silk – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – It isn’t all in the Wrist

The Garden Bands are finished and now the question is whether to use them in a project and, if the answer is yes, how?

In my last blog post, I showed you the first of the two bands sitting alongside my hummingbird band.

When I had finished the hummingbird band, I had been thinking about cutting it into two or three pieces, placing them side by side and making “something”. Friends in one of my Zoom groups were not enthusiastic and suggested I weave two bands to flank the hummers and use the whole thing as a wall hanging. I liked the idea of not having to cut (and possibly regret having done so). On top of that, weaving accompanying narrow bands meant that I could once again try out the little flower motifs and the subtle color transitions that I had been sampling in 20/2 cotton.

Now both bands are finished and here they are together…..

I am really pleased with them and may never use them for anything at all. I just really enjoyed creating them. I will play around with placing them next to the hummingbirds in various ways to create symmetry or even asymmetry as some of my weaving friends have suggested. I might keep the borders or perhaps fold them back so that they are hidden. I might hang them together so that they look like one complete piece or leave space between them.

Right now, I think I just need to leave them be and think about all that. Put it this way, there won’t be any cutting or sewing happening just yet.

What I would like to do next is sample these motifs in heavier thread. I have some 8/2 tencel that I would like to try. It will be interesting to see how wide the piece will be in this tencel. I have quite a few people asking me if I plan to publish these patterns and I am not really sure how they will look on a larger scale. They are fine and delicate in 60/2 silk. How will they look in 8/2 tencel?

At the same time I am not even sure if I would like to publish the hummingbirds. The hummingbirds have become part of my pandemic experience…they represent my yearning to be out of all this and zipping about freely. My friends in the States tell me that it is time to take in their feeders as the hummingbirds start their migration south. It must be so nice spotting the first ones arriving at the start of the season the following year. I have often thought about doing a similar seasonal change by spending the mild winters here in Bolivia and the summers in Australia but that was a pre-pandemic dream. I am not sure if I can pull that off any more. I, like many of you I am sure, have had to modify plans with the times.

This is the warp I created for the second band…

In this photo, I have finished creating the heddles for one half of the warp in this warp-faced double weave structure (one heddle set for all the light threads, and one for the darks), and have just started creating a third set for the light threads on the other side of the cross. A fourth will hold all the dark threads on that side of the cross. Those of you who have used my book Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms will have learned a two-shed set-up for this same structure that is perfect for the inkle loom. I only use four sets of heddles when I am weaving with a lot of ends and especially if the thread is fine. The inkle loom is perfect for the more basic two-shed set-up with heavier thread and fewer ends. Bolivian weavers who use this structure will use the method that is traditionally used in their community. Some of them use the two-shed method even when the threads are fine and numerous. This was the way that I was initially taught. Others use a four-shed set-up.

Working with multiple sets of heddles for a warp-faced structure on a fixed-tension loom, like the horizontal ground looms that are used in certain areas of Bolivia and Peru, is challenging.

Bunches of string heddles control the colored layers of warps on the horizontal loom of Taquile Island, Peru

In my experience, using a loom where the weaver can modify tension at will with his or her body makes the process of using multiple heddles much easier. Of course, I am talking about the backstrap loom. The weaver can control just how much the warp threads are able to rise and bend to form as large a shed as necessary without dragging up any sticky neighboring threads that don’t belong, and without causing abrasion.

A two-heddle set-up for Andean Pebble Weave for one of my Within These Walls panels.

When I was first taught Andean Pebble Weave way back in 1996 using narrow warps with quite fine thread, I was shown how to manage two sets of heddles. It took quite some time to figure out what was going on. I would just watch my teachers hands deftly manipulating the heddles, magically and effortlessly creating clean sheds, but at first was not able to replicate the moves. What I wasn’t noticing was how the rest of the body was also involved in the process. It wasn’t only about what their hands were doing. My teachers had to move to slightly relax tension on the warp while working with their hands. I broke a few warp threads in my rough handling before that key piece of information clicked. Those broken threads did not make me popular! You might understand what the title of this blog post is about now.

On narrow warps, I was able to wrap one set of heddles over one hand and roll it away while pulling up on the other heddle with the other hand. The wrapping and rolling tightens all the threads in those heddles. It holds them taut and in place so that they simply cannot grab on to neighboring threads and become part of a shed in which they don’t belong.

Here’s 7-year old Lily doing just that:

This and some of the following images are screen shots from videos that I took and will be blurry as a result. I think they still allow you to see what is going on. You can see how slack Lily’s warp is because she has relaxed tension (more than is really necessary as you can get away with very slight movements when the warp is this narrow). One hand is pulling up the second group of heddles while the other wraps and rolls the first set away.

Here’s my student Berna doing the same: (Hi Berna! I know you read this blog from time to time). She is raising the first heddle while rolling the other away. You can see how her left pinky rests on the warp and acts as the pivot point for the roll. Having placed her other pinky within the shed to save it, her body is on its way to returning to the “neutral” position in which the tension on the warp is no longer relaxed. She had relaxed tension just enough to enable her to save the shed on her finger. She can later replace her finger within the shed with a sword to beat.

Susan learned all this about operating a loom with two sets of heddles on narrow warps from me during my visits in the States. She needed to contact me recently after having set up the beautiful Andean Pebble Weave warp (below) with its two sets of pretty heddles as it’s her first time attempting something this wide. She works with wood and has had to prepare swords that will suit the width of this new project. I hope that she sends pictures of them.

