supplementary weft – Page 5 – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Moody Blues and Greens

I have had a frustrating time trying to photograph my most recent ikat piece in a way that captures its true colors. I haven’t succeeded. The piece either looks a pale and washed-out green or takes on a blue resembling turquoise. So, you will see that the colors of my latest finished silk ikat project in the following pictures are ridiculously different. This piece has its moods!

This is the ikat warp that I dyed with a color called Teal by the manufacturer only to find that much of the blue component of the dye mixture simply would not take. The dye bath water turned a turquoise-ish blue at the end of the process and I had to rinse the yarn very well to stop it from continuing to release blue. What was left behind was a green that I ended up loving. I suppose this color could in fact be called teal. I have completely lost track now of the color my mind’s eye had been expecting.

Below, you can see the first band of patterning with supplementary weft and the ikat pattern stretching away in the distance. You can see the “holes”, or spaces, that I left in the ikat pattern which I planned to fill with motifs using supplementary weft.

I scattered some more motifs using silk supplementary weft before reaching the start of the ikat section…

I used the same motif and designed an elongated version to fill the spaces I had left between the lines of ikat…

Here it is in a blue mood. It is off the loom before being washed and pressed and feeling rather stiff…not like silk at all. I know not to be disappointed by this. The wet-finishing process produces magical results!

I washed it and gave it the typical hard press so that the silk relaxed and shone…Now it’s in a green mood on the black background.

A different background, a different mood…(I love this version!: the colors are pretty true for the motifs but that’s not the real color of the warp).

One of the things I like about this particular technique of patterning using supplementary weft is that the motif does not show on the back of the cloth. Instead, you see a sort of “reverse embossing” (my made-up name for it!). If you look closely you can make out the diamond shapes and even the pattern that sits within the diamonds.

You can read more, if you like, about this single-face technique in a basic tutorial that I wrote some time ago. It includes some pattern charts.

As for the true color, I guess the closest shot would be the one with the black background. The real color is a richer version of that. I did the wet-finishing before dealing with the fringe as I wasn’t sure to what use this piece would be put. One end is a selvedge so there was nothing to bother with there. I wanted to avoid having the unwoven warp ends collapse into a tangled mess in the wash and so, while at the loom, I stopped weaving and then inserted a piece of cardboard in a shed that was the width of the warp and about three inches long. Then I wove another inch and cut the piece off the loom and removed the cardboard. That was enough to keep the unwoven warp ends in good shape until I decided what to do with them.

I had been planning to move onward from this project to a balanced weave in which the ikat pattern is in the weft or perhaps in both warp and weft. However, I can see from the samples that I have woven with the 30/2 silk in balanced plain-weave that I need more experience with getting a consistent beat and achieving the desired number of picks per inch.

I haven’t quite settled into that yet and I think I need to have developed a good rhythm before I attempt tying and dyeing and trying to get dyed threads to align. I did weave another balanced-weave sample in 30/2 silk using a finer bamboo reed that I have….28epi this time instead of 24epi and am much happier with this sample.

So, next up is an ikat project with 60/2 silk. I have been scratching around all week trying to come up with a pattern in which I can combine several of the elements I have been working with so far….creating shapes with a bit more curve (with limited success), dyeing with multiple colors (two, so far) and folding the warp to create an instant repeat when I wrap it with tape. This time I am going to fold the warp to halve its width rather than its length and tie the pattern on those two layers of threads at once.

I’ve decided to try having four colors in the pattern after looking at gorgeous pieces from Indonesia that have been dyed with morinda and indigo. The patterns include a very dark blue-black, a paler blue from the first dipping in indigo, morinda-red and the raw white original color of the cotton warp. Hopefully, I am not pushing this too far in my limited experience!

I’ll leave you here with my best wishes for a joyful Christmas and all the best for whichever holidays you celebrate at this time of year. I added a few more Andean Pebble Weave Christmas tree ornaments to my collection because I was itching to do some pick-up. All these colors are true!

Backstrap Weaving – Order and Disorder

It all started a few years ago when my weaving friend Bhakti gave me a loom with a circular warp that she had been using to study with a group of Karen backstrap weavers. Her teachers had created the warp and set it up for her. It seems that they used the sticks that they would normally use for their much wider projects. The coil rod, heddle sticks and shed rod were clumsily long for this narrow warp. Because I was traveling, the first thing I did was leave behind the large piece of long pvc pipe that they had been using as the shed rod. It was way too bulky to pack. I saved the space it had been occupying with a sturdy piece of cord.

