Tag: supplementary weft

Backstrap Weaving – What’s My Style?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Backstrap Weaving – Wonderfully Wide

It’s been a while since I’ve had something wide (wide for me, anyway) on my backstrap loom. The last thing was the cotton rep-weave warp from which I made a backstrap/loom carry bag. This one was 15 1/2″ and had 800 ends.

The warp is made up of white and cochineal-dyed cotton from Guatemala. I dyed some of the white black.
The finished backstrap which doubles as a loom and tool tote bag.

As I said, these kinds of warps are wide for me but not necessarily for backstrap loom weavers in other parts of the world. The widest warp that I’ve seen over here was 39″. It was a light cotton ikat warp that was being woven by a weaver from northern Peru. She stood while weaving in order to manage the width. That makes my 15 1/2″ seem quite ridiculous. Backstrap loom weavers in parts of SE Asia routinely weave what look like even wider pieces while seated at their looms. Maybe when I am eventually living back in Australia, I’ll be able to explore that side of the world and maybe sit beside those weavers to see how they skillfully create their warps and manage those widths.

An ikat shawl weaver from Tacabamba, Peru, standing to manage the wide cotton warp on her loom.

I like the fact that, as far as the loom is concerned, going wide simply means getting hold of some longer sticks. I have a piece of painted metal curtain rod that I’m using as the cloth beam of my latest project. A dowel rod acts as the warp beam. The weft thread can be wound around a suitably long stick if I don’t have a long enough shuttle.

My Montagnard (Vietnamese hill tribe) teachers always use the beams and swords that are designed for the widest pieces of skirt and blanket fabric that they weave no matter how narrow the piece they happen to be weaving.

My current project is 18 1/2”…a very humble width in comparison. However, to me it feels wonderfully wide and I love having my beams loaded up like this.

The other thing to which my “Wonderfully Wide” blog title refers is the fact that I feel that I have a wonderfully wide range of techniques and structures that I can draw on when it comes down to planning a new project. I wandered through several ideas when it came down to figuring out what I would do with the silk thread that I had been given by a couple of fiber friends in Australia.

I wasn’t one hundred percent sure about the size of this silk thread but after fishing out silk examples from my stash drawer that range from 30/2 to 140/2, I came to the conclusion that the variegated is most likely 10/2 and the white 20/2.

I thought about doing rep with alternating thick and thin weft and some pick-up. That idea got discarded in favor of ikat…a variegated ikat pattern on a solid-color background. In the end I settled on using supplementary weft to play with positive and negative space.

I felt that I’d already explored the idea of a variegated ikat pattern in this piece (although the thread in this case isn’t actually variegated. It’s just a mix of lots of different colored ends of warp). I had to look back at this to be reminded that I hadn’t particularly liked the effect at the time (although it’s funny how things can grow on you!)
When I do ikat on a multi-colored warp, I prefer having wide stripes of color so that there’s only one color in each pattern segment, as you can see in this silk example I made some years ago.

The warp on which I’m currently working will hopefully be fabric for one face of a pillow/cushion cover. I am using the 10/2 variegated thread alongside doubled 20/2 to give me the width I need. Please bear in mind that I’m not saying that doubled 20/2 equals a single strand of 10/2. I’m just hoping that the two will play well enough together to give me the width that I need.

But first, as always, comes the sampling. The pattern will be foliage and hummingbirds. I wanted to weave the foliage using white supplementary weft (multiple strands of 30/2 silk) to fill the negative spaces. This means that the foliage pattern would be revealed in the underlying variegated ground cloth. Normally it’s the supplementary weft itself that forms the positive part of the pattern.

This covered book that I created is already living in Australia. I dug up photos to see what the various colors of supplementary weft looked like in the upper and lower foliage patterns. Again, it isn’t variegated thread but rather a combination of four strands of three different colors. In this case the supplementary weft is used as the positive part of the pattern on the green background.
In this example, the gold supplementary weft has filled the negative space around the flower pattern which is revealed in the black ground cloth. The red patterning shows the use of supplementary weft in both positive and negative space.

