supplementary weft – Page 4 – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Between Science and Magic Part 2

“Between Science and Magic”…this is the second time that I am using this title for a post. I saw it being used as the title of a review of a new book about hummingbirds and loved it. It is such a fitting description of these amazing little creatures. You sit and watch as they magically hover by a flower in a buzz and blur of wings. Then you watch some brilliant BBC slow motion footage that reveals the science behind their ability to do so. And yet the science doesn’t in any way diminish the feeling I get that I am witnessing magic.

As I sat sketching, crunching numbers and planning the next book cover that I wanted to weave, it dawned on me that the phrase is also a fitting one for how I feel about weaving. I decided that it would be fun to include the phrase on the cover of a book that I will call A Weaver’s Journal.

My planning notes look kind of scientific with all those numbers, diagrams and other scribblings. I don’t trust gut feeling or instinct when it comes to planning a project. I can’t eyeball width by winding warp threads and just stopping when it looks right. It all has to be figured out beforehand.

Colors don’t just magically come together in my head either. I don’t have a natural talent for that and envy it in others. I look at what I have in my stash and then go online for help hoping that I can somehow put together something similar.

**I started with teal and then looked online for ideas**.

I only have natural white and a color called “rye” in 30/2 silk and so needed to dye some of the white to teal. I have a jar of teal dye which didn’t work for me the last time I used it. The yarn simply refused to take up the blue component of the dye and ended up a very odd green. I am horrifyingly unscientific about dyeing. I don’t weigh the yarn. I make my best guess as to the amount of dye to use. I don’t measure the temperature of the water. If I get the intended color, it’s pure magic. And I don’t take notes! I mixed two blues that I have, one that is green-ish and another that is more like a standard dark blue and hoped for the best.

The balls of teal are the ones I dyed. They’re 30/2 silk. I wanted to get a color that was close to the tube of 60/2 teal. The fact that I did indeed get something close is magic to me! I would weave the hummingbirds using multiple strands of the 60/2 teal on 30/2 rye just like in the sample band pictured above. They would be surrounded by 30/2 teal, which would have other supplementary-weft patterns in gold. I didn’t manage to work the pale blue into the plan.

Warping…I am very methodical. Nothing is left to chance, wizardry or magic!

**The strings at the top are to create sections and make counting easier when laying in the pattern.**

I don’t wing patterns. The hummingbirds had already been designed, tested and adjusted. I had yet to design the words. I was made aware of just how clumsy I had become with cursive writing! I think that in Australia I was taught a Victorian style of cursive. The lower-case ‘r’ we were taught is not as attractive as those I see in other styles, and designing it so that it connected smoothly and, more importantly, without taking up too much space, was beyond me. So, you will see that my ‘r’s are socially distanced from one of their neighboring letters.

**At this point, I was regretting the gold stripes. I dealt with those later. My phone’s camera sees the teal as more turquoise-y**.

**I am done with the ‘r’s at this stage. Good. My ipod camera is more teal-friendly.**

I am using DMC #12 2-ply mercerized cotton for the heddles on this 30/2 silk warp. They play very nicely with the silk.

It’s a short warp and I wanted to see what my heddles looked like at the end. People often ask me if I re-use my heddle string. I don’t. But I just might pick the fluff off these while listening to a good podcast or two one of these days. The fluff forms a bracelet around the heddle thread and so it’s not just a matter of giving the heddles a good shake or beating. Each little bracelet ring needs to be broken.

The amount of fluff that collects depends on the kind of materials being used in warp and heddle string as well as on how you are handling the heddles as you use them to raise threads. It’s perfectly normal for small amounts of fluff to accumulate as the heddles naturally inch their way along the warp as the weaving advances. I am never aware of shifting them myself. They just seem to magically move along. When I was at the end of this warp and with far less space in which to work, I had to slide the heddles back out of the way so that I could insert a sword and my pick-up stick. Then I had to slide them forward again in order to continue operating the loom. I suspect that most of this fluff accumulated due to all that sliding back and forth at the very end.

I hadn’t wet finished the cloth for the first hummingbird book cover. I felt that the fine, non-mercerized, grabby, tightly-woven cotton that I used for that one really didn’t need that kind of finishing for its role as a sturdy book cover.

**30/2 non-mercerized cotton that I brought back from Guatemala in 2008**.

I had to face the fact that the silk piece did, and that wet-finishing was going to alter the carefully planned dimensions of the cloth…carefully planned to perfectly fit my book. Silk weft and silk warp did not give me the tight secure warp-faced weave that the grabby cotton had. Wet-finishing also made the cloth floppy and drape-y, lovely characteristics for a wearable piece, not so much for a book cover. It was very fiddly applying the floppy cloth to the book….but I got there.

**The finished book and the good ol’ contact cement that makes it all possible**.

You may have noticed that the gold stripes are gone. I wove a vey narrow length of tape in the 60/2 teal silk and used it to compensate for the lost width from the wet-finishing process as well as cover the gold stripes that had been annoying me. The tapes also covered some of the more irregular turns of supplementary weft…a bonus! I love the way it turned out.