I loved the simple backstrap made from a piece of plastic Thai rice sack. A halved stick of bamboo fills the seam at the two sides so that the strap doesn’t fold in on itself. The sword was also wonderful as was the forked dowel rod that had been neatly split in two. The unwoven warp, and later the cloth itself, get clamped between the two pieces of that split rod and then rolled with the help of another rod to hold the circular warp in place. This stops the warp from slipping around the two end beams as the weaver beats. It was too precious a piece to leave behind even though it was heavy and bulky. The simple temple, which consisted of a flat stick with pins taped to ends, was also a treasure.

In case you are not familiar with what I mean by a circular warp, compare the two warps in this next picture….

The warp with the blue and yellow pattern is circular. You start weaving at one point and continue around the circle until you arrive back at the place where you started. The entire warp slides and rotates around its two end beams every time you advance the warp. This means that the weaver always stays more or less seated at the same distance from the end of the warp throughout the project.

The other warp is the one that I more typically use…a single-plane warp. You start weaving at one end and finish at the other end. The cloth is rolled up as the weaving advances. The weaver, therefore, moves closer and closer to the end beam as the weaving advances.

I learned about the use of circular warps on backstrap looms with the Montagnard (Vietnamese hilltribe) backstrap weavers with whom I studied some years ago and have used this kind of warp a few times in my own work. It is particularly handy when I want to weave a piece that is too long to fit in my weaving space on a single-plane set-up, like the purple scarf project below….

Here’s another long warp that I set up in circular fashion as a demonstration piece…

Above, you can clearly see the circular nature of the warp my Montagnard teacher, Ju Nie, is using.

One thing I have struggled with a little when using a circular warp is getting the warp well clamped and fixed in position in order to start the weaving. My aim has always been to clamp the warp so that I can start weaving as close to all the knots (where I changed colors in the warp) as possible. This creates the smallest amount of loom waste. This has always involved a lot of fiddling and messing about, for me in my inexperience, with the threads slipping and sliding in their circle around the two end beams so that the knots eventually got very much misaligned. My warp that had come off the warping stakes in such good order would end up in complete disorder! Eventually I would get it clamped but there would be much more waste than I had anticipated because the knots had slipped so much out of alignment. Part of the problem is that I didn’t insert the coil rod while winding the warp. A coil rod in a circular warp has a very useful stabilizing effect even before you can actually start weaving.

I noticed that the Karen weavers set up their warp in a slightly different way which keeps the color changes in the warp perfectly aligned and in good order no matter how much messing about you do. They use two coil rods….one in the typical position beyond the shed rod and the other is positioned at the point in the warp where one would start weaving. This second one creates even more stability and locks everything at the color changes into position.

This is the way I would go about winding a warp if I wanted to replicate the set-up of the Karen warp I was given…

Of course, I can’t say that this is the way they did it themselves.

The two blackened circles are the two fixed stakes that hold the warp tension. Ca = the coil rod at the ”start” of the warp. Cb = the coil rod in its typical position beyond the shed rod. The stakes marked X hold the cross. I know that the Karen weavers use a hollow rod of large girth (H) to measure the length of the heddles that they create while they wind the warp. Later, a stick of much smaller girth is inserted in the tube. The tube is slid out from beneath the heddles and the thinner stick remains behind as the heddle rod.

I could see from examining the Ca coil rod in my Karen warp that the first and last ends of warp were tied directly to the rod. At a color change, the tail of the old color would be left on standby until it was later called into use again. The new color would be tied to the rod. It all looks a bit disorderly there in the picture below but, wow, what a difference it makes to getting the warp nicely clamped and positioned so that the start of the weaving can be as orderly as possible!

I placed a stiff cardboard strip in one of the sheds at the coil rod which gave me a nice straight and even base against which to beat and started weaving from there.

In the very first picture I showed of the warp you may have noticed that there were two shuttles. The warp had been set up for some continuous patterning with supplementary-weft. The green weft was used for the ground weave and the white weft was the supplemental patterning thread. The warp included two patterning rods that raised certain warp threads in order to form the simple repeating pattern. These were placed in the same way that my Guatemalan weaving teachers had shown me.

I wasn’t really in love with the pattern and I also didn’t care for the fact that the ground weave was more warp-dominant than warp-faced so, once I had decided that I was going to actually sit and weave this piece (about three years after having received it!), I removed the patterning sticks and un-wove the six inches or so of cloth that had been started.

