom of my bag. These letters have personality! They aren’t large and blocky and overpowering. They sort of dance their way along the warp. I had liked them but hadn’t been drawn to using them when Ruth had first showed me her creations. After all, I had so many other ways at my disposal for designing letters. But now they seem just right for this project. I like that weaving them in complementary weft rather than complementary warp means that the words run across the width of the warp rather than along the length.

You’ll have to wait for my next post to see these fun letters, that is, if I stay with this idea about adding words. The fact that this is not a repetitive or symmetric pattern will make progress very slow. I am, however, very curious to see how the letters look in complementary-weft and will most likely stick it out. (If you’d like a sneak preview of this style of lettering, go take a look at the Winter 2022 issue of Little Looms. You’ll see Alison’s project on the cover).

See you next time (maybe from Australia!…first time back in four years).

Backstrap Weaving – A Little Complementary-warp on the Side

I wanted to write a short post just to record what I have been up to in these last weeks of 2022. Here in Santa Cruz we are marking the end of the year with yet another strike tomorrow. It’s supposedly just a 24-hour one this time rather than another strike-without-end like the one we endured in October and November for 36 days. However, I was up and out early and at the supermarket today just in case it drags on.

This is a summary of what’s been going on in my fiber-y activities. I finally managed to get all the stuff I needed for my cochineal dyeing, including paper to measure pH, and produced a red in my final attempt. Then I ran out of cochineal. My usual supplier in the street market is out of it and I guess I’ll need to find another. I want to make sure that getting red wasn’t just a fluke! You can see the bright red that I got at the top and then all the other colors I got while trying, below.

I made a couple of other experiments. First, just out of curiosity, I threw some alum-mordanted wool in the pot before adding the silk in the last run. I was amazed to see it instantly turned a dark, rich red-wine red. The silk wouldn’t have anything to do with that color! The closest it would go was a dusty pink. Another thing I did was soak some of the dark purple that I had already produced, and didn’t particularly like, in pH- neutral distilled water. It turned an interesting copper color. I had too many orange samples and so I soaked one of those in the same pH-neutral distilled water and got a dull pink.

It’s nice seeing all the colors together. Now I need to come up with an idea for using them.

My original plan had been to create two tones of red to use in a silk ikat project but dyeing with cochineal on silk has been trickier than I had imagined. Wool seems to be easier.. Maybe it’s time to try ikat with wool. I feel sure that using a material like wool which has a certain amount of stretch will make that challenging. I remember my very first experiment with ikat so many years ago. In my ignorance I just dove straight in and used my handspun llama thread with bold red dye that was meant for cotton. Needless to say the result was a very disappointing Barbie-pink background with a barely discernible white pattern.

**The cochineal-on-silk colors surrounded by a silk ikat scarf fabric that I wove some time ago. I used acid dyes for the ikat fabric.**

And on the side, while messing around in the dye pots, I have been experimenting on my backstrap loom with something that I have been wanting to try for a long time. I wanted to try weaving complementary-warp patterns in a complementary-weft structure…I guess you could also call it “turned” complementary-warp, although “complementary-weft” does the trick for me.

I rummaged around in my stash and found some hemp thread that a weaving friend had given me years ago and used that as the base warp. I thought that the hemp would be sturdy enough to stand up to all the fiddling about that was bound to take place as I figured out the best way to execute the complementary-weft technique. The first thing to figure out was the number of warp threads that would make up each group around which the weft threads would turn. I was lucky in that my first guess turned out to be a good one.

I chose one of the fish motifs that I had charted for my Complementary-warp Pattern Book. The fish would normally be swimming length-wise down the warp. In complementary-weft it swims across the width of the warp. The second thing to figure out was how to turn the weft threads at the edges. I wasn’t sure if I would need floating selvedges but after fiddling about with different ideas, I found that they weren’t necessary. The selvedges are neat and stable. Of course, the back of the fabric shows a red fish on a blue background.

For the weft patterns I used some of the naturally dyed cotton from Mayan Hands that my weaving friend Kate had given me many years ago. It was left over from a kit she had brought back from Mayan Hands in Guatemala. The bag of beautiful thread has sat in my closet for years waiting for just the right project.

The natural dye substances used are cochineal (I am so impressed that they can get such deep colors on cotton with cochineal!). There are three depths of cochineal reds. You can see light indigo and dark indigo. I would so love to have more of that dark indigo. Obviously, it was also a favorite of Kate’s! Madder produced the orange, and osage orange the tan colors. There’s quite a lot of natural that I can dye myself. This thread is heavier than the kind that I normally like to use as warp but it has turned out to be perfect as complementary weft on the hemp base warp. You can take a look here if you would like to learn more about this Mayan Hands natural dye project in Guatemala.