There might be one more book coming if I can scrape together yarn from my stash that fits the idea that is developing.

In the meantime, I have had a little distraction, although it is still hummingbird-related. A Facebook page about archaeology recently shared some pictures from the textile collection of the museum of the University of Princeton. The description reads: Cross-Loop Stitched Border Fragment Featuring 54 Hummingbirds, 100 B.C -A.D. 200. Camelid Fiber and Cotton. Peru, South Coast.

This is magic….the fact that this shows up in my news feed on Facebook at a time when I am into all things hummingbird-ish. And how astoundingly gorgeous is this piece of work! I love that we have this evidence that people were just as in love with the magical hummingbird two thousand years ago as we are today and felt the desire to depict them in their art. The depth of color in this two-thousand-year old piece is incredible.

I know this technique as cross-knit looping and was taught it as a decorative and protective edging by my weaving teachers in Bolivia. I have also seen it referred to as needle knitting, the needle in this case being a sewing needle that carries the thread though loops rather than a knitting one. I have not come across anyone here in my travels who is using this technique to create these three-dimensional figures although I know that the Center for Traditional Textiles in Cusco (CTTC), Peru is currently working on recovering the technique and creating reproductions. Back in 2012 when I was in the U.K, Sue Prior showed me a piece of three-dimensional needle knitting that she had created as part of the work of the Peruvian Textiles Study Group in her Guild. It was a wonderful little sample. My email contact for Sue is out-of-date and I wonder if she still reads my blog. Contact me, please, Sue!

I thought I would try a little project of my own in chunky cotton to see if I could get a result that looked something like those three little tail feathers.

This is a first attempt and there is plenty that I will do differently if a second attempt ever happens. This just might be a good exercise to keep me busy while I ponder my next woven project.

I’ll finish by showing you the work of Fenny in the Netherlands. She is doing a spectacular job of weaving a pattern that was designed by my online weaving friend Eladio Salas in Mexico. That was many years ago after I had published my very first book. Eladio took very quickly to designing and weaving wide and complex patterns on his backstrap loom. He allowed me to use a portion of his amazing original design in my pattern books. Fenny’s work is beautiful. She has a nice loom which allows her to comfortably weave these wider patterns.

This pattern is charted along with 131 others in my book More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns which is available as a PDF or as a spiral-bound book at Taproot Video.

I am still staying in most of the time and staying safe. Hopefully we will get our booster shots soon. I wonder which one it will be. I went out to visit a friend yesterday. Strolling the thirteen blocks home on a Saturday afternoon is very pleasant because the downtown area is quite deserted. But then I got bitten on the leg by a dog! The bite area is black and blue from the force of the bite but fortunately only one tooth broke the skin. Maybe the universe is telling me not to get cocky and to just stay home!

Let’s finish with something pleasant…. 🙂

Backstrap Weaving – I Made a Thing

First of all, I have to tell you just how wonderful it was to hear from so many people behind the scenes about the bonus video clips I talked about in my last post. Those who had bought my tubular band book on Patternfish needed to contact me to gain access to the video gifts. And contact me you did! I have to apologize for not having sent each and every one of you a personal reply…it got a bit overwhelming! But it served as a reminder that there are many many eyes out there reading my posts….yes, actually reading all my ramblings and not just scrolling down through the pictures (although, there’s nothing wrong with that!). I do try to provide a lot of eye candy for those who stop by and don’t have the time to read everything.. All this is to say, thank you. It made me feel good.

You’ll see that the title of this post is I Made a Thing. I did… but this thing I made is not THE thing that I am planning for my hummingbird motifs. That idea is still developing in my head, But, yes, I made A thing. However, there was still some sampling to do as I had come up with another idea for my little birds.

Two posts ago I showed you a new version woven with supplementary weft rather than in double weave in which I used the idea of embellishing the hummers with curls and swirls. The sample above is in 30/2 silk with silk supplementary weft. I used this idea one more time in some green cotton thread that I had brought back from Guatemala in 2008. I think the cotton might be something like 30/2 in size and I am pretty sure that it isn’t mercerized.

In the example on the left, I created the outline and the swirls within the hummingbird shapes with teal supplementary weft. On the right, I filled in the negative space around the swirls with white supplementary weft. That means that the swirls are revealed in the exposed green ground cloth. It’s a different look. I love both versions! I may have to combine both in that distant “real” project”.

An advantage of the using the supplementary-weft technique is the simplicity of the loom set-up. I like to use four sets of string heddles when I weave with fine warp material in warp-faced double weave. I need only use the most basic set-up of all when I use this supplementary-weft technique.

I am using five strands of very fine silk as the supplementary weft and played around with the idea of using strands of different colors. I abandoned the first attempt at the bottom…too pale…and liked the darker version at the top. Dwindling stash has me using color combinations that I might not have normally considered. I do like the green and orange-y red tones together. A weaver friend told me that green goes with everything because, after all, Nature has combined it with every imaginable color of flower. True!