I used a thick piece of dowel to replace the pvc shed rod that I had removed. And then I put sticks in the original cross to get an idea of how wide this warp would be if I wove it as warp-faced rather than warp-dominant.

I am in the habit of first weaving a sample with new-to-me yarn before taking on a major project like this so that I know exactly what width to expect. That wasn’t an option this time. By putting in cross sticks and gently sliding them back and forth along the warp until everything settles, I can then push the threads around and get a pretty good idea of the where these threads will want to sit in my hands when I am in the driver’s seat. It’s worth noting that ten different weavers could work on this warp and all create different widths of good warp-faced cloth. The threads will behave in different ways with different weavers at the loom according to how how much tension each places on the wrap, how they beat and how they handle the weft. Something that was a little unusual for me was the fact that the warp was made up of doubled threads.

The first thing I had to come to terms with was the lack of order in the green strips. I am a bit nutty when it comes to symmetry. The green strips were all different widths. Well, the fact is that I didn’t come to terms with it and I cut and pulled out ends so that the two outer strips matched. I then made the two inner ones match too. They were slightly wider than the two outer ones. One white stripe was missing a couple of ends but I decided I would live with that!

ABOVE: In “jammies” on a wintry day trying to decide what to do about those uneven green bits!

From order to disorder….I then decided that the little supplementary-weft patterns that I planned to use, needed to be scattered randomly along the length of the piece. I don’t do random very well and every time I try, I find myself unconsciously slipping back into a pattern. I pushed ahead trying to be as little controlled by a need for symmetry and orderly patterning as I could.

There was plenty of warp to work with and so I decided the first part would just be about seeing if I had set the width correctly. Then I would decide on the motifs I would use, the material for the supplementary weft and the colors. The warp didn’t come with enough weft material to weave the complete project and so I used some white thread I have in my stash. You can see the turns of the white weft along the edges. A bit later I discovered that I did in fact have some green in my stash that almost perfectly matched the warp color.

Below you can see the fun moment when the ”starting coil rod” rounds the far beam and starts heading towards you rather than away from you. You finally get to catch just a glimpse of what you have woven so far….

The warp is in good order which is more than can be said about the contents of my cupboard!

And getting closer….and then closer….

In the picture above left you can see that I am using a shed rod attached with rubber bands to a second stick. These two form the system that I call the ”twisty sticks” and twisting them is what helps me to open a nice clean heddle shed without having the scrape the heddles along the warp. This way of operating the loom is one I learned from a backstrap weaver in Peru and is just one of many methods that I have seen backstrap weavers use.

In the picture on the right, you can see the flat stick (it’s actually a shuttle that I am re-purposing) that I kept permanently positioned in the ”back” shed at the shed rod. I would pull it down towards the heddle and then tilt it on its side to raise and clear that shed through the heddles. Then I would leave it lying flat once again within the shed when it wasn’t in use.

Getting veeeeery close….The two coil rods and the shed rod (I am using a two-stick shed rod aka ”twisty sticks”) are now so close together that if I wish to continue, I’ll need to change the large shed rod to a much slimmer one, which is what I did. With that, I was able to squeeze in another couple of inches.

And, this is where I called it quits….

All sticks have been removed and you can see the unwoven warp that connects the start of the woven cloth to the end. What a mess that is!

And here is the cloth straight off the loom….

One idea I have is to lay pieces of the cloth side by side, joining them with decorative stitching, and make a bag of some sort. I will let the cloth lie around for a while and see what other ideas come along.

Here are the simple sticks that went into this project from top to bottom…

far beam,

forked split rod (these are the ones that came with the warp but I ended up using the pair below them which I had bought from another backstrap weaver from Burma. They are much lighter in weight.),

shuttle (I didn’t use the stick shuttle that came with the warp as I am not fond of that kind of shuttle),

sword/beater (this is an old favorite of mine from back in 1995. It was originally a very long shuttle for my Navajo loom which was cut down and beveled to become a simple sword…love it!),

shed rod,

heddle rod and second heddle -”protection” rod,

starter coil rod (Ca)….interesting how it ended up a bit bowed!,

coil rod (Cb),

second shed stick which together with the shed rod formed the ”twisty sticks”.

Oh, and there was a second rod (not pictured) that was used together with the split rod to roll and secure the near end of the warp. I didn’t feel any need for a temple.