So, I wound a warp of what I figured would be a suitable width to give me the information I needed for the larger project. With this sample I would find out the number of ends I needed to create X inches of cloth, the number of strands of 30/2 silk that would give good coverage as supplementary weft, the best weight of silk to use as the main weft and the warp span of the longest practical weft float. I took some old foliage patterns that I had created for other projects and altered them to reduce the negative spaces to what I guessed wouldn’t create impractical lengths of floats….the kind that would sag or get hooked on things when the cloth was in use.

The pattern needs to be busy so that there are never any excessively long floats of the white supplementary weft.

I was very happy with the result and made a note not to have the pattern on the real project extend all the way to the selvedges. The first couple of little triangles you see there are where I was testing the ideal number of strands of 30/2 silk to use for the supplementary weft. The 30/2 silk comes from my weaving friend Deanna. We made a swap….a very large cone of 10/2 cotton (which had also been a gift from my friend, Betty) for a cone of 30/2 silk.

Susan’s gift of 20/2 silk is being used as warp alongside the Will’s variegated 10/2s in the real project. Deanna’s 30/2 silk (which in a roundabout way also comes from Betty) is the supplementary weft. I am weaving the generosity of all these fiber friends into this piece!

Off the warping stakes and onto the loom. As usual, when winding wide warps, I wind several small sections removing them one by one from the warping stakes and placing them on the loom beams that are waiting nearby on the floor. I don’t take any risks with having my warping stakes lean, even if ever so slightly, by having too much thread loaded onto them.

The next task was to make 593 heddles.

I placed a couple of cardboard strips in the sheds to help me see if any sections of the warp are set more closely than others…as I’ve said here many times, there are varying degrees of “warp-facedness” which means that some warp threads might be positioned closer together than others. When weaving with supplementary weft I need to weave a little narrower than is my natural tendency so that I make sure that the patterning weft is not exposed at all when it travels between the layers of warp. That can be a bit tricky….fighting against muscle memory.

It’s normally my habit to start with a selvedge in which case I would remove those cardboard strips and start weaving right at the base of the warp. However, I decided to leave them in place this time. Although the two aren’t visible in this photo, I can tell you that the 10/2 silk and doubled 20/2 seem to working together well.

This is the point where I will start weaving the pattern. And here I’ve stopped for the time being while I figure out my design. My sample was on 142 ends. I need to extend it to 1186 ends! I plan to have a strip of pattern the same length as my sample, once again using the supplementary weft to fill the negative space. Then I plan to weave scattered frolicking hummingbirds in white supplementary weft, this time using the variegated thread as the negative space surrounding the figures. I’ll finish by repeating the first strip of pattern. Well, that’s the plan anyway.

I’ll have a choice in the style of hummingbird figures….either using the supplementary weft to “draw” the swirls within their bodies as can be seen on the left, or use the weft to fill in the negative space within their bodies so that the swirls appear the underlying ground cloth, as on the right. I’m leaning towards the latter but maybe a combination of both?

This is what I mean by “wonderfully wide”. Choices, choices, choices. I have another idea, which I won’t go into yet, for including some very quiet pattern in the white sections of warp. I thought of it about two minutes ago! There’s something about writing this blog that helps with the creative process, it seems. The idea is a little mad so I might wait and see how that goes before I reveal it….or not! The madness might be just temporary, lol.

So, thank you so much all my extremely generous fiber friends for these lovely gifts of thread. Here I am weaving in a color palette that is not a common one for me. It does remind me a little, though, of the piece I wove when weaving friend Marilyn let me pick colors from her stash of 10/2 cotton.

Maybe this sunrise I had witnessed with Gwen while in Florida was on my mind at the time……

The lake had alligators in it!

I’ve spent several evenings now just working on the pattern. Let’s see how much progress I’ve made when next we meet…..