I love how my backstrap loom allows me to set-up a short sample warp like the one above. I could probably squeeze a couple more inches out of that warp if I remove the coil rod and replace the pencils with finer sticks. I can even drop back to just one stick or even to no stick at all…using a shed loop instead to contain the threads in that half of the warp.

So, while I ponder that “real” project to which I keep referring, I decided to use all that I had learned so far and weave a cover for a book. This is the Thing that I made. I found a book in a size I like in a local store. It has blank, thick lovely pages that have lots of texture. It was a chance to use the cotton thread from Guatemala that has been sitting here since 2008. I had brought it back with plans to use it as supplementary weft rather than as warp. I didn’t have enough green and so I decided to get even more comfortable with orange and use orange as both warp and weft. What I am calling orange in the warp is more of a coral color really.

I love the look of all those crisp white heddles against the green. I normally weave my book covers with the selvedges running along the horizontal edges of the book. Because I wanted my hummingbirds to be be the right way up rather than sideways, I planned this piece to have the selvedges aligned with the vertical sides of the book. I crossed my fingers in the hope that my one short and narrow sample in this thread would give me reliable information in terms of ends per inch. I wanted the cloth to sit right at the vertical edges. I didn’t want to turn it over all four edges and create all that bulk at the corners.

I also decided that I wouldn’t wet-finish the cloth. I know....Shocking! I figured that it’s a nice tight warp-faced weave that doesn’t require further tightening in the water. I simply was not going to deal with accounting for shrinkage. The cotton has a rough rustic feel that I like. Wet finishing would have softened it I am sure, but I am happy with the rustic feel.

Completely removing the cover from the book was easy and made the process so much simpler. This way, I didn’t have to cut the cloth and tuck a tab into the spine. Contact cement has become my friend since I learned to work with it. This isn’t the first book I have ever completely covered with my woven cloth…number 11, in fact, and I have learned some do’s and don’t’s along the way.

And here it is finished. I managed to get the little flower positioned on the spine right where I had wanted it to be .I apologize that I have been lazy lately just snapping all my photos with my tiny ipod, some of them as you can probably tell, late at night . I still haven’t bought myself a new tripod for the “good” camera.

Naturally, questions arise about technique tutorials when I show these projects on social media. I did write a very basic tutorial on this supplementary-weft technique many years ago which you can find right here on my blog. I admit that the tutorial makes me cringe just a little as the base warp that I used in the blue example all those years ago was so terribly corrugated! Nevertheless, the tutorial will give you a good idea of how this works and I know that many people have successfully used it.

A wonderful resource for supplementary-weft techniques that I have come across in the last few months is the website of Guatemalan-based Mari Gray’s Kakaw Designs. Mari writes on her site that Kakaw means cacao and goes on to explain that Kakaw Designs supports “traditions as deep as the root of the cacao tree”. Apart from selling clothing, accessories and even footwear made from Guatemalan textiles that she and her partners have specially designed, she runs tours, offers courses and sells kits for weavers who would like to try their hand at operating a backstrap loom.

One of several pre-warped and pre-heddled loom styles offered by Kakaw Designs.

You can order fully warped and set-up backstrap looms, like the one above, with everything you need to weave brocade (supplementary-weft) patterns using the techniques employed by weavers in San Antonio Aguas Calientes. The kit can be supplemented by classes via Zoom given by Guatemalan weaver Doña Lidia in English. There are classes on basic backstrap loom operation and plain warp-faced weaving as well beginner and intermediate-level brocading classes. For more advanced weavers, they even offer a class in the double-faced supplementary-weft technique. Other offerings include tamale and tortilla-making classes.

A piece that I photographed of a Quetzal bird woven in the double-faced technique while in San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Guatemala in 2008.

This simple bee motif is the first I learned to weave in the double-faced structure with my teacher in Guatemala.

Single and double-faced styles that I studied and wove in the same area in which instructor Doña Lidia is located in Guatemala.

This piece shows the nature of single-faced supplementary-weft patterning.

Instructions are also available via PDF with accompanying video clips for those in time zones that don’t fit well with the scheduled Zoom classes or for those who are not able to attend the live classes for any other reason. Take a look at the Experiences page on the Kakaw Designs website for more details. If any of you have taken any of these classes with Kakaw Designs, please do let me know. Perhaps you would be willing to share pictures.

Doña Lidia being filmed for one of her weaving classes.

From the archives….here’s me practicing all I learned in Guatemala back in 2008. I learned so much that expanded my knowledge of supplementary-weft techniques far beyond what I had learned here in South America. Guatemala is so much about weaving with supplementary weft. and there are so many different styles. Once you learn more about it, you will understand how Guatemalan textiles can be so wonderfully colorful.

In this picture I was weaving the cloth that would become the front and back covers of the journal in which I recorded all the instructions. Even back then I was enjoying creating woven covers for my books. I finished the piece that I had started with my teacher in Guatemala (inset) and used that on the lid of a backstrap loom tool box.

Ah…my weaving space looks so neat and tidy in that picture! I wasn’t living alone back then. Here’s what it looks like now. You can see my book cover cloth on the loom and the rest is all the accompanying creative chaos.