One other thing worth mentioning is that I have a new appreciation for the way my Guatemalan weaving teachers taught me to enclose the warp threads in heddles. This is the same method that the Karen weavers use and is also used by Yan, who brought her Li-style backstrap loom to show me, and Ju Nie my Montagnard teacher. I’ll expand on this in another post after I have done some experiments.

In the meantime, I must write to Bhakti and show her what became of her wonderful gift!

Backstrap Weaving – Crossing Woven Paths

Since I last wrote, I had the luck to cross woven paths with a lady who lives on Hainan Island in southern China. She found her way into my inbox via my blog after she had spent time with some backstrap weavers on Hainan Island from the Li minority group.

I imagine that it had been a very intense time watching the weavers at work trying to absorb and make sense of everything they were doing. Megan told me that although she speaks Mandarin, the weavers speak a local dialect. They were only able to communicate using some very basic Chinese words. It reminds me of weaving with Quechua-speaking ladies here in Bolivia and Peru. One of my teachers had the habit of throwing a word in Spanish at the end of long sentences in Quechua hoping, I suppose, that it would somehow give context to what she was saying. Believe it or not, it sometimes actually did help me to get the gist of what she was saying! None of it was instructional, though. It was basically chit-chat and the way that we tried to bond talking about our families.

Here’s Megan observing one of the Li weavers at her foot-tensioned loom.

She told me that the loom had been warped and fabric had been woven before she arrived and so she was able to watch the steps to creating the patterns with the supplementary weft threads but had not had a chance to see the loom being set up.

She took home a loom with its partly woven fabric but was understandably a bit confused about the process and unable to sit and continue the weaving on her own. As she was about to travel to Europe and wanted to take the loom with her, she did not have a chance to return to the weavers and have her questions answered. I am glad she found me! She sent me a brilliant high-resolution photo of the loom with the parts numbered and an email in which she named the parts as best she could. I love to trouble-shoot but I can’t do so without good pictures that I can enlarge. I couldn’t have asked for more from the pictures that Megan had sent me. The piece is decorated with supplementary weft.

It was exciting because I had seen Li backstrap looms when I was at Convergence in 2010. Pam Nadjowski had a booth in the Vendor Hall with textiles and weaving implements of various Chinese minority groups and the Li loom was one of them. That’s it pictured below. I was tempted to buy one because the pieces were so beautiful However, I eventually settled on buying two fine bamboo reeds instead that have served me very well in my weaving projects.

Pam had sent me and allowed me to use pictures of the Li weavers that she had taken during the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market one year. Clearly they use several different kinds of techniques to decorate their woven cloth, not only supplementary-weft inlay.

I love the paddle-like ends of the beam against which the weavers place their feet. Megan’s loom is much simpler. I like how a piece of plastic tube has been used in hers as the shed rod. The caps on the ends are handy for helping to stop the rod from sliding out of the warp. Weavers in Peru often use pvc pipe for the shed rod in their backstrap looms. They thread a safety string through the hollow pipe and tie the ends together which helps to stop the pipe from sliding completely out of the warp. You can see how beautifully the paddle ends on the Li loom are decorated in my photo from Convergence.

When I examined the photo with the numbered parts that Megan had sent me, I was excited to recognize the set-up as one that had been taught to me by two of my weaving teachers in Guatemala in 2008. That’s one of my teachers, Carmen, in the picture at left. I have even written a tutorial on this blog for the set-up and technique.

So, I was able to help with an explanation. Because Megan had named the loom parts in her email to me, we already had a common vocabulary with which to work. I could point her to my tutorial which also has video and, with those prompts, she was able to remember what the weavers had been demonstrating and she was on her way! She too remarked on how much fun this connection was. In her words…

This was exactly the advice I needed, as now everything works PERFECTLY! I am so happy, not only because I managed to move on my own, but also because a lady on the other side of the globe, who works with native people of different culture, was able to give me solutions. I find this very awesome 🙂

Here she is contentedly weaving at her loom….I have to say that she seems to have the right toes for this.

Now we can take another look at the picture Megan sent me with the numbered parts and I can name them for you. The rods hold a circular warp which are, as far as I know, far more common in Asian backstrap weaving than single-plane warps. In South America I have only seen circular warps used by backstrap weavers in Ecuador and I have read that they are also used in far northern Peru. The Vietnamese hilltribe weavers with whom I studied also use circular warps as did the Burmese weaver that I spent some time with one day.