The heddles on their rods fill a narrower space than the width of the warp as some of the heddles hold two threads. This difference in width is expected as the woven cloth will be a fair bit narrower than the width of the warp as you see it here. The fact that this structure uses warp floats on both faces of the fabric means that the fabric will be narrower and thicker than one with the same number of ends in plain weave.

Isn’t this warp gorgeous? I can’t wait to see what she does with this asymmetric layout.

This is Susan’s first attempt at this kind of width having woven several beautiful Andean Pebble Weave guitar straps for friends and family which have given her plenty of practice in winding nicely-tensioned warps and making string heddles. Of course, now her question is how to manage these two sets of much wider heddles. A hand is simply not large enough to wrap and roll these.

For wide warps, I was taught to substitute a sword for the hand….

Here I am demonstrating doing this for a group of friends and exaggerating somewhat to show the effect of moving my body forward to relax tension on the warp. The more I move forward, the larger the shed. The edge of the sword rests on the warp and is the pivot point. Once the shed is open, I can let go of the sword in the wrapped-and-rolled heddle, maintain the forward position, keep pulling up on the heddle rod, and save the open shed on a sword. You can see how my sword is completely wrapped within the heddles and rolled. So, an important tip is to take account of the width of your sword when you are making the heddles. If they are shorter than the width of the sword, this move will not work so well. If they are a lot longer, they will be clumsy.

This still-shot which I grabbed from one of my videos, shows a backstrap weaver in Peru positioning herself to wrap and roll her sword away while her other hand lifts the heddle nearest to her. She chooses to use a sword rather than her hand even on this relatively narrow warp. Her sword sits just below the heddle stick which shows that her heddles are the perfect length for this. That is what I always aim for. No doubt she has been doing this for most of her life and doesn’t even need to think about it.

Now you can see her raised heddle a lot more clearly and her forward position is evident.

So, this was precisely what I was doing on my double-weave Garden warp. I would roll Heddle One away with my hand while lifting Heddle Two. And I worked Heddles Three and Four in the same way. It enabled me to work with this fine 60/2 silk without breaking any threads from abrasion and achieve nice clean sheds every time.

When working with just one heddle together with a shed rod, I like to use what I call the “twisty stick” method. You can see this in action in this video clip. Twisting the two sticks tightens that layer of threads so that the threads remain taut and in place while I bend and raise the threads in the other layer. I go into this in more detail (how to set it up etc) in my video class Operating a Backstrap Loom.

You can see me using the twisty sticks a few times in this next video where I am nearing the end of a warp of 60/2 silk…

Of course, it is important to point out that there are many many different methods used by backstrap weavers to operate their looms. I share with you some of my current favorite methods that work well for me with a variety of warp materials. There is no single correct way to do any of this. Some materials, for example, are just friendlier in terms of stickiness and work well with simpler methods. Some materials are so sturdy that the weaver can get away with simply grabbing and pulling up on the heddle while sawing it back and forth along the warp to clear the shed and remove any stray threads that don’t belong.

How I would love to be there with all of you who are venturing into weaving on backstrap looms. Who knows when that will be possible? In the meantime, I hope that some of what you have seen here today is helpful and perhaps interesting even to those who don’t use a backstrap loom.

It’s time to wet finish the Garden and Hummingbird bands and give them a good hard press in order to better enjoy the loveliness of the silk. Right now they could easily be mistaken for cotton. I am looking forward to bringing out their sheen.

Until next time….

Backstrap Weaving – Limbo Land

I don’t like being in weaving Limbo Land. Usually, while I am sitting weaving one project, I have the next one already developing in my head or on paper. I’ll be gathering yarn and charting patterns when not at the loom so that I can launch myself straight into warping once the current project is off and washed and sewn.

While I had the general idea for the next project sorted out, I hadn’t quite pinned down the finer details and so I found myself in Limbo Land once my current project was off the loom.

Urgh…I dislike Limbo Land. Limbo Land is the place where I do crazy things like suddenly decide to cut my own hair. Fortunately, I decided to spend this little jaunt in Limbo Land in a much better way….starting my next book! And then I suddenly got the little spark of idea I needed to pull together all my thoughts for the next project. I really need to write these things down because I have already forgotten the source of the spark.

The ikat piece that I just finished was about weaving shapes that would allow me to calculate take-up for future projects. I was interested to see how much length was lost in the original ikat shapes once they were woven using warp-float patterning rather than the plain weave that I usually do.

I think I mentioned in my last post that I was getting bored with the pick-up pattern that I had chosen to weave within the ikat shape. Well, I came up with a way to amuse myself for the second half of the pattern. I decided that the bottom half looked like foliage and that I could slip a little hummingbird in among the plants in the upper half. Planning that out was fun and I realized that this was really what I originally had in mind when I saw the drawing of a hand in that magazine ad that I have mentioned in past posts….weaving pictures within pictures.

So I have decided to weave a series of small silk pieces based on this basic shape filled with pictures. I have just finished tying off a larger and simpler version of this shape in red 60/2 silk again which is now soaking in preparation for dyeing tomorrow. I have a pretty good idea of how I want to fill it. Let’s see where all this takes me.

I suspect there will be some moments of “What was I thinking?” when it comes time to weave and I have to come to grips with all the detail that I have put into the pictures! I can guarantee it won’t be boring to weave!