I’ll finish by showing you a picture that Kathy sent me of her warp-faced double weave project. She used some rather soft cotton that she happened to have in her stash and was surprised that it behaved so well. Warp-faced double weave is a dense structure and can be hard on softer yarn so that’s something about which you should be careful when choosing thread for this technique. Crochet cotton with its high twist works very well when you are learning. With experience you could ty branching out to using less hardy materials. Kathy has used motifs from my Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms book but she is a backstrap-loom gal at heart and prefers to weave double weave that way. She is using just two basic sheds as I teach in my inkle loom book.

Warp-faced Double Weave is wonderfully versatile in the range of images that it allows you create…from whimsical birds, butterflies and bunnies to delicate leaf and floral patterns, to the bold angular shapes of Mapuche-style motifs or the more intricate Al Sadu-style patterns of the Bedouin. It’s one of my favorite structures for creating images and lettering.

See you next time!

Backstrap Weaving – Making the Most of It

Back when I was doing my training to be a teacher of English as a foreign language, I remember being told over and over to make sure that any original materials that we created were designed to be multi-functional. Why go to all the time and trouble to create something that would be used once in only one context?

I loved creating my own materials for English-teaching. Back then when I didn’t have much time for weaving, it seems that I poured all my creative juices into doing that. It was multi-functional in that I got to be creative while at the same time providing some welcome fun time for my students away from the text books. And I got better and better with using the same material in different ways with a variety of groups in a variety of contexts at different levels in their learning. And, as a bonus, it gave me a reason to buy stationery. I discovered that I have a thing for stationery.

Give me a chance to draw and paste and sticky-tape and color and I am happy as a baby.

When it comes to weaving, I have folders and closet shelves piled high with charts that I have created for projects. They got used once and then filed away, like the mega chart that I created for my Shipibo-inspired project that you can see above. Sometimes I wonder why I keep them. But then you know how that goes….about a week after you throw something away, you find that you need it, right?

My cat always enjoyed my get-down-on-the-floor-to-chart time.

So, with all that in mind, I am pleased that I have been taking the hummingbird charts, over which I have long labored, and using them in a variety of ways…making the most of all that time and effort. And, I am not done yet. I have a theme in my head for a future project…something that I wish to express, and all this sampling is hopefully leading me there. It’s all just a vague idea at the moment and I am still waiting for the light bulb to come on. In the meantime, I’ll just keep weaving hummingbirds.

I wanted to see what my hummingbird motifs looked like in a large format. I had completed my piece in 60/2 silk. In that fine thread, the stepped nature of the lines that form the various diagonals and curves is not all that noticeable. But what about in something much heavier? Would those lines then become clumsy and ugly? I combed through my stash and found that the only thing I had that would work in terms of having two high contrast colors was 8/2 Tencel and so I created a short warp for sampling. Some particularly high-twist crochet cotton made pretty heddles for warp-faced double weave.

What a dream it has been to weave with this heavier thread! Firstly, the Tencel is gorgeous to handle. It plays well with the crochet cotton heddles and is so easy to see when doing pick-up compared to to the 60/2 silk…no surprises there. I do think it is a shame to use Tencel, which is so much appreciated for its draping qualities, in a dense structure like warp-faced double weave but it was the only option in my available stash for this experiment. I promise that I won’t do it again!

Because the theme that I have in my head concerns embellishment and also the lack thereof, I decided to embellish my king-sized hummingbird to the max. I really enjoyed planning those “hippy bandanna” curls and swirls and I think they add to the playfulness, the love of life and joy of flight that hummingbirds always suggest to me. The hummingbird will be my new signature pattern.

I felt that the curve-like lines and stepped diagonals looked fine. I certainly did not feel distracted by the fact that the steps in these lines are more obvious than they are in finer thread. In fact, I would have to say that I was pretty thrilled with the whole thing.

So, what was next? I could see that 8/2 in warp-faced double weave in something of this width (3″) would simply not be useful for much…too wide for a sturdy belt or bag strap and much too thick and heavy for anything else. So I turned once again to my stash for something a little finer. I happen have, courtesy of my friend Deanna, a good supply of natural-colored 30/2 silk along with a small quantity of it that I had dyed in a color called “rye” for an ikat project I wove last year. The problem was that I did not have any other color that would allow me to weave pick-up patterns in double weave. Yes, I could dye some but…sigh…I wasn’t in the mood!

Solution….use supplementary weft to create the patterns. Bonus: for the supplementary weft structure, I can use the same chart as I do for double weave. I like to use several strands of a finer thread for the supplementary weft which gave me a nice selection from which to choose in my stash of 60/2 silk. I went with rye warp and teal supplementary weft.

The pattern color that you see in the double weave version on the right comes from warp threads that do not float as opposed to the silk piece in which the pattern is formed by floating weft threads. I love the added dimension that the supplemental weft threads give to the cloth. Bonus: I only made one set of heddles for this structure as opposed to four for the double weave piece. The double weave bonus: I can create horizontal lines of any length I please which I can’t do in the supplemental weft structure as the weft floats need to be limited to a certain practical length. That meant that some parts of my original charts needed to be modified. Long horizontal lines for wings needed to be transformed into sweeping curves. It took some time but wasn’t difficult to do and I am really pleased with the way they turned out.