Next, I tried an Andean pattern from my Complementary-warp Pick-up Book and then I played around a bit to see the effect of using a much finer main weft and a much heavier complementary weft. I used Omega Sinfonia as the heavier complementary weft. I thought that having the weft section stand out in high relief against the hemp cloth might be attractive. I decided that I preferred a more even surface. However, the heavier weft did produce a motif that wasn’t quite as compressed as the others.

I was done with that experiment and decided that I now wanted to combine complementary-warp and complementary-weft in the same piece. It was one thing to use complementary weft on plain weave. Working it on a denser base of complementary-warp would be different. I am sure that I was somehow under the influence of my silk cochineal colors when I chose the colors for this next sample. I used the Mayan Hands cotton for both warp and weft.

The orange sections are complementary-warp and the red, complementary-weft. I like the fact that I could change the color of the complementary-weft threads at any time, if I wanted to. However, I decided to just stick with red for this sample.

The complementary-weft structure lends itself well to motifs with vertical lines. In complementary-warp I can have sharp, smooth horizontal lines if I wish, like the beak of my hummingbird motif at the bottom. In complementary-weft I can have sharp smooth vertical lines like the stalks of leaves and stems of flowers. Once I had figured out the ideal number of warp threads around which to turn the weft threads, the next challenge was to match the widths of the complementary-warp and complementary-weft sections. I eventually got there by the time I reached the third comp-warp section. In order to do so, I had to weave the comp-warp sections at a width that is not natural to me which meant having to regularly check that I was staying on track. The narrower hummingbird sections sits at my natural width and I could maintain that width easily without ever having to check. My attempts to match the width are more obvious in the next picture.

**Working on matching the width of the complementary-warp sections to that of the complementary-weft.**

So, now I want to use these combined structures on a much wider piece to make a bag for cotton-spinning tools…my takli, the mortar in which it’s supported, and my supply of cotton sliver….something that will enable me to easily store and carry it all about with me when I travel or when it’s not in use. I’ll use the Mayan Hands cotton but will dye some of the natural to get more colors. I might dye some more blues to go with the light and dark indigo thread that I already have in the kit.

A fun thing about the sample band I just wove was that I wove it with four selvedges. That’s the first time I have created a four-selvedged piece in cotton. It was relatively easy because I closed the gap with complementary-weft patterning rather than trying to close it in the warp-patterned sections. I turned the loom around and wove some comp warp at the far end of the warp and then filled in the gap between the two woven sections with comp weft. I didn’t go so far as to attempt a pattern, though! I might try that next time.

And with this project in this new-to-me combination of structures I will be starting off the new year. No doubt, there’ll be more cochineal dyeing next year and more ikat. I have no idea why I have so much black 60/2 silk but I would love to get something wide and very detailed on the loom in that black silk. The “dwindling stash” that I am always talking about is still dwindling but there always seems to be enough of the right stuff to enable me to experiment and then go on to weave useful projects.

If all goes my way, there will be a trip to Australia in 2023 to hopefully lay the ground work for my eventual move back. That will perhaps straighten out the stress-inducing mess of unanswered questions in my head and, who knows, I may return here feeling settled and confident enough to work on continuing with the book projects I have started and left long neglected.

Thanks for staying with me. I wish you all the best for happiness and peace of mind in the coming new year!

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 – Pieces

I am still working on the bag project! But I do believe that I have just warped the very last piece of the puzzle. Then I will be hand sewing everything together. I’ve already made what I feel is a good start on that. While sewing, my mind will be free to start thinking about which project comes next.

The last piece is a band that goes around the mouth of the bag to cover the small pleats that will be in the main body. I really wanted a bag that is less box-like than the usual things I put together with my woven cloth. Using pleats seemed like a way to create a slightly more interesting shape.

Here you can see the warp for the 1 3/4″ band that will encircle the bag. I haven’t yet put in the two sets of string heddles for this sturdy intermesh structure. It’s a dense (complementary-warp) structure of three-span warp floats that can sometimes fool the viewer into thinking it’s plain weave. I might edge it with plain-weave tubular bands when I am done. If I decide to do that, well, I guess that means that this isn’t the final piece after all. There’ll be two tubular bands to warp and apply. I love those tubular edgings and am always looking for an excuse to use them.

