rep weave – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – In the Bag

Another birthday comes and goes. I was given some lovely mini cheesecakes by a friend and we went out for a stroll around the street market that starts a block and half from my place before having a birthday lunch. Every now and then I go to this market looking for cochineal. The ladies that sell the home remedies are the ones that have it but it seemed that the source had dried up as I hadn’t been able to find any this year.

The market is big and, being in good company, we chatted and ventured further into the market than I normally find it necessary to do on my own. It paid off. I actually found the cochineal mother lode. I just bought a little and then snapped photos all around to make sure that I’ll be able to find this particular vendor again.

I often forget how different these markets must seem to my weaving friends who live outside South America. I generally don’t feel secure taking my phone out when I am at the market. This comes from experience! In fact, I don’t usually take it with me at all. But, because I had an extra pair of eyes with me on this day, I brought it along and took a few photos along the way.

**I love the two white cats under the table waiting patiently for tidbits.**

**One of the many “healers” who will read your fortune and find solutions for your troubles.**

And then I came across another surprise. It seemed that they were stacking up for my birthday. I have never seen anyone selling hand-spun wool down here in the tropical lowlands in all the years that I have been here. In fact, there isn’t any industrially-spun wool to be found either. On this day there were three balls of handspun wool hanging in amongst the home remedies in this little store owned by a lady from Potosi.

We talked spinning and weaving and she searched about to find her spindle to show me. It wasn’t particularly fine yarn but it was such a novelty to find it here and so nice to chat with this lady that I simply had to buy a ball of it. I’ll dye it with the cochineal that I just bought.

And with this I broke my vow to only work from stash but what the heck, it was my birthday.

**It has the most wonderful smell that is characteristic of those home remedy stalls**.

One more stop was made at the many aisles of the indoor part of the market where the sewing supplies are sold. I needed a long zip in a certain color for the loom carry bag that I was making.

There are multiple vendors along this aisle and it’s amazing how much stuff they cram into their small allotted spaces. What’s more amazing is that they know exactly where everything is. I got my zip in the perfect color.

So, this is what has been on my loom. I showed you the warp of Mayan Hands cotton from Guatemala in my last post. I dyed the black and there are two shades of cochineal red that were dyed in Guatemala.

**Each of the red sections is flanked by twelve ends of a slightly darker red. It doesn’t really show up in this photo**. I goofed while warping and put more red ends on the right hand side than on the left but decided to just let it be.

The black and white section would enable me to weave several kinds of patterning styles and I decided to weave this in rep weave….alternating thick and thin weft. That would make a sturdy bag and a cushy backstrap. You might remember my plan to make a carry bag for my loom that could double as a backstrap.

I chose a pattern that I had used on a silk wrist cuff some years ago. I had woven it using the complementary-warp intermesh structure with a pattern from Joanne Hall’s book on Mexican Tapestry weaving.

**I chose the pattern on the far left in these two images.**

I first had to weave a sample to see how many strands I needed to make up the thick weft. Then I could get underway. Because I hadn’t used this Mayan Hands cotton in a large plain-weave project before and had only woven a tiny sample with it, I was a bit unsure about being able to set the width of the large project correctly right from the start. It’s quite common to start off too narrow. Threads that are sitting side by side along two cross sticks sit one above the other along the cloth beam and this can trick you into misjudging the width of the cloth. So, I did what I do if I am weaving with new-to-me yarn and placed four narrow strips of cardboard within the first four sheds so that I could see how the threads sit side by side.

By doing this I can move the threads around until I get the ideal coverage of the cardboard strips within the sheds. I take measurements, carefully remove the strips, disturbing the threads as little as possible while doing so, and then start weaving. This enables me to start at just the right width and maintain it for the entire project.

**There’s nothing delicate or subtle about this** **pattern!**

The motif is a complementary-warp pick-up pattern made up of two-span floats and very occasionally a three-span. Any section of white in a row that doesn’t have any white directly above or below it in the preceding or following row will be made up of three-span floats. Being complementary-warp, the piece is double-faced. It’s very straightforward. You just have to remember that vertical lines of white need to be broken up by picking up black threads in the thin-weft rows.