Another source of inspiration for this idea of pictures within shapes arrived in my inbox just this morning. The Textile Museum in DC announced the arrival of The Textile Museum Journal, Volume 47 and the cover picture fits very well with my latest weaving projects.

This volume is devoted to “color in textiles across time and space” and includes an article by Elena Phipps on “Woven Brilliance: Approaching Color in Andean Textile Traditions.” You can take a look here for more information about subscribing to the journal, this issue, and back issues.

The cover of latest volume of The Textile Museum Journal…what I see are pictures within pictures!

I have actually had a pretty colorful morning all told as I got to attend a Zoom presentation by dye master Dagmar Klos on the basics of dyeing which was simply marvelous. There was plenty of information for me to apply to even the occasional dyeing that I I do for my ikat projects.

This picture of a weaver taking a break from her backstrap loom from the Threads of Life Facebook page really speaks to me. Maybe she is turning over ideas for her next piece.

And, sticking with the subject of color, I wanted to tell you about collections of beautiful backstrap-woven fabric squares that Threads of Life in Ubud, Bali is selling via their online store. I have been signed up for the Threads of Life newsletter ever since my failed attempt to attend their weft ikat workshop back in 2017. They were incredibly understanding about the misfortune that prevented my being there and I have always been very grateful to them for that. Of course they are just one of the many organizations that are being sorely affected by the pandemic and the resulting absence of tourism. They rely heavily on the purchase of textiles from visitors to their gallery in order to be able to continue supporting the various backstrap-weaving communities with whom they work.

From their website: By aligning with indigenous culture in its fieldwork and marketing, Threads of Life alleviates rural poverty, helps weavers to form independent producer groups, and facilitates their sustainable management of their natural dye resources.

I was very impressed by how quickly the Threads of Life staff sprang into action once the full extent of the pandemic had been realized and came up with new and truly unique ideas for their online store. Apparently, they have been holding onto an assortment of textiles that have been purchased from the weaving communities over the years that, due to having some small flaws, have not been sold in the Gallery. These pieces have been cut into squares and are being sold in beautifully coordinated color sets that can be used in patchwork and quilting projects. They make my mouth water!

The sets include squares of solid-color naturally-dyed cloth in stunning indigo blues and in rust and terracotta tones woven from handspun cotton as well as ikat and batik pieces. The cloth originates from various Indonesian islands and have been placed in these sets accordingly.

Here are some pictures of some of the sets: those blues!!

This is just a small sampling of all the products that they have to offer. There is also a range of large naturally-dyed lengths of fabric in the collection that they call Farmer to Fabric, tablet-woven trim in naturally dyed cotton and heirloom quality textiles and baskets representing various islands and communities.

This link to Threads of Life won’t just take you to their store. I hope that you can take some time to explore the site. There is a nice slide show at the bottom of the page illustrating the steps and time involved in the creation of an ikat textile. There are also tabs that take you to pages with information on the organization’s field work, natural dyes, the artisans with whom they work and the organization’s classes and workshops.

And, finally, I would like to tell you about the inclusion of an article I wrote in the latest issue of tinyStudio Creative Life magazine….”The Inspirational Publication for Mindful Crafters”.

(I would like point out that I would never have dared to wear shorts if my weaving teacher, Trini, was not also wearing them! This picture was taken by anthropologist Kathleen Klumpp when I accompanied her to stay with Trini and her family of cotton spinners and weavers in coastal Ecuador.)

I met the magazine’s editor, Suzy Brown, when I was in New Zealand last year. We wove together over a couple of days and she later invited me to write about my experience learning to weave in South America. The magazine comes out quarterly and this issue has 126 pages of luscious fibery inspiration and yes, there is quite a lot about color in there too with extensive articles on dyeing with woad and cochineal. It covers topics ranging from sheep breeds to fiber preparation, spinning, dyeing and felting, spinning tools and equipment and includes focus articles on various fiber artists (this issue includes an artist who creates amazingly innovative art work using machine-knit fabric as a base), visits to artists’ studios, as well as instructions for craft projects.

Suzy puts together a fun flip-through video for each issue on Youtube….

With a new ikat project about to hit the dye bath and a new book in the works, I don’t see any more wallowing in Limbo Land in my near future!

Take care and stay safe, please.

Picking up Ikat AGAIN

I have come back full circle to my ikat explorations again. I meandered over to Finnweave for a while and then made a quick visit to three-color double-faced pebble weave. Now I am back in ikat territory and making experiments by adding a twist of my own. Meanwhile, I am planning on paper the large projects in Finnweave and three-color pebble which will be next on the to-do list.

I smile when I remember one of my first ever attempts at ikat. I am pretty sure that I did this after my first trip to Ecuador in 2005. There I had seen that ikat weavers were using strips of cabuya fiber (agave) to wrap their warp threads and I brought back some to try for myself. I found it impossible to use! There must have been some tricks to effectively preparing and/or tying the cabuya that I had obviously missed.

For some reason, I decided that it would be a good idea to use my own hand spun llama yarn as the warp for this first attempt. Bad idea. Even worse was my attempt to dye it with cotton dye. I had no idea about such things at the time. For me, dye was dye and should work with any material. I was mad about the fact that what was supposed to be a strong so-called Mexican Red came out Barbie-pink but I started weaving it anyway.

