supplementary weft – Page 6 – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Taking Stock

As I get ready to hit the road once again…how these seven weeks at home and back at my loom have flown!!…I always find it useful and somehow necessary to stop and take stock of what I have done with my weaving time and think ahead to my return so that I can hit the ground running when I get back. The next time I am home it will be for a full luxurious six months, unless I get restless and decide to go visit with my weaving teachers. Several ideas have already come to mind.

The first thing I finished when I got home seven weeks ago, was the silk paisley-patterned scarf.

If you have been following my blog over the years you will certainly know about my friend Dorinda. She recently left Bolivia to return to her home in the USA after having worked with a group of weavers in the central Bolivian highlands for about a decade. She writes and tells me about her transition back to life in the developed world. It is inspiring for me as I face the the fact that one day, I too, will most likely need to return to my other home in Australia and leave all this behind. This year I celebrate twenty-five years in South America. Leaving seems impossible and the very thought of it breaks my heart. If I could somehow make my home in both countries…..

Dorinda has also been taking stock of many things, one of which is the inventory of woven items she has had brought over from Bolivia recently. Naturally, Dorinda has had a difficult time assuring the weavers she left behind that all is not over and that she will be better able to generate sales for them in the USA than when she was with them in Bolivia. She is eager to give them a new order but funds for materials to create more textiles must come from the sale of existing stock.

This is where I am hoping you can help out. Dorinda has with her in the USA a limited number of bands of various width, zippered pouches and straps all created with the weavers’ own handspun naturally-dyed wool. If any of you have woven tubular bands with me, you will be well-acquainted with this beautiful cloth. I have also shown the pieces many times on my blog.

From Dorinda:

Those of you who enjoy working with the hand spun natural dyed woven cloth to make your own creations will be pleased to know that there are 19 fajas/bands ($38) (70” x 5” ) 6 larger weavings ($68) which are 63” x 9.5”, and 12 straps ($18) which are 74” to 78” long and 1.5” wide available for purchase.

There are also zippered pouches…$17 with wrist strap, $16 without, as well as yoga mat straps. Dorinda is particularly keen to promote the yoga mat straps as these are woven by the youngest weavers and sales of the straps encourages themto continue learning to weave from their elders and advance to wider pieces. Read more of the story in Dorinda’s blog post.

You can contact Dorinda directly to order or ask about any of these items by emailing her at dkdutcher@hotmail.com

As for my taking of stock, I am pleased that a couple of the items I completed during this short stint at home will travel with me. I have a new pouch for my iPod and charger as well as a handy neck pouch for carrying my iPod about when I want to use it as a camera.

I finished the neck ribbon for Tracy so that I can complete our fun sprang-for-backstrap-weaving barter agreement…

And, I wove a couple of silk bookmarks which are gifts for some friends. On the first one I used patterns that I haven’t woven for years and which I saw during time I spent with Angela, my Guaraní weaving teacher. I got half way through charting these patterns, but found that it was actually faster to just wing it….something which is fairly easy to do in the intermesh structure.

I wove the mug rugs pictured above many years ago with one of the patterns and still have three of the test pieces which served as my guide for replicating the motif. It had taken me a few attempts to get the tubular edging on those mug rugs right and the two pieces in the picture were duds. I am not showing the ugly edges of the mug rugs in the picture! I have a large tub of these abandoned pieces under my bed in case you believe that everything I weave turns out well first go! Occasionally I pull them out and they become useful.

Speaking of mug rugs, one of the new backstrap weavers on Ravelry has been using the mug rug pattern charts here on my blog to weave sets of mug rugs. It’s nice to see those patterns being used along with the tutorial on double weave. Those mug rugs were a favorite project of mine all those years ago. They wove up so quickly and I still have them scattered all over my home.

I took another silk book mark of the loom and used a 9-strand flat braid for finishing it. The green one was finished with a five-strand version. I call these my ”lazy” braids…one large braid that is quick to make as opposed to the multiple four-strand round braids that I usually like to do. I have a tutorial for the five-strand version here. The nine-strand one follows basically the same steps except that individual strands go over two and under two instead of over one, under one as described in the five-strand tutorial. It keeps all the fine ends of 60/2 silk nicely under control.