And here it is off the loom. I wove the start and finish only with thin weft so that they would be easier to hem. I also split them into two halves because they would become sleeves into which I would thread the cords for the backstrap. This will be clearer later when you see images of the cords in place.

I’m really happy with it! I ran out of black thick weft and switched to reddish brown which I think looked even better. In the end the color didn’t matter because I covered the bumpy selvedges in order to sew in the zip.

**There’s no point to this photo. I just like the way my book looks on top of the rep weave piece. 🙂**

**I wove a band using the lightest of the three cochineal colours that I have in this cotton and used it to enclose the typical bumpy rep weave selvedges**.

I still have to test the ideal length of the white cords so that I can cut and bind them off. I also need to decide on the best way to affix a carry strap. I’m going to let it sit for a bit while I think about that.

**Here it is holding sticks, swords, shuttle and tool bag. I still have to sew to isolate the sleeves that hold the cords.**

What’s next? Maybe some dyeing with cochineal and perhaps a longer version of the little box-like purse that I recently made. I have a lot of fine Guatemalan cotton for that in a color the vendor called champagne. I need to come up with a pattern for it in supplementary weft.

Keep busy lest you be accused of sloth! I was amused to see this depiction of the seven deadly/mortal sins in an episode of QI. A spinner was used to represent Sloth. How dare they! I couldn’t get a close enough view of the spinner during the program to be able to understand what that was all about. But I did find an image online and was able to see that her spindle, laden with yarn, was lying idle on the ground….the horror.

See you next time!

Backstrap Weaving – Yards of Deserts and Dreamlands

Great width and great length are two things that I cannot hope to comfortably achieve on my backstrap loom and so it was nice to be able to spend time with my friend Claudia and be there just in time to see her pull yards and yards of soft Hawaiian sunrise fabric off her floor loom. Claudia and Janet, who together form Lotsaknots Studio, have been weaving baby wraps….yards and yards of custom baby wraps. It seems that many new moms out there in the Western world like to “wear” their babies these days and put a lot of thought into the color of their custom-made baby-carrying fabric. Claudia cut the fabric off the loom and then pulled and pulled out over 8 yards of fabric for two wraps. It tumbled onto the floor in a pile of luscious soft sunrise tones.

Of course, mothers in Asia, Africa, Central and South America and many other regions around the world have always carried their babies either in front or back wrapped in fabric so that baby can accompany them in every aspect of their daily lives…on a trip to market, working bent over in the fields or at the stove, carting water from the well…

One of my weaving teachers in Guatemala shows me her nephew which she carries in a woven sling. His little cap is a woven piece which has been decorated with a double faced supplementary-weft technique. Therectabgle of fabric has a draw string through the top which is pulled to the form the cap. — One of my weaving teachers in Guatemala shows me her nephew which she carries in a woven sling. His little hat is a woven piece which has been decorated with a double faced supplementary-weft technique. The rectangle of fabric has a draw string along the top which is pulled to close the top of the hat

A lady in Bolivia carries her randchild on her back leaving her hands free to spin yarn on a drop spindle. The carrrying cloth is traditionally hand woven although this lady is using a synthetic factory-made piece. These cloths are used tocarry any kind of load...goods being taken to and from market or "luggage" on a trip. — A lady in Bolivia carries her grandchild on her back leaving her hands free to spin yarn on a drop spindle. The carrying cloth is traditionally hand woven although this lady is using a synthetic factory-made piece. These cloths are used to carry any kind of load…goods being taken to and from market or “luggage” on a trip.

When I went to the Tinkuy in Cusco in 2010, I accompanied a group of weavers from Cochabamaba. We had quite a trek to make from the bus stop to our lodgings and I was very envious of the ladies as they wrapped their duffel bags in their carrying cloths, tossed them on their back and headed off down the dusty road. I lugged mine, handles over my forearm and with bag clumsily bumping along against my hip. Guess who made better progress.

