Tag: spinning

Backstrap Weaving: Looms, MORE looms and southern hospitality.

Spring has sprung in North Carolina! I am spending some time here in Lincoln County with my online buddy Lisa and her family. Lisa’s father owns and runs the local newspaper and is a wealth of information on local history and its colorful characters and has kept me highly entertained with stories throughout my stay over breakfasts and dinners of typical southern treats. He tells me that North Carolina, while being one of the ten most populous states in the US, is also one of the most forested. This town looks like a gorgeous well manicured and landscaped park in which people have been graciously allowed to place their homes – luscious, expansive  green front lawns, azaleas in full bloom, majestic oaks, show-case flower beds and vegetable and herb gardens abound. You can barely see the houses amongst the trees and shrubs – so gorgeous!..so spacious! Oh, and I heard a mocking bird yesterday! – To Kill A Mockingbird is my favorite book.

And I have been treated to helping upon helping of southern hospitality. I am so tickled everytime someone calls me ma’am!  I was eager to try some typical southern food – all those names that we hear in movies and TV shows and have no clue about –  so Lisa’s husband made me a batch of “biscuits” which we enjoyed with Lisa’s homemade berry jams. We have biscuits in Australia but our biscuits are what people in North America call cookies.

LEFT: Homemade buttermilk biscuits…RIGHT: A good southern breakfast.

We went out for a good southern breakfast. The largest plate in the above picture is mine! – biscuits with gravy, corn grits and country ham. I still can’t believe I ate all that! I asked about chitlins as I have always wondered about those but the general reaction at the table made me think that I would be better off not trying them!

For something different, Lisa and Ryan took me to their favorite Thai restaurant as I had mentioned that south-east Asian food is something that I miss in Bolivia.

On entering the restaurant, Lisa and I were drawn immediately to the textiles that decorated the walls and tables. The owner was so pleased by our interest in Thai weaving that he gave us each a woven bag from Thailand!

So, what has been planned for my visit apart from eating? – lots  and lots of fibery fun! Lisa and I met online through a discussion on her fabulous yurt band which you may remember from a previous post. Finally my little yurt band border bands get to meet their inspiration. You can see them there at right next to the huge forty-eight foot yurt band. There is nothing like seeing something like this “for real” after having admired it for so long online. The colors are so much richer and I am suprised at how loose and flexible the weave is compared to South American bands which are beaten hard into a stiff firm fabric.

So Lisa and I met on Ravelry where she was trying to figure out the structure of the yurt band weave to see if she could reproduce it. Photos were flying back and forth in cyber space and it was only after seeing the back side of the textile that I finally recognized it as simple warp floats. We then set about weaving a tiny reproduction – the “s” motif  on which I made a tutorial here. We laugh about the fact that a chica in South America helped a gal in North America figure out a weave from Central Asia – and all online! And thus  a friendship was formed.

By the way, my friend Caroline in Australia has been doing her own investigation into other kinds of yurt band construction which you can read about here. She wove a three-color reproduction band recently.

Inkle, cardboard, tapestry, card, backstrap, frame and rigid heddle looms!

Lisa is a felter, spinner, knitter, painter, braider, weaver and loom gatherer. In an attempt to clear some space so we could use her four-shaft floor loom, we pulled no less than fourteen looms out of her studio!  Now what am I , the backstrap weaver doing on a four-shaft loom? I will tell you more about that little adventure later on.

In the meantime, check out Lisa’s fabulous felt work above. Lisa is in the local fiber guild and SCA group and so her projects tend to involve historical reproductions with her SCA companions as well as work with the fiber guild which gives her an outlet for more contemporary pieces.

Lisa’s felted pouch and inkle loom woven strap. I can’t wait to make one and decorate it with a backstrap woven band. The yurt design cell phone pouch I wove for Lisa is next to it with her iphone inside – a perfect fit.

The piece above on the left has a Scythian design. The Scythian people existed on the Central Asian steppe around 500 BC and a feature of their animal motifs is the twisted hindquarters.

The piece above on the right is a Viking design.