While I wait for that light bulb to come on which will enable me to figure out how exactly to compose the themed piece that I have in mind, I will weave these embellished hummingbirds into something useful. I think I will use my embellished hummers with some indigo-dyed cotton from Guatemala that I have and use it to make journal covers as I have in the past. That will involve an outing to the stationery store to find a nice sized journal. I want something quite big so that I can squeeze in a lot of hummingbirds. I am hoping to get something that has paper that is nice for sketching.

The indigo and champagne colored Guatemalan thread along with the initial width sample that I wove for the first journal.

I used this 30/2 cotton in the past for mini-journal covers which I have given away as gifts. I wove my friends’ initials into the spines of the books…no re-gifting allowed!

For these, I used embroidery floss for the supplementary weft but I can tell you that removing strands from the slightly twisted six strands of floss is a royal pain if you are wanting to use very long lengths. I like to split all six strands and then lay them back together again so that all twist is removed. That way they lie flat and ribbon-like on the cloth just the way I like it. Yes, it’s a pain and so I might use silk instead. Combining threads to create multi-stranded weft is so much easier than pulling stands apart.

In the meantime, Zoom time is still spinning-and-plying time and progress is ever so slow. It gives me lots of time to think about how I would like to over-dye some of these colors and what I would like to weave with them. The planning is all the more important when using one’s own handspun and I already blew it by over-dyeing a really nice green with black the last time I used this handspun to weave some cuffs.

I also have another idea for an ikat project developing in which I combine it with three-color reversible pebble weave. I am sure that it will happen long before this handspun is ready for use.

And so I keep myself busy and out of trouble and keep my spirits lifted. Book sales at Taproot Video are keeping me afloat and I am hoping that the cooler temperatures in the northern hemisphere mean more cozy time at home weaving for those who live up there and maybe time to try some of the patterning techniques that I teach in my books. As always, thank you all for your support!

Backstrap Weaving – Percolating

Ikat! I have been giving myself time to allow the abundance of images and information that I keep finding on ikat to slowly filter so that I can focus on the next project. Without this filtering, there is the tendency to want to try everything in the one project. Another thing that is driving that tendency is the fact that my supply of natural-color 60/2 silk is coming to an end. I had used much more than originally planned in the last ikat project. This project was supposed to be a “sample” which for me is typically pretty small. The project turned into something else all together and will end up hanging on a wall.

Here it is after having been pressed good and hard. That always brings out the sheen of the silk but it has been hard to capture it in a photo.

In a way I am being forced to stop and ponder and allow the ideas to percolate because I was surprised to find that the suppliers of alum that I have always used here in Santa Cruz suddenly don’t carry it any more. I had been planning to dye my next ikat project with cochineal and was depending on being able to find alum. I have yet to find a substitute for alum as the mordant. That brought the plans for the next project to a halt.

Getting cochineal here in the lowlands is usually the tricky bit, not the alum. Cochineal is not used for dyeing here but is sold instead by the ladies in the street markets who carry home remedies. They tell me that it is to be taken as a remedy for susto which I can only understand to mean “fright” or perhaps that could be stretched to mean “anxiety”? Finding cochineal was even trickier this time. The massive street market that lies just two blocks from my home was recently “cleaned up”. All the vendors who normally wander the streets or sit on the sidewalk were ordered to move on. This must have included some of the home remedy vendors.

Asking the wrong vendor brought on a cranky almost offended response. It seems to me that this attitude is somehow part of the Highland-versus-Lowland vibe that is quite strong here in lowland Santa Cruz where certain things associated with the highlands, such as the chewing of coca leaves, are rejected as inferior and “indio”. It appeared that only the vendors from the highlands would have cochineal in their home remedy stalls. In any case, you can see that I was successful in finding someone from whom to buy the little dried beetles.

One down, one to go – alum. I was told that the Mennonites use alum when canning their produce so I will be off to the Mennonite market to see if I can find it there. I have not been to that market before and look forward to it. I am told that it is a market of farming implements and supplies for raising livestock etc.

With those two items in hand, I can start to make some experiments. I wonder what kind of red I will get? I will be happy with pretty much anything except pink. Here’s the color I got with cochineal on my hand spun llama fiber many years ago using an alum pre-mordant. I used it in small double weave, tubular band and complementary-warp pick-up projects.

My challenges for this next ikat project include using a natural dye and tying a much finer pattern. I was lucky to be shown a detailed image of a small section of an ikat textile from Indonesia in which I could actually count the warp threads. I could see that the weaver had tied around groups of six ends to create such a fine and detailed pattern. I could clearly see the three white warp threads in the woven cloth against the morinda-dyed background. WOW.

I know that the hand spun cotton that weaver was using is most likely thicker than the 60/2 silk I have been using. That makes it hard to make a comparison. In my last piece I tied around sections of fourteen ends in the pattern area and around twenty eight ends where I had created broad bands of resist. I would love to know generally how fine the hand spun cotton used in the Indonesian ikat pieces is in terms of wpi.