My Vietnamese weaving tecaher Ju Nie showed us how she wraps a baby sling. The Montagnard baby slings are woven on backstrap looms and often decorated with motifs in supplementary weft. made — My Vietnamese weaving teacher Ju Nie showed us how she wraps a baby sling. The Montagnard baby slings are woven on backstrap looms and often decorated with motifs in supplementary weft. Using a circular warp on a backstrap loom make these kinds of lengths more manageable. They are usually woven as two separate panels which are then sewn together.

I enjoyed learning about the whole process involved in the creation of one of the Lotsaknots custom wraps. First, the mother will describe her needs and usually provides a picture which contains the kinds of colors that she would like to have in her wrap.

This is the picture that was used for the latest wrap on Claudia’s loom which has been entitled Dreamland. The yarn is ordered and Janet wraps colors around card to help determine the final layout. She has amazing talent for this and I think that she has captured the tones and mood of the picture beautifully. As I stick to red, black and white for my entire series of wall hangings, this talent for combining colors is one that I envy.

Then comes the job of winding all those yards of warp. One half will be the custom wrap made to the mother’s specified length. The second wrap will have a different weft color which will give it quite a different look and this “sister wrap” can be sold online.

I loved seeing these chained sections of warp sitting on the floor ready to go on the loom. They reminded me of snakes of berry-flavored soft serve icecream oozing out of a machine.

I am often mystified by the way people gasp at all that is involved in setting up for backtrap weaving. People roll their eyes when they look at all the string heddles I have to make. I don’t get it. I have to say that that is nothing compared to the process of getting this kind of warp onto a floor loom! Now I know what rough sleying is and understand the need for a trapeze when warping. Then there are all those heddles to thread and then the reed. Some of it seems really hard for one person to do all alone.

Here are all the threads on the apron rod after having been rough-sleyed. Doesn’t that look gorgeous! I learned a lot watching Claudia do all this and I was even able to lend a hand now and then. I was sorry not to have been around long enough to witness the entire process.

We could have finished it but Clauda wanted to take advantage of my being there to get in a little backstrap weaving so we spent some time on that. She has been wanting to do rep weave and, as she has never done it before, I was happy to be able to get a sample project set up and started on her loom.

Here’s the start of a pink and lavender rep weave. I love the kind of ikat effect that appears in the warp threads as you are in the process of changing sheds. Rep weave is a piece of cake for me as I am used to doing warp-faced weaves and rep weave simply involves alternating a thick and thin weft. The effect is lovely and it weaves up so very fast with that thick weft. Claudia would like to make a set of four placemats in repweave on her backstrap loom and will use a circular warp to get the desired length for all four pieces. The width is one that is easily manageable on a backstrap loom.

Here’s the rep weave piece that I made some time ago for my tray table. It is decorated with complementary-warp pick up pattern.

Here’s Claudia’s piece underway. I was having fun with it and had to try not to go too far before letting Claudia take over. She was busy hemming her just completed pair of wraps while I worked on this. Above you can see where I have just started making a change of dominant color by swapping the sheds into which I place the thick and thin wefts.

Claudia does some backstrap weaving every time I visit and goes back to her floor loom when she finishes her project. Therefore, it takes her a little time to get back into the swing of things after having had a long break. Above, you can see that she is well underway. We used a pick-up stick to make that small block of color change and now she is back into the original sequence. It is just a short warp for sampling. Now she has a nice width sample which will help her calculate how much warp she needs to wind for her placemat project. She is using 3/2 perle cotton.

This was a nice break for Claudia between baby wraps. The baby wrap business is never ending with 47 people on the custom order waitlist!

Here’s one of the earlier wraps which was called Sedona. I love this one!

The color arrangement was inpired by this painting…

And here is the fabric….it is a wonderful representation of the painting, don’t you think?

This next one was entered in a Facebook wrap challenge which had a theme of Wizard of Oz…

The metallic red threads, which I think are such a nice touch, represent Dorothy’s ruby red slippers.