Looking back on it now, I tend to think that it wasn’t a bad first attempt but it hadn’t pleased me at the time and I abandoned and discarded it. I wish I had kept it now. I suppose the Barbie-pink would have faded and washed out eventually anyway. I have learned some stuff since then!

After giving up on the cabuya, I tried using strips cut from plastic bags but I found that the plastic stretched and often broke as I tried to tie knots. Besides that, it was very hard to cut really fine strips. I remember watching a tv show in which someone was destroying some incriminating evidence on tape. They ripped the tape out of the cartridge and broke it apart. I was thinking…yeah, right, tape is not that easy to snap apart in bare hands. And then it dawned on me that cassette tape might make good wrapping material. That Barbie warp is wrapped with cassette tape. (I learned later that it doesn’t stand up too well to very hot water).

The next attempt was with wool singles that was sold as warp for tapestry weaving. I figured it wouldn’t be as stretchy as my hand spun llama. I am pretty sure that I used hair dye on this one! It was also abandoned because the threads shifted more than I was willing to tolerate once I started weaving. In any case there was and always is something to learn in these ikat experiments.

Let’s try again with something even less likely to stretch. This one was in UKI 20/2 cotton and the appropriate dye (I only owned cotton dyes at that point and was still under the impression that the Mexican red dye that had turned out Barbie-pink had just been a bad batch.)

What was supposed to be a deep ocean blue came out like this…what?! Another bad batch?! No. Here’s a new lesson. You need to scour the cotton thread to make it ready to accept dye. Fortunately, I really liked this kind of blue but this experiment also went to the trash despite the fact that the ikat patterns had come out quite nicely.

This next one on un-scoured cotton (the lesson was yet to be learned) came out a wishy-washy grey instead of black and had me contacting the seller of this 20/2 thread for help and it was he who told me about scouring. Who knew?! I was able to rescue the wishy-washy grey piece by running it through a second dyebath. It gave me something very close to the jet-black that I had been looking for…

And so goes the process of learning on your own!

Hooray, this time I got the color I was expecting. This is 8/2 cotton. These experiments were taking place in 2012.

In 2015 I started playing with creating shapes in ikat and filling them with pick-up patterns as I wove. I used both two-color and three-color pebble weave in the bird series at left. While doing those, I learned that if the proportions of the shape were important (for example, if I wanted to weave a circle rather than an oval), I needed to account for take-up when I wrapped the pattern into the warp. The tied figure would need to be slightly elongated.

Those experiments were in 8/2 cotton. At this point I had been given a roll of Japanese ikat tape which held up well in very hot water, I knew about scouring, and I had learned that there were different kinds of dyes made especially for protein fibers and other kinds for plant fibers. Now I could just concentrate on wrapping warp threads and weaving!

Fortunately, my most recent experiments with ikat in silk, which were started in 2019, have made it off the loom complete and have stayed out of the trash.

Recently, I experimented with leaving some spaces in the ikat pattern to add motifs in supplementary weft as I wove. That was fun and I enjoyed figuring out the exact point at which to start adding the supplementary-weft pattern and choosing a motif that would fit nicely in the available space.

I added just a small motif using supplementary weft to the center of this one…

These latest projects have been about learning to fold the warp in half either horizontally or vertically in order to wrap two layers of threads at once and create instant repeats of the pattern.

It has also been fun seeing the effect of using a multi-colored base warp and making some useful things in the process like this silk cowl.

And now I am back to the experiments in combined ikat and pick-up. I am starting out with a sensibly small project in 60/2 silk. No one wants their silk to end up in the trash!

I am going to revive a picture that I posted back in 2015 when I was first combining ikat with pick-up. This is what you get when you do a Google search for those two terms…

Michelle Nussbaumer’s ikat pickup truck from the Dallas Morning News

In my last post, I showed my latest attempt at this combination on the loom…

Here it is off the loom waiting to be something. Of course, it could just spend its life being a sample but I decided that, although there are some kinks to be ironed out in the process, the finished piece would make a nice second pouch for my iPod.

I added eye-patterned tubular bands to the sides and made a simple four-strand braid for the neck strap. I didn’t like the blank space at the top of the warp and added a piece of a pair of earrings that one of my students had made. I remember telling her when I bought the earrings that I wanted to dismantle them and use the pieces as pendants. I had planned on weaving or braiding the necklaces for the pendants. Of the four pieces, I still have three to use as pendants and one which now nicely fills the space on my pouch.

A second experiment with this technique is underway. I am adding a little something more this time. We’ll see how that goes. I am still at the wrapping stage.

So, that’s what I have been up to at my loom. I have also been doing a lot of Zooming with weavers. I feel that we can quite nicely re-create the feeling of a weaving circle via Zoom….not quite like these intimate circles of which I have been a part in the past but I feel that Zoom meetings have been working remarkably well and are doing a wonderful job of creating a sense of together-ness. My Zoom workshops on Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms have been going really well, I feel.

Here we have a group from New Zealand and a group from the USA from back in the good ol’ days. Now we can have individuals gathering via Zoom from all over the world!

In one of our get-togethers, Mary showed me the backstrap that she had just woven. I was so happy to see that the instructions from my tutorial are still being used. I wrote that one way back in 2009. I particularly like this way of making a backstrap because you use the entire warp. The unwoven parts at the start and end are braided and become part of the backstrap. Mary did a beautiful job with her braids.