#1 and #10….the warp beam and cloth beam…or near beam and far beam as I usually call them

#2 coil rod or rolling stick

#3 patterning shed stick 2

#4 shed rod

#5 patterning shed stick 1

#6 heddle rod

#7 and #8 patterning swords

#9 main sword

Half the black warp threads lie on top of the shed rod. The other half are enclosed in heddle loops and are raised when the weaver lifts the heddle rod. Patterning shed stick 1 holds certain threads from the shed-rod shed. Patterning shed stick 2 holds certain threads from the heddle shed. It’s these threads under which the supplementary weft is passed to form the patterns. The patterning sticks raise groups of threads and the weaver selects threads from these groups according to the pattern she is creating.

Here’s the video that I created a few years ago to show how to set up a warp with these patterning sticks. I am using heavy cotton thread and a really narrow warp just to demonstrate this. The second part of the same video shows how to operate the loom and use the sticks to create patterns. You can pass the supplementary weft from one edge of the cloth to the other as Megan’s weaving friend has done or you can create smaller discontinuous patterns by passing the weft back and forth just from edge to edge of the motif itself as I demonstrate in the video. My Guatemalan teachers use both techniques.

You can see the rest of that tutorial here. This is the cloth that my teacher and I wove together in Guatemala. The X patterns used continuous weft from edge to edge. The little figures were woven using the discontinuous method. Simple inlay as well as wrapping and soumak-like techniques are used to create these kinds of patterns. The blue checkered pattern is supplementary weft passed through the two unaltered patterning sheds. I used these methods to weave this cotton scarf some years after that trip….

Every now and then a student will bring me a warp that they bought in Guatemala with partly-woven cloth and I get to play on it! You can see the two patterning sticks in the warp just to the left of the shed rod….one on top and one below. Guatemalan weavers use single-plane warps rather than circular ones.

I am not sure what kind of system the Li weavers use to clamp and roll up their circular warps. The warp does need to be secured before weaving can begin or it will slide around the beams every time the weaver beats. I own an implement that I got from Dar Ku, a backstrap weaver from Myanmar, that I was able to spend some time with. It’s a split beam, the two pieces of which are placed above and below the unwoven warp ends and then joined and rolled to secure the circular warp and stop it from slipping around the beams. So far, I have only used it in more unorthodox ways.Right now, I am using it to secure to my current piece of weaving…

I found that I could no longer roll up the woven cloth around two beams as I usually do, as the little built-in pocket is bulky and was creating a bump. That was messing with the tension on the unwoven warp threads. So, I removed the cloth beam and had to find another way to attach myself to the piece so that I could continue weaving and be in comfortable reach of the weaving line and heddles. I have clamped the cloth between the split beam. I add another beam and can roll the cloth around both. Two rolls get me to a good position where I can start weaving again. That is working well.

Now I am on the home stretch having passed the half-way mark and have finished the diamond section of the pattern. Now I will weave the two weaving ladies again. This time I get to weave them the right way up rather than standing on their heads! I am thinking of trying to design a tree under which they can sit and weave in the shade.

Progress hasn’t been as fast as it could have been because I am working on another book. I realized that it is not often that I get to spend this much time at home and that I really need to take advantage of that. Too many of my book projects have been started and left standing with the interruption of travel. I am also very buzzed about the fact that I can include video clips with my publications on Patternfish. This is highly motivating!

Here are some projects from students and online weaving friends…..

Christine, who came to weave with me in Maine, is using a Harrisille Designs band lock, in much the same way as I am using the split beam, to clamp her band. She took this project away with her and reported that this was the easiest way to bring weaving along on her trip in carry-on luggage.

Caroline designed and wove this cute snail motif on a warp-faced double weave band that we started together.

Gonit Porat in Israel wove a fabulous band with several patterns from my book of traditional and original Andean Pebble Weave designs. She uses the two-heddle method which is just one of several ways to set up a loom for this structure. Click on her name to visit her website and see the amazing work she does with hundreds of tablets.

Yehudit is making striking key fobs using patterns from my Complementary-warp Pick-up book. That book shows another way to create Andean Pebble Weave patterns without using additional string heddles. And this is what Lenora is weaving using the same book. It is amazing how a little imagination in the arrangement of colors in the borders can give a band an extra bit of zing. I love it.

Lausanne finished the wool band with its aquatic patterns that she started during my visit to Vermont last year. She also used the two-heddle method for these Andean Pebble Weave patterns that are charted in my Pattern Book.

And, I was right in guessing that Kristin would be the first one to show me a project in which she wove and sewed the eye-pattern tubular band as an edging for her hand-woven cloth. This was all made with her own hand-spun alpaca yarn. It’s a beautiful finish for this piece.