There are a lot of felted pieces in Lisa’s home. I am seated on a felt cushion with my feet on a felted rug and, hopefully, if time permits, Lisa will teach me to make a felted pouch like the one at left. I will do a South American motif – shock! – and weave a strap on my backstrap loom.

I have my fingers crossed for a cut pile lesson or two while here too! Lisa has one started on her Mirrix loom which you can see on the left. The felt rug in the center is one she bought and is from Kazakhstan and I think it is splendid. At right, check out her grin as she peruses her newly arrived catalog from the “Secrets of the Silk Road” exhibition currently at the Bower Museum in Santa Ana.

Did I mention that she is also a terrific spinner? Here are a few of her most treasured spindles –  Turkish and Tibetan styles, phangs from Ladakh, a Kundert, which is her workhorse spindle, and sentimentally valuable ones gifted by her husband as well as a bead whorl crafted by 5 1/2 year-old Joshua.

Lisa loves to teach and share and I got to see her in her element at an Earth Day Festival last weekend, where she showed and taught her crafts.

Lisa has taught me that finger loop braiding need not be limited to short braids as I had thought. She has a nifty way of hooking the end around her toe and an even niftier way of tamping down the braid which I will show you in a video. Here, she is teaching a five-strand braid to girl scouts, Carolie and Julia who had a ball with it.

When my weaving tecaher in Potosi  taught me a six-strand finger loop flat braid, I would make the braid while she would tamp it down using the side of her hand with a slicing action. So it seemed that two people were required to work together to make the braid nicely. Not so… check out Lisa’s cool foot action in this video!

I got to demonstrate backstrap weaving and that was a lot of fun. There was a convenient pole in our area to which I could tie up.
There was music and the weaver eye, forever on the lookout, spotted the ikat guitar strap

I wove pebble weave to promote my new e-monograph and it was quite a different experience to weaving at CNCH where my audience was largely weavers.

At this Earth Day event a lot of the people had never seen weaving demonstrated in any form and we attracted quite a lot of onlookers.

Lisa was spinning and explaining the felting process while I knelt on the floor and wove.

Caught up in the excitement of it all, I completely forgot that that kneeling position is not something I can maintain for longer that five minutes at home! I sat there happily for a couple of hours!

Kids were kept busy painting Earth Day flags. I was quite taken with a lady who was selling cards on recycled paper with photographs of her cats-eye-glasses-1960’s youth and with a wicked sense of humor. She gave a pair of cats-eye sunglasses to her vistors and that led to this photo op with me there in the center. Becca, from Shiele Museum, who was making paper flowers with kids, kind of caught the whole sunny spirit of the day with her colorful clothes and radiant smile.

The next day I was invited to visit with British couple Maurice and Ursula. Those of you who are on Weavetech may know Maurice and the superbly crafted looms he made for himself. Maurice, on hearing that there was another “British Subject” in town, promptly invited me to tea and then lunch and a visit with his four and eight-shaft floor looms and weaving studio. Ursula’s passion is quilting.

Maurice in his studio. He also built the spinning wheel in the center. Ursula posed with her quilt which she has finished piecing together but has yet to quilt. She is still experimenting with designs on her recently purchased quilting machine. Maurice and Ursula can work side by side on their fiber pursuits in the studio. The photo does not show the true colors unfortunately. The main colors are deep purple and apple green and they are stunning together.

Since putting out my e-monograph on Andean Pebble Weave, I have had a couple of enquiries about whether the technique can be worked on a four-shaft loom. Sadly, I didn’t feel qualified to answer those questions well and so I was determined to get educated about that on this part of my trip and Maurice was extremely helpful. I had never seen a four-shaft loom “in person” and I don’t think that Maurice was all that familiar with a backstrap loom. So together we muddled through and came up with a possible way to get the pebble weave going on this kind of loom if you simply didn’t have any other kind of loom to work with.