You can find the tutorial for this backstrap here. It tells you how to weave it on a backstrap loom and what to use as an improvised backstrap as you do so. The article includes instructional video clips.

Todos Santos is approaching when here in Bolivia it is customary for all the family to visit and spend time with one’s departed relatives at the cemetery. Part of the act of remembrance is baking what are known here as tantawawas (bread babies). This picture from the website of Bolivia Bella shows one of the many forms these bread babies can take…

Small ceramic faces can also be bought in the street markets. They are pressed into the dough and then removed before baking. Once out of the oven the faces are fixed to the bread ( in some manner unknown to me). This image is from the bolivianita website….

This year some enterprising folk are selling some special 2020 faces that ae wearing Covid-protecting face masks. I would like to think that they are locally made and not brought in from China.

I am wondering in what creative ways Halloween will be celebrated in this extraordinary year. I’ve seen pictures on Facebook of people creating special shoots via which candy can be delivered while keeping a safe distance way from the kids.

Until next time, stay safe, please!

Backstrap Weaving – Staying Balanced

One part of me is crying out for more ikat while another part is telling me to take a break, process what I have learned so far, and then head back in. I am really pleased with my latest ikat piece, mainly because I don’t have to add the familiar footnote: ”The colors didn’t turn out anything like I had expected them to”. This time I mixed my dyes…two kinds of blue with a blue-grey…and got very close to what I had in mind. Can I replicate it? Probably not. I am using such small quantities and don’t have the equipment with which to measure them. All I have is the tiny spoon that comes with the Stevia.

In my last post, I showed you the warp extended on my backstrap loom. I told you how I was getting “railroad tracks” and had unwoven to see if I could do anything about it. No, there wasn’t a fix that I could see so off I went again with the weaving satisfied that I had at least tried.

As I mentioned in my last post, I believe the “railroad track” effect is due to the two layers of warp threads being slightly misaligned. I think that they got misaligned when I folded the warp in half to set it up on the frame where I wrap it with plastic. This is only the second time that I have folded the warp to halve its length. Other times I have either folded it in half to halve its width or not folded it at all.

This is the other project where I folded the warp in half. You can just see the two horizontal bars of white on either side of the center. That’s where I tied tape to secure the layers before I folded it. I think that’s the key and not doing that might be where I went wrong in this latest piece. I’ll just have to do another and test this theory!

I was pleased that the pattern in my latest piece came out balanced, that is, my warp threads were quite evenly spaced across the width of the piece. Many things about this piece make me very happy!

I say that the threads were “quite” evenly spaced because there is some tell-tale exposure of the supplementary weft in some parts where I added a motif in the center of the piece.

I created a little motif in supplementary weft that would suit the ikat shapes. The hardest part of this was creating and placing a motif that would fit exactly in the available space. So, I had to start weaving the motif at just the right moment, make sure that I got to the center of the motif when I had reached the center of the warp and make sure that I maintained an even beat so that the two halves of the motif were balanced. The horizontal center line is created by wrapping the supplementary weft around equally spaced warp threads….it looks like chain stitch and is a method I learned from my teachers in Guatemala. I couldn’t use the usual inlay technique for an uninterrupted line like that because the resulting float would be way too long.

The Guatemalan weavers use this chain-like “stitch” in their figures to form things like the brim of a hat, a bird’s beak, the base of a skirt, a wing, or a plant and feet. You can see some examples below in the piece I wove with my teacher in Guatemala.

Weavers in Bhutan also use it although they execute it in a slightly different way. My friend Wendy Garrity uses it in her work.

Here I am nearing the end. You can see the railroad tracks. I am thinking that in certain motifs, this effect could actually enhance a pattern but using it in that way would require being in control of when and where it occurs. I can’t see myself being able to do that!

Here it is fresh off the loom before being washed and pressed good and hard. It’s just the right size to hang on the narrow bit of dividing wall between my living/dining room and kitchen. However, I think I’ll be saving all my wall hangings for the time in some distant future when I am able to move back to Australia.

So, that marks the end of the experiments with un-dyed 60/2 silk for the time being. I’ve run out of thread. I’ll be spending some time now looking at my stash of colored 60/2 silk and the remains of my un-dyed 30/2 silk to see what kind of ikat project comes next.

As I said earlier, part of me is saying that I should take a break and do something else. I saw some work in striking black and gold by a Russian artist online that, at first glance, looked like Finnweave. When I read her descriptions, I saw that it was in fact crochet! It seemed to me that the motifs could be quite easily replicated in Finnweave. That is, if I could remember how to do Finnweave! I don’t weave this structure very much and have to go back to my notes each and every time I want to try it. My notes are scribblings of information taken from various sources including the Baizerman and Cahlander book on double weave structures and an article by David Xenakis in an old Prairie Wool Companion.

This is the last thing I wove in Finnweave….It’s in 8/2 cotton and has motifs that I saw on belts made by Otomi weavers in Mexico.

I set up the warp with multiple heddles. It’s the only one of the balanced structures that I have tried that I am able to successfully weave without using a reed to maintain sett.

It’s a double weave. Two balanced plain-weave layers are being woven…one dark and one light. They are connected when there is an exchange of colors between the two layers, that is, when you create a pick-up pattern. You can see the dark and light layers separated in this picture….