Backstrap Weaving – The Inner Chaos

The Inner Chaos…..I’m only talking about the chaos within my weaving tool bags and my weaving journal…nothing introspective….well maybe just a little bit. I am pretty jumbled up below the surface when it comes to my thoughts about my eventual move back to Australia. Now that I’ve let the cat out of the bag, I’m constantly being asked “when?”. I don’t know. There are so many complexities to be sorted out at this end!

But enough of that. Let’s talk about weaving and tool bags. I showed you the little box bag that I made recently in which I can carry basic sewing supplies. I love how it opens up to give me a clear view of its contents. My large tool bag often has me digging around in the dark and getting stabbed by needles until I eventually give up and tip out the contents. I don’t help matters by tossing in all kinds of random odds and ends that I pick up from the floor when I sit down to weave….the used cable tie that I am determined to pick open and re-use, the rubber band that broke and that I’ve tied into a knot, the little chunk of eraser that really is too small to be of any more use.

I love this little box purse. The project also gave me a chance to practice my hand-sewing skills.

The long zippered tool bag was a bonus that I could make with left over fabric. It holds several of my small swords and the smaller of my pick-up sticks.

A variety of things that I use to pick up threads to create patterns…hair sticks, shawl pins, chopsticks, a dpn and a stick from my teacher in Guatemala. The shorter ones fit in the zippered bag.
Just a few of my smaller swords. These were all made for me from Australian woods found in the state of NSW (my home state).

But what about the longer tools that don’t fit in the zippered bag? Well, of course, they need another bag of their own, another box-like purse, except longer. And then what about the poor old large tool bag that has served me so well all these years?

The old faithful tool bag that has been everywhere with me, looking bright and sparkly, fresh off the loom in 2010, and the way it looks today.

It won’t be abandoned. I finally decided to invest in a good pair of fabric scissors and a pair of pinking shears. They now live in this bag all on their own. I’ve been told that I really should learn how to do French seams rather than rely on the pinking shears and I’ll get to that one day.

And so I got down to planning a larger box-like purse. I decided to use the champagne-colored cotton thread from Guatemala. I had epi information on it from past projects. I just needed to dye some of it brown and decide on a pattern for it in supplementary weft.

One of the journal covers that I wove using this thread.

Some years ago, I took paisley figures and arranged them in order to create a pattern of my own. It was a lot of drawing, sampling and modifying…a lot of work before I could start weaving. I used it once in a silk scarf project and that was the end of that for several years. I decided that it needed to be used again.

I fished the large paper pattern out of the folder. Luckily it was still legible. My pencil patterns often get really worn and smudged during the course of a project. Sometimes I even throw them away! I think, well, that was a lot of work…I’ll never weave that again! Now I always photograph them when they are freshly drawn.

All the sketching and ideas go into my weaving book. At that early stage its all fairly neat and orderly. It’s when the time comes for number crunching that it all goes to hell…the chaos within the pages begins. I would love to be one of those people who can consistently write neatly, sketch beautifully and create art within the pages of their journals. I do keep detailed notes but they are a mess! I often need to return to them and then I might have to spend quite a bit of time deciphering just how I got from A to B. If you want to see an absolutely amazing journals (dedicated to travel), take a look at jose_naranja on Instagram…unbelievably beautiful.

Weaving cloth covers for my notebooks has made note-making so pleasurable. I just wish the insides were as pretty as the outside.

These ones are still blank.
My current notebook.

I made a little video that takes you inside…..

I’m glad that many years ago when I was making books to document all that I had learned from my various indigenous teachers, I was patient enough to write out everything neatly, make precise drawings and diagrams, illustrate with photos, as well as glue in woven samples. Some even have miniature looms complete with heddles to illustrate the warping set-up. Each of the eight books I made had some kind of weaving on its cover.

The first one, bottom left, was started back in 1996 when I was still living in southern Chile.

Here’s a glimpse of the inside of a couple. These have already gone to live in Australia…

The last project in my little video is the start of the long version of the box-like purse. Here it is on the loom….