The odd-looking thing to the left of the band warp is the left-over warp from the three-color flap piece. I had given myself a bit more comfort room than was necessary in the length of the warp and I am finding it hard to throw this away. I guess I will put it in a bag with the idea of maybe using the yarn for tassels, extra fringe etc. some day. Six months down the track I will discover it in the closet, realize that I am over my attachment to it, and throw it out. Surely I am not the only one who does this kind of thing!

This is what the warp for the flap looked like on the loom. I was setting up for 3-color Andean Pebble Weave using 1476 ends of 20/2 wool spread over 12 inches…dense! I enjoyed creating the warp but once I was sitting at the loom I couldn’t help wondering what on earth I had let myself in for. I had used the same 20/2 wool for the front, back, and sides of the bag and knew to expect it to be challenging in this warp-faced structure. It is certainly nothing at all like my hand-spun wool that I used for the strap. It had behaved so beautifully! Still, I tend to forget and it’s always a bit of a shock when I attempt to open the very first shed. It was a beast! but I know how to adapt and soon there was a rhythm and I forgot all about the beastliness and just enjoyed watching the little hummingbirds appear.

I didn’t break any warp threads. Dust bunnies appeared on the floor beneath the warp where they caused no harm, but not in the heddles. I used DMC #12 cotton for the heddles.

I plan to cut the end of the flap into a curved shape. It’s easy to say that now and we will see how I feel once I am hovering over it with scissors in hand. I have to tell you that I am loving fusible interfacing. It helped me to bravely cut away at the gold lining fabric that I wove. However, this flap fabric with its three colors is super dense and I am not so confident about the interfacing’s ability to hold everything together. I don’t know if it is considered a “cheat” using the fusible interfacing in this way. I am just making this up as I go along! This is another piece of the bag that I plan to edge with a plain-weave tubular band. It will reinforce and cover the cut edge. I have used it before on shaped pieces like this in cotton.

**Curved flap edged with a tubular band.**

I have a tutorial on this blog for doing this kind of thing.

**The last repeat before weaving the pattern that will appear on the back of the bag.**

Quite a lot of people have been asking me about the reversible three-color pebble weave…

**Reversible 3-color pebble weave. The lighter reverse shows up a mistake that the dark side hides petty well. Oops!**

I don’t plan to write a tutorial until I have had a chance to teach it in person several times. I find that kind of experience absolutely invaluable when deciding on which aspects I need to focus when writing it all down. I feel that I need to be able to see it through a student’s point of view and feedback from a wide variety of students who have different learning styles is golden. It is quite a step up from the basic two-color structure to the reversible three-color version that I have been doing. What I will say for now is that I have spent YEARS happily exploring the basic two-color version. There’s much that you can do to turn a piece with just two interacting colors into something that looks spectacular and complex. Clever use of color can make it seem like there is just so much more going on. For example, let me show you the beauty that Fenny in the Netherlands has created using the basic method…..

I really don’t believe that weaving that pattern in the three-color method could possibly improve on what Fenny has created. The block-style pattern chart for this pattern is in my More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns book. It was my attempt to replicate the very first piece of weaving that I had purchased in Peru back in 1996. It was a scrap of band that was being sold on the street and had been woven in natural wool colors. It is not a faithful replica because I hadn’t fully understood all the possible structures at the time. Still, I liked it enough to include it in the book and I continue to weave this version rather than the entirely faithful one which I have also charted in a different publication.

And if that hasn’t convinced you, I will also pull out this example again with its clever use of color because I love it so much!

Priscilla has taken several of the most basic shapes that are charted in my Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms book to create her own unique pattern. Her beautiful use of color makes this band even more eye-catching. Again, I can’t imagine the three-color technique being able to improve on this and I love the fact that she has taken these basic building blocks and used them together so creatively.

I will leave you here with a reminder that the following are my two “gateway” books to this technique. The one on the right is for those who weave their bands on standard inkle looms and includes access to video clips. The other one is for those who use ANY kind of loom to weave their warp-faced bands. You should be able to competently weave plain-weave warp-faced bands on your loom of choice before attempting this. There are detailed descriptions of the books on the Taproot Video website as well as a chance to “look inside” at some sample pages. The books are available as PDFs or as spiral-bound books.

LINKS: Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms Complementary-warp Pick-up

Complementary-warp is the name of a category of woven structures in which the two faces of the cloth are structurally identical with colors reversed. Andean Pebble Weave is a complementary-warp structure and just one of the varieties that sits within this category.

Until next time, when I will hopefully be able to show you my finished bag.