For all other work in balanced structures, I use one of the lovely bamboo reeds that I have. I have two wide ones and one small one. The small one is the finest.

Recently, I used the small one with my 30/2 silk as I test to see if perhaps one day I could dabble in weft ikat.

A couple of years ago I was using the larger reeds for my experiments with cotton sheer cloth and weft inlay…

This is what the cloth looked like after being washed….

I experimented with weaving a small piece without a reed (because the reed was too cumbersome for this width) and using a flea comb to beat!…It was somewhat successful but there’s no need to mess around with this on wider pieces when you have a reed, is there?

I think the first piece I ever wove using one of the bamboo reeds was this shadow weave piece from many years ago…

It’s fiddly reaching and working with multiple heddle rods behind the reed and I am grateful that Finnweave, with its need for multiple heddle rods, works for me without the need for a reed.

When I saw the black and gold crocheted piece that I mentioned earlier, I was reminded that my friend Betty had given me two cones of 20/2 cotton…one black and one gold. Perfect! So, I set out to weave a width sample.

The finest thread I have used for Finnweave so far has been 8/2. I needed a new sample in 20/2.

My first sample was cute but way too small to really give me a reliable measurement. I will probably return to it some time and weave a wrist cuff so that I have another structure to add to my wrist cuff collection. I used it to also test the proportions of some shapes I was panning to use in a bigger project.

I then created a wider warp.

There was a bit of a wobbly start as I got back into the rhythm of the moves and working out how best to interlock the weft threads when working with two shuttles. The lower pattern is from bags that are woven by Otomi weavers in Mexico. The pattern that I am starting is part of a motif from a piece I photographed in the National Museum of the American Indian in D.C way back in 2007, also from a textile woven in Mexico. I have doubled it and added a motif in between.

Although I am able to stop the warp threads from drifting together and making the piece warp-faced, you can see that the sett is not equal. The motif on the right is wider than the one on the left….something to work on. The motifs at the weaving line that I am just starting to weave are some basic leaves that I created. Of course, there had to be leaves! I am pleased with the way this is turning out. I am anxious to see how it all comes together after wet-finishing and am hoping that the black is color-fast. I am so used to the what-you-see-is-what-you-get nature of warp-faced weaving, that it is hard to wait until the wet-finish to discover how this will really look and feel. The 20/2 thread is not hard to work with . It is helpful that the threads are paired in Finnweave and so the units that I need to pick up for the pattern are easy to see.

Doramay Keasby wrote a nice article in Handwoven Jan/Feb 2011 in which she compared five types of double weave pick-up structures. She noted that Finnweave gave the smoothest pattern (that is, no feathering along horizontal or vertical lines. Feathering along horizontal lines look like icicles hanging off the end of a roof and can be a pretty effect) but is not double faced. So, you wouldn’t want to use it for something in which you would like both faces of the cloth to be admired. There is pattern on the reverse but it is rather odd looking.

So, that’s what has kept me busy and sane these last couple of weeks. That, and another Zoom meeting with some weavers along with my attempts to learn some new juggling tricks. I confess that I didn’t get too far with my spinning in the Tour de Fleece. I plied one lot of the green I was spinning and got through the purple. But, I am motivated to do some three-color pebble with this yarn and just need to keep that goal in sight. I am not adding extra twist as some people do for wool that is destined for warp-faced weaving. I just don’t like the way the “tight” thread feels and I would rather just adjust the technique I use to operate the loom to account for a softer yarn.

The messages that I get from online friends are a big help in these unsettled times too! Keep them coming. Please never feel shy about contacting me with questions. I include an email address in all my publications for that very reason. Or, you can write to me via a comment on this blog. The comments go into moderation before they are approved for publication so you can ask me not to publish, if you like.

Here are some projects from my online weaving friends….

Annette Giles has created a nice set of wrist cuffs using the warp-faced double weave structure that she learned in my book. I see that she added a touch or two of her own to some of the patterns. That’s a good first step toward designing one’s own motifs.

Judy Lepthien has also been using my Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms book and has already started creating some patterns of her own.

Wendy sent me a picture of the piece that she wove on a backstrap loom and sewed into a pillow. She tells me that she had some trouble handling the wider warp with the multi-sword pick-up technique that I teach in my Complementary-warp Pick-up book and so she went back to a narrower band to practice it some more. Then she was able to better handle this wider piece. The pattern is one used by weavers in the community of Chinchero, Peru.

Josefin Waltin has been using her own hand spun and hand dyed yarn to weave fabric on a backstrap loom. She used this fabric to make a sweet bag….

Carlos Vargas has been working with un-mercerized cotton on his backstrap loom to make some beautiful fabric too.. He said that he worked out a way to operate the loom so that there was not too much abrasion of the un-mercerized cotton. If not handled well, un-mercerized cotton can create a mess of fluff in the heddles and make it impossible to create clear sheds. Backstrap weavers need to have different strategies up their sleeves to allow them to work with a variety of materials. It would be a shame to have to be limited to only the smoothest and friendliest of materials…only mercerized cotton and only very tightly spun wool, for example.

It’s nice to finish this post admiring Josefin and Carlos’ soothing colors.

Take care, please and I’ll see you again soon.