The other challenge is creating a new pattern to use with the finer tying. That hasn’t been easy….I have been looking around a lot for ideas and there’s just way too much input!

I have sketched out something very loosely based on leaves. Leaves have become one of my signature patterns and so I figured it would be appropriate to do something with stylized leaves. What I have drawn has ended up being so stylized that it may not be recognizable as leaves, but that’s okay. Whether I can transfer my sketch to the warp remains to be seen.

So far, I have worked with steps of fixed height and width to form the diagonal lines in the patterns, all carefully plotted and measured out. All the angles have been the same. The pattern I have sketched will involve a lot more free-form tying. Oh my goodness, what have I done?! I can often get very carried away creating these challenges right up until the moment I see the warp stretched out before me. Then some hasty adjustments are made. I remind myself every time I think I have become ridiculously over ambitious with this new pattern I have sketched that I did, after all, manage to tie a a couple of fairly nice circles some years ago. Let’s wait and see what happens.

The other benefit of taking time-out is that I have had much more time to spend on the book. I still can’t quite see the end in sight but I have made really good progress.

Now, I have something wonderful to show from a weaving friend, Emily Robison. I can’t remember exactly how Emily and I connected but she contacted me online and we were able to meet up on one of my trips away and weave double weave bands together. You can see her already weaving a pattern of her own creation at left.

I asked Emily if she would like to write a couple of paragraphs to share with you about her woven work and her experience learning to weave on a backstrap loom in Micronesia and I will leave the rest of the story for you in her own words….

To my knowledge, the type of weaving that I do is found only in the outer islands of Yap state, in the Federated States of Micronesia — migratory origins unknown. They are a collection of about 16 tiny inhabited low-lying coral islands (possibly all less than one square mile). The culture practiced in the outer islands is very distinct from the main island of Yap — the two cultures have languages of unrelated origins — but they are very intertwined. The islands practice a caste system, and the main island considers outer island people and culture to be either very low caste or other caste, meaning that a main islander wouldn’t go to the homes or eat the food of an outer islander, and main islanders do not weave lava lava.

Photo supplied by Emily Robison of her own non-traditional use of some of the patterning elements she learned with the weavers of the outer islands.

The backstrap woven fabric called lava lava is used in certain patterns as the only form of outer island female dress — a type of wraparound skirt — and in other patterns it is used as part of the traditional male main island dress. It is also used in main islander funeral ceremonies. Therefore it’s an important trade item from the outer islands to the main islands, but main islanders consider it taboo to participate in any part of the manufacture.

Photo supplied by Emily Robison of her current work which she says is a reproduction of one of her teacher’s pieces except for the supplementary-weft pattern.

Traditionally, lava lavas were woven of banana and hibiscus bark fibers and naturally dyed in reds and blacks (maybe other colors, but I haven’t seen them), but this practice has shifted in favor of commercially available thread from China. This transition is less than 50 years old. The traditional fabrics weren’t warp-faced, I don’t think — at least the few I’ve seen weren’t — but today’s lava lavas are.

Silk is too expensive, wool too hot, and cotton doesn’t hold up to the production, so they exclusively used polyester (but I’ve heard rumors of people incorporating more cotton in the past 10 years). Their patterns are pretty distinct and uniform. People can use many colors (reds are off limits unless used as an accent color or on the edges), but the two types of patterns are the lava lavas with large fields of solid color and accents on the edges and in the middle. These are the ones that have a supplemental weft, and an example is the one that I am currently weaving. (Emily tells me that the supplementary-weft patterning technique shows pattern on both faces of the cloth. Here is a view of the back of the cloth of her current piece showing the black supplementary-weft pattern.)

Another example is the style with 6 or 7 contrasting stripes (I don’t know when one would be chosen over the other — 6 is more common) on a colorful background. The stripes are made of two complementary colors and some patterning.

The ones for men are just black and white, 6 or 7 striped.

Image of a Yapese man’s lava lava taken by Laverne from the website of worthpoint.com

Single-thread floats in the green section on the upper face of the cloth.

Much to the chagrin of my Yapese host family, I studied with outer islanders and wove in secret for about 18 months. It was a real taboo thing to do and it didn’t make me any friends… so I don’t know as much as I could have learned if I’d been living with an outer island family.

The patterns are made with two sticks that control the floats — one for the right face, and one for the reverse face. The warp is always continuous, and the tension rod loop, string heddles, and pattern floats are all created in the warping process.

(Note from Laverne: I just love that extra heddle peg sitting there so neatly like that. If you are curious about how heddles are made during the warping process, I can show you how my Montagnard (Vietnames hilltribe) backstrap weaving teachers do it. It’s probably not exactly the same way as the Yapese weavers do it but it will give you an idea for now. There’s a video showing how Ju Nie does it embedded in this blog post followed by a video I made slowing the process down so that you can more easily see how it works.)