Some feedback from an online weaving friend on these tubular bands and my most recent book, in which she compares the bands to potato chips, brought a smile to my face and really made my day 🙂

Oh my, these little bands are just like potato chips, but way healthier. I just can’t stop at one! I was in a bit of a weaving slump, but now I’m dreaming of things I can weave, just so I can add this lovely edging. I can hardly wait to finish one band so that I can try another in a different colour combo. I’ve been waiting for a book like this for years, down to earth and easy to understand. Thank you Laverne!

Lizzie Ruffell has been weaving bands using some of the knot-work pattern that are charted in my second book. She says that she is now completely comfortable with the spotted charts, has managed to adapt a tablet-weaving pattern (the dragons) to pebble weave and chart it, and is keen now to create some designs of her own.

While my northern hemisphere friends huddle indoors away from some of the coldest temperatures in decades, and Australia recovers from its recent heatwave, I am enjoying a few days of cooler temperatures here. I was filming video clips during a stretch of particularly hot days last week (I still can’t get a tech to come out and look at my broken air conditioner!). I have to get myself into some pretty awkward positions sometimes to film and give people the weaver’s view of what I am doing. At one point I had to stop filming because sweat from my forehead was dripping onto the band I was attempting to weave. I can tell you that holding some of the positions is doing my abs a whole lot of good!

I will leave you with a bright band and some spring-like images to brighten up your cold days, or soften some brutally hot ones. I call this band Birds, Bees, Butterflies and Blooms.

Backstrap Weaving – A Leafy Retreat

Anyone who is familiar with my work will know that I like weaving leaves….creeping leaf-laden vines, fallen leaves lying among berries or on the snow, shadowy leaves floating on a background of translucent cloth.

I have used them in a variety of structures: using supplemental weft on a warp-faced plain-weave ground, in intermesh, in double weave, in Andean Pebble Weave, and, more recently, with supplemental weft on an open mesh-like ground. I like to consider them my signature patterns.

Leaves on the snow and leaves among the berries in silk.

Leaf patterns in two very different cotton projects that both use supplemental weft threads to create the motifs.

A band with a leafy pattern is the one I chose to be my ”reward” weaving whenever I decided to take a break from writing my latest book. Right after I wrote my blog post ”Taking My Own Advice” in which I talked about the importance to me of having these little rewards, I set about choosing thread and planning a small project. I wanted a wrist cuff but one that was a fair bit wider than others I have woven. I also wanted one in black and white to go with a necklace that I often wear. I have a lot of DMC #12 perle cotton and decided to go with that. It is silky smooth and strong in contrast with the sticky wool and delicate hand-spun cotton singles that I have been weaving with lately. Oh my, how those sheds just pop open with the lightest touch!

I chose my pattern, one that I included in my latest book of 100 patterns…Complementary-warp Pattern Book…….leaves, of course, this time in pebble weave.

I had first created this pattern for a piece that became the cover for a journal in which I combined colors using small skeins of naturally-dyed silk that I had been given. This pattern of leaves is included in the Garden set of patterns in the latest book. The garden set includes various flower motifs, a butterfly, a humming bird and of course the leaves with a flower bud. And, there is whole other set that is made up of just bees.

I made my heddles on my wrist-cuff warp and then, there the warp sat for two weeks, tied to the bottom of my bed and stretched out across the floor. I can’t say that it sat there untouched because I stepped on it, tripped over it, and even got things tangled in it as I sat on the floor next to it, tapping away at my computer keys, writing my book and studying my samples. My bedroom floor is my weaving studio and my desk! I am afraid that I was a little impatient with that warp and would just shove it aside. The thing that had become entangled in it would be favored over the fine threads in the warp. I was almost convinced that I had abused it so much that it would be beyond recovery for weaving. I was so absorbed in writing the book and taking photos that I guess I just didn’t need time out for ”reward” weaving. The book itself required a certain amount of weaving and I guess those projects alone gave me enough loom time to keep me very happy. I would often be typing with the sample I was currently weaving still attached to my waist!

Now I am in a period between two major parts of the book-writing project and I decided to take a break and enjoy my little leaf pattern. A little leafy retreat. As you can see, the abused warp survived and I was able to weave enough band to make a cuff. The fineness of the thread allowed me to weave two columns of the pattern and I enjoy the mental gymnastics of flipping the pattern in my head as I pick my way across the threads.