Backstrap Weaving – Creative outlets

It’s interesting to see what my online friends and acquaintances are doing with the time they have on their hands during these periods of lock-down and self isolation. I won’t call it “killing time” as who would want to kill a commodity that is so precious? Most are using the time, their hands and yarn from their stashes to weave, crochet, braid and knit. A couple of friends have been drawing. My friend Yonat just finished a spectacular tapestry piece and I have seen some amazing quilts developing.

It’s no secret what I have been doing with my time and it’s not really anything different to what I would be doing in a “normal” world. The only difference is that I am not organizing my time around the fact that I have a trip away coming up. The last few years gave me the opportunity to travel to Australia in the down-under winter months. We are still in strict lock-down here and for me the biggest difference is having to pick through my stash to plan my future projects rather than plan something and only then buy yarn specifically for those projects on a trip away. There’s something rather nice about that. So, it’s all about weaving for me and soon it will be about planning my next book.

Oh, and I have been juggling. That’s a new one. My nephew taught me to juggle many years ago when I was on a visit to Australia. You never forget but you do get rusty….in my case, very rusty. It’s a great way to warm up my arms and shoulders before I do other exercises, not to mention all the other parts of the body that are involved in retrieving dropped balls. Now I am thinking about how to make my own juggling balls. I don’t need another set but some custom-made ones would be fun. I have a “good” set and then a set of crocheted rice-filled ones that I bought from Guatemala. It’s amusing watching the grains of rice escape and fly about the room as I toss the balls in the air. Maybe I’ll learn something other than the basic three-ball toss.

I hand-sewed my face masks. They came out pretty well. I picked apart a disposable pleated surgical mask to use as the model, made it a bit wider to reach to my ears, and added a little tuck under the chin. I had some wire to use for the nose and used the elastic from some eye masks that I had. One mask is only a single layer of fabric and the other is doubled. I wear them both at the same time. They’ve been through the wash several times and survived. I guess my hand-sewing isn’t that bad after all. Wearing a mask is mandatory in all stores and businesses here. I have not heard a single peep of complaint from anyone here about that.

My sister-in-law, Debbie, is one of the people that I mentioned who took up drawing during some of her stay-safe-at-home time. She had never done any drawing at all in her life and she whipped up this sketch of me wearing a mask and surprised me with it. I love it….

I don’t sew and don’t have a stash of fabric. The masks were made from fabric that my friend Claudia had given me so that I could sew an edging on my ikat cowl. I guess I favor these autumn colors. They happen to be the kinds of colors that I have been using in my recent ikat experiments.

After having finished experiment #8, above, I calculated the amount of 60/2 un-dyed silk that I had left to play with and saw that I had enough to make a sash that could hang on the wall with the other two pieces. That would leave me with a tiny bit to make a wrist cuff. I always like to be able to wear cuffs when I teach. They serve as nice portable examples of the various techniques that I use in my work. After all this time spent on ikat, I felt I needed to add an ikat cuff to the collection. However, I wanted it also be an experiment and planned to make it a test of some of the dye colors that I would use in the larger sash project….autumn colors.

Here it is on my arm along with other cuffs and bracelets that I have woven in autumn colors. It is fresh off the loom here and so it looks dull and fluffy and you can still see the charcoal markings where I drew the pattern on the warp before tying the tape. Its look would change after a wash and press.

One of the tape ties came partly undone in the dye bath which spoiled the pattern a little. I guess I got distracted and didn’t complete the knot for that particular tie. This piece went through three dye baths. That’s a lot of fuss for such a small piece but I learn something every time. Figuring out the most efficient way to stage the steps for dyeing the three colors colors is something that I am learning. On this occasion, I dyed with the burnt orange first. Then I unwrapped the parts that would be yellow and dyed those. Then I unwrapped the border threads and covered the entire pattern section with tape and dyed brown. Other possible sequences come to mind and I guess it depends on the ratio of pattern area to negative space, the colors that are being used, and just how much wrapping, unwrapping and re-wrapping you want to do. I had been hoping that the border and the rest of the negative space would be significantly different tones of brown….a solid dark brown on the borders and a reddish-brown in the other negative spaces. They are different but not so much as to be really noticeable.

I cut and hemmed the ends. The 60/2 silk is fine enough to allow me to hem without creating too much bulk. I’ll add some small snaps, two at each end. I usually add ribbon crimps to cuffs that are too bulky to hem. Jump rings and lobster-claw clasps finish them off nicely. As with any kind of bracelet, attaching the clasp with one hand can be tricky. I have done it often enough now to have a method that works well. That’s something that you might want to consider if you are planning a cuff of your own.

I hemmed and used snaps for these bands in 60/2 silk. There are some very low profile plastic snaps out there but I actually find them quite hard to do up and am sticking with metal ones for the time being.

I also like using a button along with a braided loop. The metal ribbon crimp has a built-in loop through which the braided cord can be passed and knotted to make a loop. The crimp covers and protects the cut raw edge of the band. The other ends of my bands are usually selvedges. Weaving bands like these on my backstrap loom allows me to start with a selvedge and so I can sew a button directly to that end. I don’t have to worry about a raw edge unraveling.

If a band has two raw edges and you want to use a button and loop, I think that adding a ribbon crimp to protect both ends would work well. The button could still be sewn to the band to overlap the crimp (and therefore hide the loop in the crimp.). I have since found out via a Facebook friend that you can buy ribbon crimps that don’t have the loop. One of these days, I’ll get some of those via an Etsy store called TwilightsFancy.