Here Lisa and I are ready to attack this project. I got a lesson in warping one of these looms with this tiny narrow warp. We warped front to back with Lisa sitting on a stool behind the harnesses while I fed the yarns to her. We only used two harnesses and set up the pebble sheds in those.
All set up and on our way. We used a pair of string heddles in front to form the picking cross and removed the reed and away we went. All went very smoothly starting off with plain pebble weave. We are using an eight-revolution warp which gives us sixteen warps from which to pick patterns. This wee band looks quite funny on this large loom.
The first motif is started and Lisa’s smile says it all.
More motifs start to take shape and all is working well, The tension is just right as the motifs are not elongated and there is enough room to get hands and sticks in to do the pick up.
Opening the heddle sheds to form a picking cross and then using a stick to pick up the pattern warps.
More motifs. This center one is a “viscacha”, a rabbit-like creature with a long tail found at high Andean altitudes . The pattern charts for these are in my e-monograph.

So, we had fun with this. Lisa learned to make patterned bands (she had graciously tested my instructions for plain pebble weave before I published my e-monograph) and I learned a little about the workings of a four-shaft floor loom. What a lovely wide shed those harnesses create with the minimum of effort.

EDIT…..As I get more familiar with this loom and its workings, I have had the famous aha! moment and figured a way to do away with the string heddles and get everything into the four shafts. However it won’t make the actual weaving any faster. It is still, after all, a pick up weave and individual warp threads need to be handled. When I get back here from MSWF and a short stay in DC, I shall get another band on this loom.

Lisa is not the only weaver in this household. Above you can see five-year old Joshua making a scarf on an Easy Weaver rigid heddle loom. The scarf has been finished and hopefully he will find it so I can show it to you here before I publish this post.

I had another encounter with this Easy Weaver loom this week as Brian Jones in England sent me a picture of an Andean pebble weave band he has been weaving following my e-monograph. I can’t tell you all how ecstatic I am about seeing the monograph being put to use!! 🙂

LEFT: Brian’s warp set up on his Easy Weaver loom. He is weaving a band from lesson 2. RIGHT:Jennifer Jordan made a key fob with the plain pebble weave band in lesson 1.

I told you before that Lisa pulled out her collection of looms so that we could get at the four-shaft one and this gave me a chance to play with and think about looms, other than backstrap ones, on which pick up bands can be woven.

You may know Franco’s clipboard loom at left. Lisa also has a somewhat sturdier frame loom on which she has been weaving a band with simple warp floats.

If some kind of tensioning system could be rigged on these so that tension could be eased off as weaving progressed, they would be wonderful. As is, the amount of take up in the warp makes it increasingly difficult to open the shed and pick the warps as weaving progresses.

I set up a warp for Andean Pebble Weave on Lisa’s frame loom to see what it would feel like and wove some pre-Columbian birds. The pattern charts for these are in my e-monograph.

As I warped up quite firmly, I think I will only be able to weave half this warp before everything gets too tight. I think it is a nice loom for sampling and short bands.


Here are some pick up bands on inkle looms. The one on the left above was made by Karren from the Weavolution Backstrap Weaving Group some time ago. She made this into a cell phone pouch. This motif is charted in my e-monograph.
On the right is Lisa’s “s” yurt band design on her inkle loom. I warped up a narrow pebble weave band on an inkle loom when I was in California and enjoyed doing all manual pick up. I have just started winding a warp for a wider one on one of Lisa’s looms and will use additional string heddles this time. I’ll keep you updated on that.
Above, you can see a picture that Ellen sent me from Denmark where she is weaving one-weft double weave on her inkle loom following my tutorial on Weavolution.

Carolyn sent me these pictures of her first Andean pebble weave band, following lesson one in my e-monograph, which she lashed to her rigid heddle loom.

Then there are tapestry looms, or this Navajo loom onto which I lashed a four-color pebble weave warp. My Navajo loom has a tensioning device so I could ease off on the tension as I progressed and, therefore, compensate for the take up.

Lisa’s Mirrix loom on which she has her cut pile weaving would work well for this.

So, all the beautiful pick up weaves that I show on my blog and for which I have provided tutorials, can be set up on a variety of looms. They by no means have to be restricted to the backstrap loom.