As for the book on which I am currently working, you might be wondering what it s about…well, I like surprises…and I’ll let you know soon!

This is what Kristin has on her loom. She is making cloth for a bag project using her own hand-spun alpaca yarn and using the pattern from a piece I wove many years ago and photographed for my very first book. Seeing her project made me fondly remember that old wool weaving of mine. I turned it into a pencil case for a friend. It was tragic when one of his pens leaked ink onto it! Kristin is an awesome spinner of all kinds of fiber and she is handling what must be a sticky and tricky piece on her backstrap loom with two sets of string heddles holding her precious hand-spun thread. Her photo has me admiring her yarn as much as the weaving.

Maria Leticia Galve in Argentina sent me a picture of the band she wove using one of the six cat patterns that are charted in my latest pattern book. It is heart- warming seeing these patterns being enjoyed by people around the world. I love the colors and the way she has flipped the cats back and forth.

The cats are just one part of the Animal set of patterns in my book.

Katrina Michaels is using one of the smaller patterns from my instructional book, Complementary-warp Pick-up, to create a guitar strap. That’s a lovely set of tools that she has there on her inkle loom. Her swords are placed within the picking cross ready to help her select threads for the next row of pattern. This is a technique favored by many who don’t want to fiddle with extra sets of heddles or whose looms don’t have enough space for them. This picking cross method is the one I teach in the Complementary-warp Pick-up book. Kristen, on the other hand, is using the two-heddle method, as am I, for the leaf pattern on my cuff. Each weaver decides on the method they prefer, or choose the one which best suits the pattern they are weaving and/or the equipment they are using.

The fabric for my new cuff is off the loom. I see that I have enough length for the two ends to overlap. I can use simple snaps to close it. But now I want to edge it with a patterned tubular band. This is weaving and sewing combined, and I find it so relaxing.

You can see that I have just started the tubular edging on the upper right. I get a kick out of turning corners when I do this sewing!

I wont have a button under which to hide the start and finish ends of the tubular band. I can, however, hide the join beneath the part where the two ends of the cuff overlap. But, let’s see how neatly I can manage to connect the two ends together. I have been trying this with increasing levels of success with heavy-ish wool. I don’t know what my chances are of achieving neatness with this DMC #12, though! I’ll keep you posted.

As I said earlier, if you are a follower of my blog, you will know my love of leaf patterns. You will also quite likely know that I don’t really do Christmas. However, I had fun last year at my brother’s place designing a bunch of Christmas-themed patterns in pebble weave. The feedback from my sister-in-law as I wove and re-wove them, making little adjustments along the way, was very helpful.

I loved the way they turned out. Then I put them aside to await their publication in my pattern book in March this year. It has been a long wait since then to pull them out for Christmas this year. I think they do look very jolly and, with these, I will wish you all a joyous and peaceful time whatever you choose to do this holiday season.

Backstrap Weaving – Time for a new Tool

One weaving tool which hasn’t really made its way into my kit is the temple, an instrument that helps weavers maintain consistent width in the cloth they are producing. I have never really felt the need to use a temple and that’s most likely because I haven’t used my backstrap loom to create the kind of cloth that I felt required one. The ladies with whom I studied in Guatemala used temples. They were wonderfully simple tools….a piece of bamboo that sat underneath the cloth with a couple of small nails holding it in place.

I have to admit that I would cringe every time we pushed those nails into the edges of the woven cloth. When I took the pieces that I had started weaving with my teachers in Guatemala back to Bolivia to finish, I continued using the temples for a while. However, I soon abandoned them as I really felt that they weren’t doing anything for me. I have seen some fine Bhutanese textiles with horrible holes gouged at intervals into the edges from the sharp ends of the temples and that, more than anything, has really put me off using them.

But, now as I am typing, I am remembering that there has actually been one piece of cloth that I wove where I could see a clear need for a temple. It was a wide silk piece that I wove some time ago. I did manage to get away without using a temple because I couldn’t bear the thought of pushing nails or even pins into the edges of the silk.

When weaving this wide piece, I was finding that the cloth would ripple slightly as I propped the shed open ready to pass the shuttle. I had to try and grab the edges of the cloth, first one side and then the other, to straighten and smooth the cloth so that I could be sure that I was laying in the right amount of weft. A third hand would have been handy! It was clumsy and slowed me down but I was willing to do it to avoid using the ”dreaded” temple.