In my last blog post I described my small test pieces for double-width fabric on my backstrap loom and lamented the fact that I didn’t have swords that were long enough to weave the width I want, around 23 inches, in a single layer rather than two.

Well, it turns out that I do! My place is so small it is hard to believe that I could overlook something like this. I have a beautiful sword that goes with a backstrap loom from the Karen people that my friend Bhakti gave me. It would work beautifully on fabric up to 23 inches wide. I also have lots of Navajo-style battens from my tapestry days. They are long. I used to weave 24-inch wide Navajo style pieces back then. These are, however, probably too narrow but would do in a pinch. And, I have four wooden one-meter length rulers that are the perfect width. They have been sitting in a tub alongside uncut broom handles for so long, I no longer even notice them. So, I think I am well set to cut and shape some nice long swords from those when I return to Bolivia.

The Karen loom with its nice long split-beams and sword.

So, that’s one for the to-do list when I get home. I also want to weave a shoulder bag with one of the cute pockets that highland weavers here incorporate in their coca-leaf pouches. These pockets are typically very small, about the width of two fingers. I want to weave a patterned wool bag with a much larger pocket that would fit perhaps my iPod, a notebook or other small item.

I learned to weave these pouches with pockets in Potosi, Bolivia way back in 1997. Part of the fun of that project was learning how to decorate the pouch after I had finished weaving it. The bag was edged with a patterned tubular band. The pocket was edged with triple cross-knit looping.

My teachers Julia and Hilda discuss how to set up the warp that includes the pocket. It had been many years since either of them had woven one of these bags.

That’s me weaving the small pouch on the horizontal ground loom. And here’s the finished pouch with its little pocket in some of the lively colors of the highlands.

I attempted to weave one these a few years ago. It resides in that tub of stuff under the bed that I told you about earlier! I had attempted it in cotton and quickly realized that cotton requires a lot more precision for this kind of thing than wool. For something like this, a bit of stretchy-ness is good! So, I have woven a miniature version in wool with a teeny tiny pocket. My notes in my journal on this back in 1997 are quite sparse. I am sure that I thought at the time that it was all just so obvious and not worth noting down. But, it was amazing how things came back to me when I hit the first obstacle in the process.

Above you can see the wee pocket with some triple cross knit looping on the side. I need to practice that some more. Some of these pouches have their pockets edged with tubular bands, like the one at left, and some have no edging at all but may have a small pom pom or tassel or added fringe hanging from them. So, that gives me a second project to come home to. I am hoping to weave the pouch with four selvedges, as is the tradition. I had also hoped to get some ikat experiments done during this time at home but that didn’t happen.

And, to finish my taking-of-stock, it was fun to be able to finally edge the purple lap blanket and put it to use in what has been a winter with unusually lengthy periods of cold-ish weather.

The double weave music band will travel with me as a sample for those who will be weaving double weave with me in Australia.

I will leave you here with some news from Taproot Video. I am sure you must all know by now that Taproot Video is the home of my video class Operating a Backstrap Loom.

Taproot Video offers its classes on dvd or as streamed content. The most recent offering is Carol James’ much awaited class on sprang braiding. Carol has had a free video on the site for some time in which she teaches some of the basics. Now you can explore the topic further with her Introduction to Sprang.

I haven’t tried it myself but I can’t see any reason why sprang wouldn’t work on a backstrap loom. One of these days I’ll do that…after I finish the wide silk piece and the wool shoulder bag and all the ikat experiments and and and…I hope my time at home later this year will see some book projects finished too.

I hope to find time to write some “postcard” blog posts while on the road. Until next time!

Backstrap Weaving – ”Big” Projects

I decided some time ago that I wanted to devote myself more to ”big” projects on my backstrap loom….longer and wider and with a greater number of ends.

But, as I put my latest big one aside, I felt that it would be fun to play around with some smaller ones for little while, something like a pouch for my iPod, for example.