Unfortunately, I didn’t photograph the Hawaiian sunrise beauties when they came off the loom but, no doubt, they will be on the Lotsaknots blog page soon. Doing custom-made pieces is quite a challenge, I think. With only phone calls, email correspondece and maybe a photo, a major piece like this has to be designed and constructed to match what the mom envisions as being perfect for her baby. I really believe that Janet and Claudia are a good team for this. Janet doesn’t weave but is so good at putting the colors together while Claudia has years of experience at the loom and sewing machine. I can’t wait to see Dreamland when it comes off the loom.

Last Saturday I wove at Terri’s place. Some of you may know Terri as Magical Moons on Etsy. Terri makes beautiful swords for backstrap weaving as well as spindles, pick-up sticks and other tools for fiber artists.

She weaves with me whenever I am in the Maryland area. Laritza joined us. Stephanie, who has never woven fabric before, (she studies basket weaving with Terri) came to have her first-ever try at backstrap weaving.

It was a spring day…a REAL spring day… and we all felt guilty for being indoors in Terri’s workskop while the sun poured down and warmed the air outside. For everyone who had endured the long long winter it was a truly unique day.

It didn’t last long as you can see at left. That was the following Tuesday. I felt guilty about being so pleased with it when everyone just rolled their eyes and said “not AGAIN!”. I didn’t want so much snow that my travel plans would be disrupted…just enough to make things pretty.

We didn’t have to be out in it. We were weaving away warm and snuggly in the studio looking out and watching it accumulate.

Here’s Stephanie making her first patterned band using what I like to call the “barefoot method”…no sticks… just string and fingers.

Laritza and Terri wove intermesh. This technique was taught to me in Peru with two sets of string heddles. This gave the ladies some good heddle making practice as a warm-up before they could get into the weaving. This is one of the patterning techniques that I teach in my second book.

Laritza’s warp goes well with her sweater. Inside it was sweater weather…outside, it was almost warm enough to shed them.

That’s Terri working on her intermesh warp.You may remember from previous posts that Terri spends a good part of the year living on Nantucket Island where she has studied basket making with the master weavers there. Below you can see an example of one of her friendship baskets. The little dog figure was contributed by another artisan but the basket is Terri’s. Everything she does including her woodwork is impeccable. I love using her swords.

Here is a gorgeous keyfob that she gave me after our time together. It has a piece of whale tooth which Terri shaped and polished. It is a “worry” piece, Terri tells me, as the piece of tooth is just the pefect shape for holding in your hand and rubbing with your thumb when you are feeling agitated. The smooth polished surface really does have a soothing feel.

So, now I am in South Jersey ready to weave with a group tomorrow..

I met Trisha and April from this group at the annual Spinning Seminar at the Mannings last summer and the idea for this gathering was born. How time flies! I had known Trisha for a long time as part of the Backstrap Weaving Group on Weavolution from way back in 2009. Now we finally get to weave together.

I just received one of my new books from the printer. It looks very handsome with its new red coil binding in place of the black comb that I have been using. I love it.

See you next week from Massachusetts.

Backstrap Weaving – Books and Blessings

I don’t do Christmas. I don’t have any family here and so it seems kind of pointless but it seems that Christmas does me! And all my Christmases came at once, as they say, this month when four packages were waiting for me at the post office this week on top of a couple that I had received the week before. Two were purchases that I had made some time around Christmas and the rest were gifts.

One was from Argentina, another from Morocco via Australia, one from Bangladesh, one from Sweden, one from the UK, one from India and yet another from Australia. Luckily, I now have space for all this new stuff!

I can’t decide which one produced the biggest smile.

Let’s start with the book from Bangladesh on backstrap weaving. I suppose this is the one about which I feel most triumphant.