My Montagnard (Vietnamese hill tribe) weaving teachers used wooden temples with carved pointed tips for the cloth they wove on their backstrap looms. They even used them for narrow bands…

And, my weaving teachers in coastal Ecuador who wove on vertical looms rather than backstrap looms, used a similar style of temple cut from a large tube of bamboo that they attach to the upper face of the cotton cloth on the loom. I remember really struggling to bend that slat of bamboo into place each time it had to be re-positioned on the cloth. This heavy-ish sturdy cotton did not suffer at all from the pointed tips of the temple.

Why all this talk of temples? Well, I would like to weave another sheer cotton piece like the one I just wove but using much finer cotton. I don’t have a reed that is fine or wide enough for the piece I have in mind and so I will have to resort to trying to maintain the sett and width by other means just like the Guatemalan weavers in Alta Verapaz do. The temple will help with the width. Maintaining the sett will be another story! What tool do the ladies in Guatemala use?….skill and lifetimes of experience and know-how passed down through generations!

Until I get the fine cotton singles that I would like to use, I will practice with the little bit of hand spun cotton that I have left over from my most recent project. For that project I used a reed and so I have a sample from which to take calculations for width and something to guide me to determine and try to maintain the spacing between warp threads. I have wound a short warp with half the number of ends that I used for my scarf. Wish me luck!

Here are some bits and pieces I have gathered together for possible temples…

The piece at the bottom of the picture is the temple that came with a Karen loom that a friend gave me. Pins have been taped to a piece of wood and the temple was sitting on the back side of the warp-faced cloth. The bamboo pieces are the temples I was using with my teachers in Guatemala. The nails that pierced the cloth and then turned into the open ends of the bamboo, are sitting on top of the tongue depressor. I was wondering if cutting points into a piece of heavy cardboard like the black stuff you see there and reinforcing it with a tongue depressor would also work.

Or, there’s this….contributed by friend Franco to the backstrap weaving group on Ravelry many years ago…

It was working well for Franco. I would love it if I could get something like this to work for me. It measures and maintains width all at once!

As for my current project…it is finished! Except for the very first part which I un-wove and turned into fringe, I got a consistent 9 1/8 inches of width.

After finishing the hem-stitching the far end, I slowly unrolled the cloth and worked my way back to the start, burying weft ends as I went. Then I cut the weft out of the first wider part of the cloth and hemstitched that end.

Here it is off the loom waiting to have its fringe twisted before being washed and pressed.

Procrastinating! Enjoying the cloth and taking pictures because I was nervous about what was going to happen to it when it was washed!

Moe procrastination…yes, it’s sheer now but will it lose this translucency when it has been washed?

A whole day has gone by. Tomorrow I’ll wash this thing.

Post-wash and press: it lost between 1/8” and 1/4” in width and the warp threads moved closer together ever so slightly. It feels so soft!

Post-wash verdict: I love this super soft supple cloth that is so unlike anything I have woven before!

Now I am thinking about dyeing it. Should I?

During all the pre-wash dithering, I decided to take a sample that I had woven before my last trip away and make it into something. You might remember that I wanted to make a wool shoulder bag with a built-in pocket in the style of the ch’uspas (coca-leaf bags) that the Bolivian weavers make. I learned how to set up the warp and weave the pocket back in 1997 with my teachers in Potosí. This small green piece is the wool sample that I most recently wove to refresh my memory of the technique. I edged the little pocket with triple cross-knit looping.

I decided to go ahead and make this into a little zippered pouch. I edged it with a tubular band style that is woven in Chahuaytire, Peru which also served as the strap. The bottom is decorated with coil stitches and the pocket is edged with single cross-knit looping. A four-strand braid makes a nice zipper tab.

The wool surface loved to attract the stray bits of cotton that I have had flying around during my latest project.

I had started gathering materials for this project before I had finished weaving the cotton scarf. I thought about what I could possibly fit into the tiny pocket and found that my door key sat within it perfectly. Two days later when I wanted to go out, I turned my apartment upside down looking for my door key. I was locked in and had completely forgotten about having placed the key in the little pocket. I had to call a friend who keeps a spare for me to come and let me out. Another two days went by before I picked up the little green bag once more to work on it and discovered the secret contents of the little pocket. Duh!

So….I guess the hand spun-cotton-with-temple experiment is next. I have also wound my skeined silk into balls ready for warping. I am thinking about weaving a silk cowl….just a simple tube to drape around my neck instead of a whole scarf. At three-and-a-half months into the grey hair transition I am still thinking about wearing color around my face to brighten things up a bit. Until next time……..