After weaving the main paisley motif which sits on the curved flap of the purse, I just wove a very simple version for what will be the base…

And here it is finished. Lessons learned when I made the first box-like purse served me well. I am really pleased with it.

I posed it next to another pouch that I wove with the same thread some years ago. The color has changed quite a lot over the years but it’s not really apparent in this photo. It has lost its golden hue on that old pouch.
It lacks the cuteness of the smaller one, though.

So now I need a bag in which to carry around all the individual tool purses…lol. Actually, my next project idea is to make a fabric case in which to store all my pattern charts. They’re currently stuffed inside a plastic box folder. The elastic straps that hold the cover in place have perished. I wonder if I could design some kind of concertina inner so that each technique has its own section. The fabric would be the outside cover. I’ve started planning the cover using the mill-spun singles wool. There’s some dyeing and sampling to do first as I’d like to use the three-color reversible pebble weave structure and need to see if the singles yarn will stand up to it.

Three-color reversible pebble weave in my own handspun plied wool.
The mill-spun singles have worked well for me in plain weave. You can see that the heddles didn’t get clogged with fluff. I have yet to see how it behaves in a denser structure of warp floats. I want to dye some of it a darker grey and some black for the three-color project.

If the singles yarn isn’t up to the task, perhaps I’ll use the plied wool yarn and cochineal that I got in the market on my birthday.

So, in conclusion, the inner chaos of my large tool bag has been sorted. While I accept that the inner chaos of my weaving notebooks will never be, perhaps my chaotically-arranged pattern charts will get categorized according to structure inside a new case with handwoven cover.

Until next time…..

Backstrap Weaving – In and out of the Box

I just wanted to quickly show what I made with the fabric I was weaving in my last post.

Supplementary-weft motifs in red silk on cotton.

Bear in mind that I am not much of a sewer and that my thrills from sewing successes, therefore, come cheaply. I do love stitching by hand, though.

I really liked a box-like purse that Handymum had shown in a video tutorial. She doesn’t speak at all in these videos and explains everything with hand gestures and occasional text in English. When I can also mute the music, it becomes my favorite way to watch these kinds of videos. They play at high speed and so I need to watch them several times to be able to catch everything. I save only the very simplest ones while I improve my skills. I’m not going to risk my handwoven cloth on something that is beyond my skill level.

YET, if I’d really respected my lack of experience and sewn a sample with fabric I have floating around, I would have avoided a silly mistake I made.

The unusual layout of the pattern is due to the nature of the box-like purse I planned to sew. The plain blue that flanks the pattern would be the sides of the “box”.
I managed to get a second product, a slim zippered tool case, from the extra bit of warp I had put on the loom. I switched to a different pattern for that based on warp-float snake designs that are woven here in the lowlands of Bolivia.
Guaraní weavers here create snake patterns in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. (They call it kara kara pepo) There are so many versions of it, both simple and complex. This is my modified version of one of them. I love how it looks in supplementary-weft in my latest project.

The sides and front of the box shape collapse inward so that when closed, the purse lies quite flat. I thought this design was really cute. What I love is that you can unclip the flap, open it up and clearly see everything laid out inside instead of having to dig around inside a zippered pouch. I occasionally have to tip out all the contents of some of my larger tool pouches in order to find something.

I dyed a piece of the fabric on which the pieces sit here light blue to use as the lining. I’ve put basic sewing supplies in there…a tin of pins, a wooden needle case, snips, a stitch ripper and some dark thread.

This was the first time I had sewn in the lining before sewing up the piece and the first time I sewed everything before flipping the whole thing right-side-out. I told you about my cheap thrills, right? I was so pleased with myself! As for the mistake, I sewed too close to the thick interfacing. In her video, Handymum sews on the lines she has drawn onto the lining and you can’t see how close she is to the interfacing on the other side. Rather than draw lines, I flipped my piece over and sewed around the interfacing instead, but much too close considering the thickness of the interfacing (I used two layers). I’m all for ripping things out and doing them over but it was too late. I’d already snipped the curve of the top, cut the points off the outer corners and cut into the inner ones. And so, the seams are really strained and stretched over the interfacing and some of my (black!) stitching shows as a result.