I have been trying to get this book since the middle of 2010 when I ran across a newspaper article about it online. Letters to the publisher didn’t produce any response. I tracked down an Australian journalist who had written a review on it but she couldn’t help. I asked my Godmother in India to try through some friends of hers in Bangladesh…no luck there either. I met a teacher from Spain on Ravelry who is working in Bangladesh who offered to try and get it…she couldn’t manage it… and finally, a Facebook acquaintance, Ananda, who works as a fashion designer in Bangladesh, came through.

He had heard of one of the authors, Manjulika Chakma and seen the book at a book fair. He managed to find the author, go to her house, where he said he enjoyed seeing her collection of tribal textiles, buy the book from her, tease me by posting a picture of it on Facebook and then send it to me! We were both very nervous about the mail as we both live in countries in the developing world where things often don’t work quite the way they should.

Well, I have been blessed because here I have it in my hands and it is really lovely.

I have only read the first few pages of Chapter Two which is about the Chakma weavers and it starts with a lovely story of how, in order to encourage the tribal backstrap weavers to start weaving again the traditional sampler known as alam as well as to see just how many of the 210 designs could be recovered, a competition was organized among twenty weavers to see who could produce the best example. And the story goes on from there telling about the preparation for the weaving, the loom, the process. I can’t wait to read more.

One thing I would like to share with you are some lines from The Song of the Loom by Chiranjib Chakma translated by Niaz Zaman which appears at the very start of the book. This is just a part of the song:

How I wish I could hear this sung in its original language!

Twelve chapters in the book deal with twelve different tribes and their work. One disappointment is that the index promises a bibliography on page 164 but my book ends at page 160! Too bad…I love bibliographies.

From Morocco via Australia came this spindle…

A friend of mine in Australia, Linda, went to Morocco last December and I asked her to get me a typical spindle. I have since decided to make this a gift for my friend Lisa in North Carolina. It isn’t for me anymore after my recent de-clutter campaign…books will always be welcome but I have enough spindles!

I actually had no idea what a typical Moroccan spindle looked like and Linda is not a spinner and told me that she had quite a difficult time finding one in the markets. Eventually an elderly gentleman told her that, if she came back the next day, he would have one for her. Linda thinks that he had this specially made for her.

I asked the ladies in the Spindle Lore group about this particular kind of spindle and got many helpful responses.

Tracy sent me a link to this site about Turkish tribal textiles which has this image of a woman using a very similar spindle.

I know that Lisa will use and enjoy this spindle. If it stays here with me, it will be left hanging on the wall. I am happy to see it, handle it and take pictures of it and learn a bit about it in the process.

To Think With a Good Heart…Wixárika Women, Weavers and Shamans by Stacy B Schaefer came to me as a used copy from the UK (copies for under $3 are out there!) after having been recommended to me by Hopi weaver Luis Garcia. Luis and I met online through a mutual interest in Huichol, or Wixárika double weaving. Here is one of Luis’s pieces in progress. He is weaving almost exactly the same motif as I chose for my bag above.

The book is described as being …”a fascinating journey into a realm of ancient beliefs and traditions woven into the story of a way of life constantly threatened by the outside world…..(It) addresses both the technology of weaving as well as the dramas and personalities in a community.”

In the words of Stacy B Schaefer herself…

A woman’s weavings reflect the changes and transformations she undergoes as she follows her life’s path, and her rites of passage from childhood to adolescence and marriage are marked by her abilities as a weaver. As a wife and mother, she is the provider of woven items for her family until she is physically no longer able to weave. But, never idle for long, she takes up spinning to help the younger women in the family carry on the weaving tradition. A woman’s life is so integrally tied to her identity as a weaver that she carries her loom to the grave, where it is buried with her.

In this book, I hope to bring Wixarika women into visibility by focusing on the medium of loom weaving. I present a descriptive ethnography of Wixárika women’s lives in chapters organized in interconnected sections that discuss gender roles, the life cycle, economics, religion and cosmology.

The book is the result of Schaefer’s having apprenticed with master weavers in two Wixárika families but it is not a how-to book.

From India I received a book that was recommended by a weaving friend in Canada who just returned from a trip to the northern states of India.