This has been a wonderful learning experience here! Tomorrow we are going to get into some felting. I would like to learn this and make something for myself but probably won’t get to continue with it back in Bolivia as I can’t get sheep wool where I live in Santa Cruz. And then there is the cut pile weaving. I got Noreen Roberts’s wonderful book on the subject but there is nothing like having someone show you in person. Lisa is still in the experimental stage with this but I am sure that she will be able to give me some good tips.

And look above at what she gave me! – a charka from India. I am thrilled to bits to have something like this from my place of birth. Lisa’s fiber guild friend Katherine came over today and showed me how to use it.

Katherine spinning cotton on my new Indian charka – the parts need a good oiling! At right is Katherine’s own charka made by Bosworth – what a piece of work! Of course she makes it all look terribly easy. Lisa sat quietly by spinning up cotton of sewing thread weight on a takhli supported spindle. So we had a very spindly day and shall be getting back into our pebble weave projects later-Lisa on the 4-shaft loom and me on the inkle.

Katherine sews and also makes card woven bands. She made the pin cushions from felt and then embroidered them and the band, I think, is intended for her husband’s guitar.

I would so love to be in a fiber guild and surrounded by all these talented people. Well, I shall do my best to soak up everything I can from Lisa during my stay here although I have to admit that being in Weavolution gives me access to weavers from all over the world – so I can’t complain – and I only need to go up into the Bolivian highlands to be with wonderfully talented backstrap weavers.

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I have a band to show you from Ann Littlewood, woven from her own design in supplementary weft technique (see my tutorial here). She is going to use this as a bookmark.

And I also had a fun message over at Weavolution from Marta Madeja in Spain who tells me that she is hiking in the Alpujarras south of Granada and picked up some sticks along the way to make a backstrap loom. She has never tried backstrap weaving before and decided to dive head first into pebble weave and bought my e-monograph. The only “yarn” she had about was embroidery thread and she managed to make a tiny pebble weave band based on lesson 1 in the monograph.

The pin will show you just how tiny this band is. She tells me that she will try lesson 2  with thicker yarn when she gets home. I wonder what she tied up to on the trail. I am waiting to hear more details from her. I think this is really cool!

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Finishing here with a million thanks to Lisa, Ryan and Jack-in-the Box Joshua, popping into the photo there below, for an amazing time in North Carolina. We are off to Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival this weekend. If you are going, please drop by and say hi. I will be demonstrating backstrap weaving in the rabbit building at the Weavolution meet up point from noon to one pm on both days.

See you there!

Thanks to all who have written to me about the e-monograph. Keep the projects and comments coming. 🙂

Backstrap Weaving- Crafting “on the road” and a video tutorial

Hopefully, if all my standby flights worked out, at the time this post is published I will be sitting in Robyn Spady’s inkle weaving class at CNCH. (Conference for Northern California Handweavers) My first such event! – very excited. This will be my first experience with an inkle loom and, hopefully, it will be better qualify me to answer those questions I often get about transferring pick-up techniques normally woven on  backstrap looms to inkle looms.

On Saturday, I will be taking Syne Mitchell’s rigid heddle class and the rest of the time I guess I will be looking at all the goodies on display, seeing Weavolution members in the flesh for the first time at the meet-up, perusing the galleries and taking lots of pictures to share with you all here at some stage.

So, as I write this here in Santa Cruz, Bolivia I am thinking it is time for me to get my “on the road” crafting stuff together.

I always take my backstrap gear along with me and, when there really isn’t anywhere I can hitch my loom, I braid or spin.

First the backstrap gear…

Backstrap weaving stuff to take traveling.
Weaving literally on the road near Potosi, Bolivia. I went with friends to the village of Calcha near Potosi to meet with weavers. On the way back we had to sit for hours on the side of the road waiting for a ride and finally got to travel back to Potosi in the back of a truck. We passed the time by hitching to a convenient dead tree and weaving. We had bought a sheep skin in the market in Calcha so we could pass the night sleeping on the floor in the hospital! This made a nice comfy seat for weaving. One lady who lived right near the main road where we were waiting came along to see and was enchanted!