However, after several days of searching through books and web pages, finding ideas for patterns, adapting them and charting, erasing and re-charting, I have come to the conclusion that even the projects that are small in physical terms are, in fact, ”big”….and that’s why I like them. I like putting in the time to search and sample. I could do without the do-overs that are sometimes necessary but that is all part of the process.

It’s nice to look back at the first steps towards the weaving of my most recent project…the silk paisley scarf… and then look at the finished scarf lying on my bed. I think that perhaps the first thoughts about tones of blue sitting next to crisp, clean white entered my head when I came across the image of the Roussel painting, above.

Gathering colors…three tones of blue, white and assorted colors.

Other first steps involved sampling, lots of it. I have three small abandoned paisley samples which I am now willing to throw away plus a chart that is well-worn from all the erasing and adjusting.

There’s the memory of this first warp which got put back on the warping stakes and unwound back to zero. One of my stakes had shifted on the first attempt and the tension was off.

I have a tangle of blue 60/2 silk…the one part that didn’t survive my attempt to unwind and re-warp. I tell myself I’ll sit down one day with a good movie and untangle it, but I doubt it!

And now the scarf is done…washed and pressed and showing off its lovely sheen. Until the iron started pressing and lifting the dampness from the fabric, it was refusing to look or behave like silk at all. I am really happy with it.

Now what should go next on my loom from the list of ideas I have?

I have been carrying my iPod around in a sweet sprang bag that Tracy made for me but I decided that it really needed a woven bag of its own…a bag big enough to carry the iPod as well as its charger.

I had seen some photos of pre-Columbian textile fragments online and a particular motif had caught my eye. I charted something based on that and added a border pattern with the idea of weaving it with supplementary weft on a ground of 30/2 cotton I had bought way back in 2013 from Mayan hands.

It’s the same cotton I had used for the journal covers I wove some time ago so I knew how it behaved. I had all the figures in my notebook from those projects and so I didn’t need to sample. I just needed to figure out the width I wanted and calculate the number of ends.

How do you like that bright pink tatting thread for the heddles?

I installed a coil rod because the cotton base structure would be plain weave.

Of the number of ways that I know of preventing the ”corrugated” look that my plain-weave cotton fabric sometimes gets, the coil rod is my (current) favorite. I much prefer it to another method which would involve turning the loom around and weaving an inch or so at the other end.

This cotton is not mercerized. There was a kind of tearing sound as I opened the sheds as the threads clung and scraped past each other but there were no breaks despite all the strumming I needed to do and everything stood up well.

Cindy and I bought this cotton at ANWG 2013. I bought a bag of this color labeled ”champagne” and Cindy bought the indigo. We shared the two colors.

Here’s the finished motif…

I was content to have a motif on just one face of the pouch and so I finished it off with plain weave, doubling the weft so that the rest of the fabric would have the same weight as that which included the supplemental weft.

And here’s the finished pouch…hand sewn. I was glad that I hadn’t forgotten how to put in a zip.

This project was supposed to give me a small break before launching into another ”big” one….but then I got distracted by a post in one of the online groups about the ”turned Krokbragd” that many people are weaving on their inkle looms and it reminded me that I had always wanted to weave a music-themed bookmark for a piano-playing friend of mine.

I chose to do it in warp-faced double weave using 60/2 silk so it would be fine enough to make a good bookmark. I set up my warp with four sets of string heddles, something I only do when weaving double weave if the thread is particularly fine or if there are a lot of ends.

I didn’t need to sample as I knew how the silk behaved in double weave, thanks to various woven samples and the notes in my notebook. Of course, I didn’t feel that I needed to chart the piano keys. However, I got a little cocky and tried to eyeball the length of the black keys rather than count threads and paid the price for that in the first two attempts.

Placing a marker on the 55th black thread made picking the colors for those black keys much faster. After a couple of repeats of piano keys, I got bored! Then I decided that it would be fun to weave a couple of bars of music. And now, of course, the ”project’ has turned into a ”sample”. My piano-playing friend will have to wait for his bookmark because weaving in those bars of music will make this piece much longer than any bookmark needs to be. Once my curiosity has been sparked, I need to follow through. The ”small” project has suddenly become big as the charting paper comes out.