I have some of the same Guatemalan cotton in a color called champagne and I might have another go at this sewing pattern but in a longer version using fabric woven from that thread.

Like the indigo cotton, the champagne-colored cotton from Guatemala is slightly finer than 20/2. I love weaving with this stuff.

I’m sad to see my supply of that indigo-dyed Guatemalan cotton getting low although stash-busting is my goal after all. I just know that I’ll probably never get to replace it. It’s special because of the way it has faded after all these years. I love the way it weaves up with all its variations of shades of blue. I still have loads of the champagne color, though. I’m assuming that it was also dyed with natural substances but it doesn’t seem to have faded. I’ll know for sure when I compare the thread on the inside of the cakes to the outside layers of thread.

As for the next project, it will be yet another bag, hopefully. Not another, you say?! But I like to think that I’m thinking a bit out of the box with this one. I have this crazy idea of making a long bag in which to carry my backstrap loom that doubles as a backstrap.

When I was house-sitting last year, I took my loom with work-in-progress to my new digs in a large cotton tote bag……
…..only to find that I had forgotten to bring a backstrap. It turned out that the tote bag in which I had carried it made a fairly decent emergency backstrap. From this came the idea.

I’m using Guatemalan cotton again except this is somewhat heavier stuff, also from Mayan Hands, that my friend Kate gave me. I dyed the black and it accompanies cochineal-dyed purplish-red (dyed in Guatemala) and natural white. I’m back to one of my old faithful color combinations.

I’ve tossed around various ideas for the structure and pattern and I think that I’ve finally (almost!) settled on rep weave to give me good sturdy fabric with complementary-warp pick-up patterns. I do try to learn something new with each project. I have in fact woven rep once before and so its not entirely new, hence the “almost” in parentheses. I keep thinking that I need to add a twist to this somehow. If not, creating the strange backstrap/tote bag may have to be the new part of this project.

The only rep weave piece I’ve woven so far.
It makes a nice placemat for my tray table so that things don’t slide around.

In the two new projects that I’ve shown in this post, the thread has come from Guatemala. The finer stuff was bought from Mayan Hands at a conference many years ago in Bellingham. The heavier thread, also from Mayan Hands, was given to me Kate.

Kate working with her Guatemalan loom and warp when I visited in California.

I wove this scarf using fine cotton thread from Guatemala that was given to me by Betty. She had bought it in the 1980s!

I used patterning techniques that I’d learned in Guatemala to decorate it.
I went to Guatemala myself in 2008, met my teacher Lidia and also brought back some cotton of the kind that you see here on the swift. Lidia took me shopping to get the best prices!

I haven’t done a whole lot with it because the quantities were quite small. I’d bought it with the idea of using it as supplementary weft rather than as warp. But here’s one thing I ‘ve used it for….

Fabric for a book cover. There wasn’t enough of any one color and so I had to step outside my color box and combine two.

So, that’s another stash that I’d like to get into. And, on that same trip I bought a ball of handspun cotton singles from a spinner. The ball sat in the closet for close to ten years and then I got to use pretty much all of it for this sheer scarf project….

I love this white-on-white supplementary weft technique.

I haven’t been to Guatemala since 2008 but every now and then someone puts a Guatemalan warp in my hands and I get to take a trip down Guatemalan-weaving Memory Lane….(and it seems that this post is also turning into one!)

I hope to make another trip to Australia in October and I’m thinking that maybe I could make a little side-trip to Guatemala from Miami on the way back when I’ll be virtually empty-handed. Who knows?

As for now, I need to go and figure out what to use for the thick weft in my rep piece, if in fact rep is my final decision for this project. See you next time.