I see that there is something I forgot to include in the photo – several flat non-stretchy shoelaces to tie the loom bars to a fixed object. I usually take a project already warped up and then my mini warping board goes along for when I get through that and want to start another.

The mini warping board with its removable screw “stakes”  is on the left.  Moving from there to the right, I have several thin dowels for cross sticks and heddle rods, my new shadow weave sewing kit purse, three beaters, a large curved needle, my new belt shuttle (thanks Lydia!), two loom bars and a roll up rod,  metal rods for three-selvedge pieces and my backstrap. I also take a small bottle of white glue so I can finish the braids on keyfobs and bookmarks. I usually pick up yarn on the trip so I can try out new stuff.

As for the braiding…

I was recently sent this image of a Tibetan nomad sling. I am no braiding expert but superficially, at least, the braid on the left looks exactly like the Margarita braid that I learned in Peru.

No, I am not going to pop a marudai, the piece of equipment on the left, into my backpack. Thanks to my teacher, Zacarias in Peru, I can make the nice Palma and Margarita braids used to make slings in Peru (which I first showed you in this post) with those two pieces of equipment on the right.

Of course there are other ways to braid the 24-strand braids without the use of cumbersome equipment. Rodrick Owen shows you in his Braids 250 Patterns from Japan, Peru and Beyond how to make them using notched cardboard squares and circles to keep the strands nicely in order. Perhaps you listened to the recent WeaveZine weavecast with Roderick Owen.

I am going to show you by video today how to work the 24-strand Palma braid as I was taught in Peru by a sling braider. The fiber used in the sling braids is generally llama and the strands are fairly thick and, therefore, easy to manage in the hands. I don’t imagine it would be quite so easy with fine yarns.

The video has been split into two segments. The technique has four parts so you will see parts one and two on the first video and the other two parts on the second one.

The idea of the videos is to show you the movements of the strands. I am not showing you there exactly how my teacher held his hand as he braided as the crossings were not so clear on the video that way so I will show you that in a still shot later.

 

Two Palma braids made with 12wpi cotton. I am going to use the one on the right as a strap for the bag which you can just see at right.

Getting started on the Palma braid:

You need eight strands of each of three colors, that is, twenty-four in total. Keep the strands short for your first practice braids – I suggest no longer than 18″. Tie all the ends together in a knot . Hold the knot in your fist having all the strands emerging from the top of your hand and then separate them into four groups. Try to align the strands as closely as possible in the order shown in the following diagram. Organized in this way, you will have red and yellow “Vs” in your braid separated by columns of light blue. It will be impossible to get the strands to stay exactly in this order at first, but don’t worry about that. This is just to get them more or less in place so you can start.


You can also see the strand order in the photo below left. Once you are braiding, only two sets of strands are worked together at any one time. You work with the near and far side sets while the other two sets are hidden in your fist, clasped against the braid itself as you can see in the photo below at right.

LEFT: The four groups of strands. RIGHT: Grasping the strands in the fist.

And now for the videos…They are a bit on the dark side-still haven’t found the perfect spot for movie making…


Well, I hope these video instructions were clear for you. Remember that yellows always pair with reds and vice versa and that you are always working from left to right across the strands. In your very first two moves, you won’t need to think about “uppers” and “lowers” when you work with the blues – just grab any blue and cross it over. Uppers and lowers will become apparent after that. Tug lightly on each strand before you cross it.

Starting is the hardest part as the strands will be loose and wandering about. After the first sequence, however, they will begin to sit naturally in their correct positions.

The picture at left shows how my teacher held the strands while braiding.  All the ends were wound into butterflies and his hand was tilted so the strands all hung down. It looks like a mess and the strands occasionally wrap around each other, but it works! Strands are going this way and that and then you open your fingers to reveal this gorgeous braid. This is the first time I will be using a braid for a bag strap – let’s see how it goes.

I will be braiding on my flight to San Francisco as I am putting some woven pieces in the gallery at the conference and hope to use the braids to hang them. This is one of those things I just didn’t get around to doing so I guess I should stick to four-strand braids for this so I can get them done quickly.