Beautiful pictures and plenty of luscious inspiration! One particular textile jogged my memory from back in 2007 of a bag that one of my Youth Hostel roomies in the Washington DC Youth Hostel had. She said that a friend in Sri Lanka had given it to her.

What a great color scheme! I think I need to try something like this.

From Argentina…

This is Susana Vallejo’s updated edition of her Manual Básico de Telar Mapuche. This revised edition has many more beautifully taken step-by-step photos than the original. Susana and I are online weaving buddies and we swap our books and ideas. I first swapped my Andean Pebble Weave book for a copy of her first edition. I will send her a copy of my next book in exchange for this copy of hers. She lives in Mar del Plata, Argentina where she runs a very active weaving school and I find her always buzzing with energy and so wonderfully charming!

Here is a picture that Susana herself put online to show what her new edition looks like…

Two gifts from Sweden via my online weaving friend Olle-Petter…

What a beautiful piece of work author Ing-Marie Frid has made with page after page of meticulously charted designs from these wonderful traditional bands. Photos of the original bands accompany every chart and they are simply stunning.

It wasn’t all about opening packages and playing with all my gifts and purchases this week. I did some preparation for future weaving projects too.

I am preparing a sample ikat warp putting into practice some thoughts and theories that I have on how to keep the threads better aligned. I am still not being terribly brave or adventurous about this and am using a simple diamond motif and keeping things small. I wrap the warps for one diamond a day, slowly and methodically while I think about different strategies for successfully weaving it.

I have the warp set up on a frame for now as I wrap and here it is sitting in front of a silk piece, with a similar simple ikat pattern, from Cambodia. I am using cassette tape to wrap.

I was pretty happy about my last attempt at ikat, which was just narrow strips within a larger textile, but I would like to make some improvements…

The ikat is part of our new weave-along and we have Janet and Tracy so far wrapping away as well.

The other preparation project which was really taking a long time to get off the ground was the charting for the continuation of my Wayuu inspired wall hanging. Well, dither no more, it is going and appears to be successful! (although the proof will be in the weaving).

Mirja Wark has charted the traditional design in her book but it is not entirely symmetrical as that is the way the Wayuu weavers choose to weave it. I, however, have this need for symmetry and so I adapted and recharted it only to weave it and find it too small and delicate for my wall hanging and the thread I am using. Now I am changing it yet again to be big and bold enough for my piece. I kind of like the fact that I am changing it so much as there are now several pieces of “me” in the design!

The rep weave sample came off the loom and got hemmed. I had some width issues so this definitely goes in the “sample” category. It fits my tray table perfectly though and will certainly be put to use to stop my bowls from sliding about.

And then Jorge came and said that he preferred the other side…not terribly practical white side up… but now I can’t decide which side I prefer! Thank you Marijke for your card woven knot pattern!

Some Bedouin activity from online weaving friends…

Bobbie, from the Ravelry group is weaving this lovely piece using that yummy Dylon Cold Water terrcaotta dye on her cotton. She is weaving one of the al’ouerjan variations. Yonat wove Bedouin Warp Substitution with me last fall and is weaving this band with many variations of the al’ouerjan pattern on her inkle loom. It is a sample band of the different patterns and she is practicing her weft twining along the way. She says that she is not crazy about the colors she chose but I love them!

We have exciting news from Tracy Hudson in the backstrap group who lives in Doha Qatar. She has written an article on Bedouin spinning which will be in the spring issue of Spin Off.

And that brings to me to wrapping this up with the unwrapping of the last “Christmas-comes-late” gift.

My dear sister-in-law made me an amazing calendar with pictures of some of my weavings mixed in with Navajo and other bits and pieces that she saw on her recent trip to south-west USA. She didn’t have many pictures of my stuff to work with…just a handful of pictures I had sent to my brother for editing about two years ago but she did a tremendous job putting it all together.