Backstrap Weaving – The Studio

I was thinking the other day about my eventual move to Australia and what my “weaving studio” might look like in my home over there. I will be starting up there with a totally clean slate…no furniture or other household items, not even a cup and a spoon! Ideally, I would leave the space pretty much empty…open, bright and uncluttered…the kind of weaving space that I would not be embarrassed to have people come and visit. However, I’m pretty sure that it will eventually end up in the same kind of state of cluttered creative chaos in which I function quite happily here!

There’s cotton cloth on the loom for a book cover, lots of charts for the floral and hummingbird patterns and goodness-knows what else.
Pick a day, any day, and you’ll find my space looking like this…except for the between-project moments when I pick stuff up to vacuum clean.

Here are some very different studio spaces that I find inspiring and delightful…

Part of Gonit Porat’s weaving space in her studio in Israel. The rigid heddle loom has a student’s work in progress using patterns in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave. I can almost smell that outdoor scene.
Judith Beckett’s basement studio in England. I just adore this picture. There’s so much to look at and raise a smile and the cats perfectly complete the picture.
Cats and fiber. This is one of my teacher’s weaving spaces here in Bolivia. If only I could keep mine as simple as this!

Who knows what my space will end up being. It’s nice to sit here and dream about it.

So, what’s on the loom? I’ve picked through my stash and brought out some indigo-dyed cotton thread that I bought from Mayan Hands at a conference maybe eight years or so ago. I’ve used it in other projects and I found that there was enough left for a little something else. I decided I’d follow one of Handymum’s little purse sewing tutorials.

Cloth for a book cover that I wove with the Mayan Hands indigo-dyed thread several years ago.

Even though the cakes of thread have sat on a shelf away from windows for years, the color has faded. My warp shows the unevenness in the blue color and I love it.

The light blue is UKI 20/2 thread that I dyed. The heddles are also 20/2. The Mayan Hands thread is slightly finer.

This warp is only 9 1/2 inches wide but has 926 ends. So, I followed all the steps that I outlined in my last post for wide warps….warping in small sections and placing each one on beams that were waiting on the floor. I followed my own advice and wound the whole warp in one session. It was interesting to note the difference in tension between the section of light blue 20/2 thread and the other indigo sections. The section of 20/2 was looser. Just the fact that the 20/2 is slightly heavier than the indigo thread seemed to have made that difference. Fortunately, I have some ridiculously fine 0.7mm double point knitting needles and I coiled all the 20/2 threads around one and parked it at the far end of the warp. It did the trick perfectly to even out the tension across the warp. Who on earth uses these 0.7mm dpns to knit? I bought them years ago to use to create third selvedges on super fine warps. I also installed a coil rod across the entire warp so that my cotton cloth wouldn’t take on that corrugated look.

I took the time to make sure that each of the 926 ends was sitting where it should be before I started weaving so that I could create a neat third selvedge.

My unconventional way of starting with an umbrella rib lashed to the cloth beam with cable ties in order to create a third selvedge.

The layout of the pattern is a little strange but I’ve planned it that way to suit Handymum’s purse design.

I love the way the indigo-blue cloth looks with its uneven coloring.

I’m going to need to cut into this cloth to make the purse. It’s going to be tough cutting into that lovely blue stuff. I’m using five strands of 120/2 silk for the supplementary weft. These are motifs that I designed a little while back. I have put on more warp than I need and so I’ll just keep weaving and use another pattern on the last bit. I’m sure that I’ll be able to use it for something. I wrote a very basic tutorial on this style of patterning with supplementary weft many years ago. You can find it here.

A little further along.

I’ll finish by showing you a beautiful double weave band that Jan Low wove and has kindly allowed me to share….

She wove it using the instructions and patterns in my book Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms. The book includes tutorials on how to design and chart your own patterns and Jan has created some of her own for this band. If you’ve already tried some form of pick-up patterning and know that you like this slower kind of weaving, you might enjoy adding warp-faced double weave to your repertoire of techniques. This book is one of eight of mine available as PDFs or as spiral-bound books (shipped from the U.S.A) at Taproot Video.