One of my favorite ways to finish a cuff is with a woven tubular band that is woven and sewn to the fabric at the same time. The weft becomes the sewing thread. The tube encloses and protects the edge of the band and really becomes part of the piece rather than just perching as an addition along the very edge. These kinds of tubular bands need to be used on fabric that is quite sturdy. In these two examples I used an eye-pattern tubular band.

I used the tubular band to cover and protect the raw edge of these wool bands. The band on the left is 20/2 worsted spun Mora yarn and the one on the right is my hand spun yarn made from from some particularly nasty llama fiber that I bought in the highlands way back in 2002 when I didn’t know any better. The center color comes from cochineal. The button is made from tagua nut from Ecuador.

The use of magnets as closures for these kinds of cuffs has been discussed but I can’t say that I trust them unless they are lockable. I would hate to lose my hand spun cuff and the tagua nut button which is a souvenir of my travels in 2005. One Facebook friend laughed about the fact that she has walked away and left bracelets with magnet closures attached dangling to metal cabinets.. Maybe a magnet closure with a safety chain would work although I do remember one weaver whose safety chain was attracted to the magnet and was therefore always stuck to it in a crumpled mess!

I have set up what could be the last 60/2 ikat experiment for a while (I say “could be” because I do have colored 60/2 silk a-plenty and as long as I have dark colored dye, I can continue to create ikat patterns. In fact, I already have some ideas!). This latest project is for the sash wall hanging…a long-ish narrow warp which I am doubling so that I can wrap two layers at once and create a pattern repeat.

First some scratchings on paper….

That’s the basic pattern that will be repeated as a mirror reflection of itself length-wise. Other bits of pattern will be added later if all goes well. And here’s the warp extended on its frame and the start of the wrappings….so far, so good.

My plan to use autumn colors has changed. I would like to try two tones of blue. I love some of the Indonesian textiles I have seen where the ikat artisans tie a pattern and then dip the warp in indigo to create a pale shade of blue. Then they tie more patterns into the pale blue and dye the warp a much darker blue. The challenge is to see if I can adjust the blue dye I have with maybe some bits of black or grey to get the kind of blue I have in mind and then create a light and dark shade. Considering the fact that none of the colors I have used so far have turned out as I had envisioned, I am thinking that this plan is quite unlikely to succeed. I will have black dye on standby to cover up any mess! I haven’t had to resort to this Plan B yet. Fingers crossed.

And now I get to show you what my online weaving friends have been doing…

You may remember that last year I spent a weekend with some of my backstrap-loom-enthusiast friends during which we focused on preparing wide projects. Here is Ann last year making heddles after a day of planning and warping….

Aunt Lydia’s size 10 has some bold and beautiful colors and Ann combined them so nicely.

Ann has had time to finish this project during time spent at home. She noted that it took a year to get through the first half and only a week to finish the rest! She’ll be sewing the fabric into a bag. I know that Ann is really skilled at the sewing machine and that this will be something awesome.

Sally Backes has more than one band project on the go. This one is on her Windhaven Fiddle loom and she is creating a pattern from my More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns book. If you have studied either the Andean Pebble Weave method or the complementary-warp pick-up methods that I teach in my books, you will be able to weave the patterns in this pattern book. I love the red and white border arrangement that Sally has chosen.

Karen Rein chose flower and leaf motifs to decorate her first warp-faced double weave band. These motifs form part of the 11/12-thread set which are designed to fit on the first learning band. There are also sets with 15/16 threads and 19/20 threads. This was woven on an inkle loom using the instructions from my Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms book.

In the double weave book I recommend using a loom that gives you, as an absolute minimum, five inches of working space. That is the distance from the weaving line to the heddles. However, where there is a will there’s a way. My weaving friend, Kate, had to run some errands which involved some sitting about and waiting. She took this tiny loom along with her as it is the most portable one she has. Another online weaving friend of mine owns one of these and says it fits in her purse! There isn’t what I would call a comfortable amount of working room for doing pick-up on this loom, particularly not for double weave, but Kate made it work and wove the little llama figure from my book while she was out. This wasn’t Kate’s first double weave band. She wove the first one on a much larger inkle loom that gave her a much more comfortable amount of space in which to work. The little loom is adorable!

I am so pleased to see that Susi Saparautzki has got to the stage where she is comfortable weaving warp-faced double weave and has moved on to designing her own patterns. One of the things I have emphasized in the book is just how easy it is to do this. Susi created a motif with dolphins and I love the splash of background on which she has placed them.

Stacy Holder’s Andean Pebble Weave band is stunning. I often forget when I am planning my projects that one can use something other than white as the lighter of the two pattern colors. I love this combination. This pattern along with several other knot-work motifs is charted in the More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns book.

Wendy has been out backstrap weaving again with her clever self-contained set-up. For this band she has been using beautiful reeled silk from Bhutan as warp and supplementary weft in jewel colors and plans to make a wrist cuff…..

Vonnie Galusha’s first Andean Pebble Weave band was used as inspiration for members of the Sacramento Weavers and Spinners Guild in their recent news letter. Vonnie worked with my Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms book.

And, finally, back to the backstrap loom. Here’s Jennifer Kwong’s set-up and first ever band in complementary-warp pick-up. It’s a beauty. We love her clever use of a crepe spatula as a sword. (Complementary-warp Pick-up book…also available in German).

That’s all for now. Mask up, if you can, and stay safe, please.