And, wise and clever woman that she is, she left January 2012 off the calendar and replaced it with January 2013 at the end knowing that I probably wouldn’t get this until February. I don’t get to see Deb and the family very often and am way overdue on a visit to Australia. She blew me away with this!

And finally, I have to tell you that my book Andean Pebble Weave will soon be speaking French! I am very close to getting this e-edition up on the Patternfish website. And don’t worry, I didn’t translate it! It has been translated by a weaver in France about whom I shall tell you more once the e-book is ready for sale. Here’s a sneak peek at the cover…

Backstrap Weaving – Roaming and Repping

There I sat with a mass of tiny blank squares in front of me. I was supposed to chart the next motif on my Si’ira inspired wall hanging.

I want to use one of the motifs already charted in Mirja Wark’s book but make some adjustments and basically double its size so it will be bigger and bolder on my wall hanging.

I don’t know why, I just couldn’t get motivated to start it.

I knew very well that once the first few squares were filled I would be off and running and having fun but I put down the pencil and decided to roam a little online instead.

And there it was…one of those delightful distractions. Someone revived an old thread in the Warped Weavers Group on Ravelry – the rep weave weave-along thread – and it reminded me that I had returned from my fall trip to the US with ideas about trying this on my backstrap loom. After all, it’s warp-faced and seemed like quite a natural thing for me to do. All that is required is the use of alternating thick and thin wefts. There is a very nice article here about the basics of rep weave.

Some time ago, before I had ever heard of rep weave, I had played a little with this basic idea when doing simple warp floats.

In an attempt to make the horizontal stripes less distracting on the band on the right I had used a #10 size weft under the white warps and a #3 under the colored ones. Obviously the difference in thickness wasn’t enough to be noticeable and I suppose if I had gone thicker, this piece would not have been practical for its intended use as a bookmark. And that is as far as I got with that.

And then rep weave came very much to life for me when I was staying at The Mannings last October during that big wet early season snow fall. Through the wintry wet, whiteness and darkness (we had three-day power outage) came this…

Color!! This was woven by The Mannings’ instructor Tom Knisely and made the front cover of Handwoven’s Jan /Feb 2011 issue, an issue that was near and dear to me because I had a little article in there myself. Little did I know that I would run into both the cover piece and its weaver in person.

So what are you to do when there is no power and you are the guest of owners of a weaving store?….sit down with piles of back issues of Handwoven and enjoy! It seemed that almost every issue I picked up had rep weave in it or maybe it was just that my mind was now tuned into it. There was this gorgeous rep weave rug in one issue….

And it turns out that it was hanging right there in one of the rooms in The Mannings store. I had been far too occupied weaving to notice. So, I got to take a look at this one as well. It was also woven by Tom. I learned that the warps don’t always have to be sett to completely cover the weft as they are in the first cover piece I showed above. In this piece the weft can be seen a little between the warps. Of course you can’t even notice that from a distance.

Perhaps this little bit of space helps you to achieve a clean shed more easily. Personally I like the more solid look.

So, between Tom’s pieces and the articles I read in the magazines I came home with ideas which went onto the “to-do” list. I decided that now was a good time to try something in rep weave. I wasn’t in the mood for charting and just wanted to weave! I already knew the design I wanted to try and hooray, it didn’t need charting.

First to sample…just how thick should that thick weft be? And what about the thin one?

This is what worked with my Clea cotton (Clea is close to a #10 crochet cotton): I used sixteen strands of Clea for the thick and some tatting thread for the thin. The plain weave sections between the rep samples came up beautifully using the tatting thread as weft….no ridging and such pretty selvedges! A tip from one of the members in the Ravelry weave-along about finishing made me weave those plain weave sections. They can be folded under and hemmed and end up being pretty much the same thickness as the rep weave sections.

And that takes care of those thick weft tails too. They can be concealed within the folds. The hemmed plain weave pieces can be folded partly or all the way under. In the picture above I have just folded them but haven’t yet sewn them into place.