Lava lavas must be long enough to cover a woman from upper hips to knees (it is taboo to show off any thigh). and so they are usually about 26 inches wide and 60 inches long. Once cut, the strings of the fringe are kept long to create a kind of modesty curtain between the legs. They’re worn by wrapping them in half around the body, and then pinching the two sides together at the right hip and folding the fringe inward to sit between the legs. They’re usually tied on with a belt, but some ladies just tuck them in.

You can follow Emily’s work via her Instagram account: @thewovenworld. She is hoping to create a website soon too.

To finish, I have a few things to show you from my online weaving friends….

Kathleen Frtiz recently received a Guatemalan backstrap loom and has taken off on her backstrap weaving adventure as if she had been born for it. This is only her third piece as far as I can tell. It is woven in fine cotton and she is pleased with how surprisingly pliant it is even before it has been wet finished. She used this piece to experiment with patterning with supplementary weft using the patterning sticks and techniques that I describe in this tutorial.

Nancy Ayton made sweet hanging ornaments from her Andean Pebble Weave bands. The deer head motif is her own creation. I love it when people start designing their own patterns. The owl and bird motif is from my Complementary-warp Pattern Book and the knot-work pattern is from More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns.

Nora Dereli is using her inkle loom to weave one of several knot-work patterns that are charted in More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns. This is a motif that Louise Ström weaves in one of the structures that are woven using tablets. I translated the motif to the Andean Pebble Weave structure.

Susan Bratt finished weaving a guitar strap on her backstrap loom using the Andean Pebble Weave structure. The pattern is from the Complementary-warp Pattern Book.

Wendy Garrity completed what she tells me is her first silk-on-silk wrist band using the supplementary-weft patterning technique known as sampa in Bhutan. The multi-color spots of color that appear between the floats of supplementary weft are so pretty. Wendy studied weaving on a backstrap loom and various traditional patterning techniques while living and working in Bhutan and leads textile tours there every year. Her website is Textile Trails.

Gregory W and I wove double weave bands together and she came up with this lovely band with her own original design shortly after. Her guild had challenged members to use these colors in a project and this was Gregory’s contribution.

Marilyn Albright and I have never met but I feel that we are bound to one of these days in her movements between Alaska and Mexico. She has been experimenting with Bedouin al’ouerjan patterns using my tutorials here on this blog and adding her own twist to the traditional pattern .

And here’s one more from Priscilla Bradburn who wove this band after learning Andean Pebble Weave from my book Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms. She has taken flat-top S hooks, hearts, diamonds and other basic shapes and combined them in her own unique way to create a new pattern of her own. This and her creative use of color has produced a beautiful band!

Let’s hope my hunt for alum is successful otherwise it will be back to the synthetic dyes for me. I wonder what other interesting things I will see at the Mennonite farmers’ market.

Until next time…

Backstrap Weaving – Color Challenges

I have finished another ikat project/experiment. This one will be a wall hanging for, most likely, some future home as there isn’t a good space to hang it here. As with most of my weaving projects, I didn’t start out wanting to weave a wall hanging. I simply wanted to continue my experiments in ikat. The experiment was largely successful and so I now get to give the product a name….in this case, a wall hanging.

My goals for this one were to…

…try tying patterns into 60/2 silk. I hadn’t used 60/2 silk for ikat before.

…place one layer of warp threads on top of the other, so that the warp was half its original intended width, and tie the pattern onto both layers at once.

…dye with multiple colors.

…include patterns woven with supplementary weft.

…weave a band along the end of the piece using the fringe of the finished piece as the weft.

The dyeing itself was successful in that there weren’t any leaks or other mishaps. However, none of colors turned out the way I had expected! The first green was way brighter than expected. I thought that it would turn out a lot “dirtier” because I wasn’t dyeing over white. I had hoped that it would look like the typical “swampy” greens that one gets from using plants. Later, I remembered having received some good advice about these particular dyes when I was buying them. I was told that the colors were bright and that it was a good idea to add a tiny bit of slate-color dye to dull them a bit. I even bought a pot of the slate dye so I could do just that and then completely forgot to follow the advice. But, there were some things about the dyeing process that pleased me: as I was dyeing one color on top of another, then on top of yet another, I managed to create an unexpected reddish-brown that I loved. The thing is, I know I will never be able to replicate it!

I thought that I would end up with a black or almost-black background color after all the layering of colors. But, as you can see, it’s a very dark green with interesting shimmers of reddish-brown and teal that appear when light hits it a certain way.

This is a view looking down from my bed first thing in the morning. The warp in this picture has been set up for weaving on a backstrap loom with heddles in place and some weaving started. My bed base is the anchor point for the far end of my loom. I have to be careful if I get up in the darkness not to stumble and get myself entangled in warp!

As weaving progressed and the warp threads jiggled about with the movement of opening and closing sheds, they began to loosen their grip on each other and fan out. The ikat patterns slowly took on a more solid appearance. At this point, I paused to choose a color in my stash of 120/2 silk so that I could weave some motifs into the broad band of reddish-brown. I had a kind of wheat color that I thought would be a good match. Out came the charting paper and I drew a pattern with hooks and arrow-head shapes that would go well with the main ikat pattern. You can also see a thin horizontal stripe of teal lying on top of the one of the wooden rods which I had decided that I hated! So, I designed another fairly solid pattern for continuous supplementary weft to weave over and hopefully conceal it.