And finally the spinning…

I always take a spindle and a bit of llama fiber along but usually only to show people a

Trini in Ecuador having a go on my drop spindle.

typical Bolivian spindle. The weavers in Guatemala knew nothing about llamas or llama fiber so it was fun to show them pictures of llamas and samples of the fiber as well as some things I had woven with it. Those in coastal Ecuador had never seen drop spinning so it was nice to be able to teach them a little. Spinning, unlike pick-up weaving and braiding, is something I can manage while chatting with people. I do like hunting for typical spindles and unusual whorls on my trips and this usually leads me off the beaten track. Having a spindle on me is always a good ice breaker. Not everyone can weave but in the villages of Bolivia it seems almost everyone can spin a bit or at least use a spindle to respin or ply yarn. They actually think I am a little mad when I say I want to learn – “What is there to learn? Even my four-year old son can do it!” – they tell me.

LEFT: Typical drop spindles sold in the Bolivian markets. RIGHT: A few of the spindles that I have collected in my travels.
LEFT: Spinning in Yanque, Peru RIGHT: Salasaca, Ecuador where the spindle called ‘sigsig’ is made from pampas grass stems. The wool is spun to be woven on floor looms into the cloth from which skirts and shawls are made.
LEFT: Spinning in Otavalo, Ecuador RIGHT: Spinning on the way home from the market, Tarabuco, Bolivia.

And last of all I take my small photo albums with pictures of weavers, looms and textiles from around South America to show weavers and travelers. I also have another album with small samples of various motifs I like to weave. In Salasaca they treated this like some kind of shopping catalog and started  making orders selecting motifs for belts and purses!

Now is there any room left in the backpack for clothes and stuff?

I am going to try my best to continue with my Friday blog posts while on the road. If I don’t don’t get a post out, it will mean I am having too much fun! 🙂

Late addition to this post…here is Stitchwort’s “S” design band from last week’s tutorial on her inkle loom made with her own handspun yarn. So if you have been wanting to try these techniques but have been a bit dubious about getting strapped into a backstrap loom, take a look at the lovely band that she has turned out. By the way, I am in love with her little shuttle and she made that herself – check it out on her blog.

The only drawback with the inkle loom that I can see is width limitations but for a band like this there is no problem. One Weavolution member did mention that these types of weaves put a lot of strain on the inkle loom so that is something to bear in mind – just in case! I am hoping to come back from CNCH a lot wiser about inkle looms!

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TRAVEL UPDATE…WEDNESDAY: Yay I made it. Both my luggage and I got to San Francisco. I have one day to recover from the trip before the conference. Gorgeous day here today – I even got sunburned.

A little time for some sightseeing…

This is one of the places I wanted to see but, wouldn’t you know it?-it was closed just today to prepare for an exhibition. So I had to satisfy myself with pressing my nose against the window and looking at all the lovely things.
THURSDAY: Dim sum breakfast in lively Chinatown, San Francisco before heading down the coast to Santa Clara. The ocean!-something I miss in Bolivia.
At the Convention Center- meeting other weavers and a lesson on spinning angora rabbit fiber from Janet, a Weavolution friend, using spindles with bead whorls.
A couple more “on the road” weaving tools belonging to my roomies here at the conference. LEFT: Janet’s mini inkle loom which she let me play on last night. RIGHT: Connie’s cool C Cactus Flower Navajo loom with her cute miniature rug.

It is funny that I have run into this Cactus Flower loom here because I saw one for the very first time last weekend when I was emailing my first weaving teacher – a lady here in the US who taught me Navajo style weaving. This is where I first got my start in weaving back in 1995 and, seeing as I am here once again in the US where it all started, I hope to blog a bit about my first weaving teacher and my adventures in Navajo style weaving next week. I have always lamented having to leave my huge Navajo loom behind in Chile when I moved to Bolivia in 1998. Now you can just pop a Cactus Flower loom in your bag and hit the road!

A buzz of excitement in the air…classes start tomorrow. 🙂