There were lots of nice tips on the weave-along thread. Some people finished their rep weave mug rugs with fringes. In that case I guess that the thick weft tails are somehow added to the fringe. Some people hem- stitched the ends.

Here are a couple of the results of the weave-along. A lot of the participants were using a four-harness mug rug kit from Yarn Barn and this four-shaft one for placemats.

Dawn MacFall hemmed her set of mug rugs while Donna finished hers with fringe.

Geri made this beautiful set of placemats…

And it doesn’t have to always be about two alternating colors in the warp. This rug made by Ellen Turner uses the same colors in both sheds….clean and simple!

There were tips about handling the two shuttles of weft in the weave-along thread as well but, to be honest, the tip I liked the most was one by Tom Knisely in his Handwoven article (darn I didn’t write down the issue date). The article is called Getting Started with Warp Rep.

If you want to see some amazing bags made from rep weave fabric take a look here. I love these!! Lynnette, who created these gorgeous bags, has allowed me to post a picture here but please do go to her blog to see all the bags.

Eva Stossel has some terrific designs for four and sixteen shafts on her blog here.

Well you know me…clean and simple is elegant and beautiful but I have a thing for motifs and I wanted to adapt this design to rep weave…

This image is from the web site of Dutch tablet weaver Marijke Van Epen and I have been admiring the knotwork designs she has there for a long long time. She has a page of all these beautiful black and white squares with knot designs and when I saw them for the first time, the idea of mug rugs immediately popped into my head. I wrote to Marijke and asked her permission to use her patterns which she kindly gave. But once I got into planning my mug rug project, I thought that I should come up with some patterns of my own…

So here I am once again admiring Marijke’s designs and wanting very much to do something with them. I could weave them in double weave like I did with the Abba Yohanni motif I wove below (which also happens to be on Marijke’s page) but I thought it might be fun and challenging to try one of them in rep.

What I have on the loom now I am calling a sample for a table runner. The brown yarn was the only color of which I had enough to make both warp and weft. The sixteen strands required for the thick weft chews up a lot of yarn. I used two sheds…the usual shed rod and string heddles and hand manipulated the warps to create the pattern.

So, this is the sample. For the real piece I have an idea for a much more interesting border design and I will make those diamonds beside the main motif larger. I lost a tiny bit of width so I will make adjustments for that next time too.

Once the first row of the main motif has been placed, there really isn’t any major counting to do and that is nice for a change. Also, can you imagine how fast this weaves up with that chunky weft?!

My calculations of width to height worked out pretty well. If I had made the verticals in the motif wider to match the thickness of the horizontals the motif as a whole would not have turned out square.

Here’s a peek at the back…

It was nice to return to Marijke’s site as she and I have been corresponding lately about a possible visit in September. I will be in the UK for the Braids 2012 conference in August and then plan to go over to The Netherlands. And I am secretly hoping to meet Mirja Wark somehow!

So, this has been fun! Normally when I weave I can’t listen to music that has lyrics as I automatically want to sing along and all my pick-up counting goes out the window. So, I have enjoyed being able to weave and sing at the same time with this project. The B52’s Cosmic Thing album was my choice…no love songs, no broken hearts, nothing deep or analytical…just pure fun. One of my favorites is “Roam”. We used to sing that back in my ski bumming days in the 80’s when we literally would “roam around the world” following the snow.

Now I roam around the world via the internet and the world comes to me too. This week Greece paid a visit when Andreas sent me pictures of his latest backstrap weaving. My oh my, he has been getting on with it and brought me a cheerful splash of color.

Color and all plain weave except for the one little pebble weave motif. I like the nice large shed rod he is using and the knitting needle heddle rod.

There he is teasing me with the special shaped finish that he does so well. I must try that again some time. Sweden also dropped by in the shape of two beautiful books on Leksandsband that were sent as a gift.

But it will be back to Colombia and Venezuela for me this coming week so I can get my design for the wall hanging ready. I will buy some yarn for the rep table runner and continue roaming the web for rep weave pattern ideas.

Check out my RESOURCES page…I added a couple of new goodies.