Discontinuous and continuous supplementary weft patterns.

This discontinuous pattern was fun to weave. I love this technique where two strands of patterning weft are passed at once. My little cardboard bobbins kept everything orderly. In the lower left part of the picture with the bobbins, you can just make out the one and only warp thread that broke. I had nicked and weakened it with the tip of my scissors when I was cutting out the ikat tape. It didn’t take long for it to break once I started weaving. Replacing a section of broken thread that has been dyed multiple colors along its length can be a problem. I had some green 60/2 silk that wasn’t a bad match for the dark green but some of it had to creep into the brown section where the warp thread had torn.

The second continuous supplementary-weft pattern that I had designed to cover the teal stripe wasn’t so much fun to weave…at least not to get started. There were 882 warp ends to count in the shed to lay in the first shot of supplementary weft and I had to count it six times before I got it right! I kept ending up with one extra thread. Was I miscounting or had I actually wound 1766 ends of 60/2 silk instead of 1764? It was maddening! Conclusion…I was miscounting. Once the first row was in, it was pretty smooth sailing. I think the pattern does a pretty good job of hiding the stripe.

The threads in the main ikat section behaved pretty well. There wasn’t a great deal of shift except for the very center. I think that had something to do with the way I had lashed the warp to the frame for tying the ikat tape. It has the typical out-of-focus look of ikat.

After that, I had to go through laying in the pattern again for the strip of supplementary weft over the second teal stripe. It was slightly less painful the second time around. And how is this for crazy? I got about 20 rows in on the set of supplementary-weft motifs on the second brown section before I realized I was weaving the wrong pattern! I had designed two patterns. The first had been too fine for this weight of silk but worth keeping for perhaps another project in heavier thread. That was the chart I had grabbed. Grrr! Un-weaving this silk is no fun at all. There is a surprising amount of fluff build-up that binds the threads and means that the sheds don’t want to pop open cleanly to release the weft that you need to remove.. I literally had to tear the threads apart.And here it is finished and still on the loom. I tried to squeeze as much dark green out of it as I could at the end but warp tension was starting to get a bit wonky at that point and it was time to stop.

Once off the loom and after the usual finishing process, I wove a band along the bottom edge of the fabric using groups of warp threads from the fringe as the weft. I designed a double-faced pebble weave pattern that would suit the motifs on the cloth….hooks, diamonds, arrow heads. The piece certainly did not need any more added pattern but weaving a band like this is something I have been wanting to try and this was a good opportunity.

I suppose I shouldn’t have used this piece for my first attempt at this technique but I am quite pleased with the result nevertheless. It takes a while to figure out the number of threads to include in each warp bundle and how hard to beat. If either one of those two factors is not quite right, the fabric will pucker. And mine did a little. My first motif is more elongated than the other two. This is the result of having to adjust my beat as I went along.

I had been admiring ikat fabric from Sumba and had noticed that the weavers there join two panels of ikat cloth together side by side and then weave a band along the two ends of the joined panels using the threads in the fringe as the weft. The vast majority of examples that I have seen so far have been warp-faced plain-weave bands with some warp stripes. It makes me wonder if the weavers recognize that there is already enough pattern in the cloth itself and that the bands, therefore, should be quite plain. This is where I got the idea to weave such a band…but I wanted pattern in mine!

One of the many gifts that Kay Faulkner left to the weaving world was a set of video clips that she had taken while traveling in Indonesia. This will show you the process of weaving one of these bands in Sumba if you are curious….

My Montagnard (Vietnamese hilltribe) weaving teachers taught me to create a twined finish on unwoven warp ends. Like the Sumba weavers, they also join panels together to make their clothing. A pattern is then twined around the unwoven warp threads on the edge of the combined panels. You can see this at the two ends of a piece I made after studying with these teachers. The Montagnard kteh edging is twined and highly patterned while the Sumba edging is woven and is normally quite plain, as far as I have seen so far. Sometimes a Montagnard weaver will hand over her cloth to a kteh expert who will finish off her woven work with the twined patterns. Here is a video (unfortunately shot by me in quite low light conditions) of one of my Montagnard teachers twining part of a row with two colors. You can appreciate that it is quite a slow process compared to weaving a band along the edge. I find the movements very calming and graceful. I like the smooth, solid colors this technique produces. The twined band has only one “good” face.

Some day, my latest ikat experiment will find its place on a wall. This experiment is over, notes have been taken, and it’s time to start thinking about the next project. I am thinking about using cochineal to dye my next ikat attempt. I have only ever used it to dye llama fiber so far. It will be interesting to see how it goes on silk. Perhaps I’ll make some dye samples this time before I go and dive into the deep end. In the meantime, the unexpected colors that I created in this latest piece have grown on me…good and earthy….as the colors I had expected to get fade from my memory.

And, I continue the challenge of removing all color from my hair. Let me sneak in an update here of my color-free challenge…18 months in and probably only two more trims to go to be rid of all the old dyed hair!