Making a start on what I have charted so far…the key signature with the time signature soon to follow…

Once I have charted the notes and woven them, I guess I will go back to the beginning and figure out how to place all of this in a bookmark that is not ridiculously long!

Hopefully, I will be able to show the finished sample in the next post and we will see if you can recognize the melody I chose.

Backstrap Weaving – Paisley Progress

The bands I ordered from the co-op in Cochabamba arrived. That’s always so exciting. I had been able to take a sneak peek at them when Dorinda sent me a picture of them laid out in her yard but there is nothing like seeing the true richness of the colors, smelling the natural dyestuff in the handspun wool and feeling the firmness of the cloth.

I love being able to put faces to most of the names on the tags after having met many of the weavers on my visit last year. We spent a day weaving together. The tags on the bands tell of the work of Maxima, my teacher, and her sister Narciza, the go-getter, (pictured below) who chose one of the largest patterns and kept begging me to show her with ”just one more row” so that she could fully grasp it before I left.

There’s young Eulalia whom I remember as being the quickest to pick up one of my woven samples and start copying the pattern.

Justina’s name is there. As head of the Huancarani weaving group, she represented her weaving friends and Bolivia when she traveled to the Tinkuy in Peru last November. Antonia contributed a band too. She and her daughter wove with me at Dorinda’s place during my visit.

And then there are Felicidad and Casimira as well as a new name I haven’t seen before – Cerila. Her band has a lighter touch and I wonder if she is one of the much older ladies.

As for my own weaving, I drew and erased and wove and un-wove, drew and erased and wove some more. I like sampling and I almost always make something useful from the samples. That was not so much the case this time as I kind of lost the plot along the way and some of the samples are already in the trash. I told you about that in my last blog post.

Sometimes I would go to bed completely dissatisfied with what I had created only to wake up the next morning to be almost completely happy with it. I decided that I needed some feedback and so I put a picture on Instagram. The response was favorable and very supportive and confirmed that I was headed in the right direction…thank you, guys… and so I felt that I was at the point where I could tackle the ”real” project and put the sampling aside.

This is warp-faced double weave in 60/2 silk. My paisley-like shapes don’t have the curled tails that you often see in classic Paisley shapes. That is a further challenge that I will leave for another time!

This is the one sample that I will continue to weave and keep so that I can make it into one of my little conference neck pouches. But for now, I am putting it aside while I return to my chart. I need to convert it so that it is suitable for the supplementary-weft technique that I want to use for my silk scarf project. Here is my blank palette awaiting its pattern…

The parts of the pattern in my sample that have long horizontal stretches of solid white won’t work if they are woven using supplemental weft. They will result in exceedingly long weft-floats. Floats of that length are impractical. They can easily get caught on things and pulled. I needed to break up the long white solid sections into smaller ones. For example, look at the solid white paisley shape that sits within the larger one at the bottom left of the design on my sample. I would need to fill that shape with circles and spots to break up the long horizontal lines of white into shorter floats.

So, here is the scarf warp underway. The start and end of the scarf will have its busy pattern and I will keep things much simpler along its length. I might double the large design for the center of the scarf or I might even repeat it at every quarter. We’ll see how it goes. I used multiple strands of 120/2 silk in three different colors for the supplementary weft….a deep red and two tones of purple. What’s fun is that the colors of the pattern look quite different depending on how the light hits the cloth.

Now I think I will pick up my drop spindle and finish plying the wool I spun for the Tour de Fleece many years ago. It has just been sitting there and I would like to use it to weave just one more cuff for our Bracelets and Cuff Weave-along on Ravelry. I might be able to squeeze this in before the end of the month. This is yarn I spun from a bag of random fiber that I won in a little Ashford online competition and I think the colors might go well enough together for a cuff project. The blue, red and white are wool. Both the red and blue are variegated but you can hardly tell. The red fiber was a weird red and brown combination that I didn’t like at all. But the spun thread looks quite nice.

The cuff in the picture is one I wove from my handspun llama fiber a few years ago. It’s one of my favorites. I used spearmint leaves and cochineal (for the beige and red) as dye. I want to weave something similar with this new batch of handspun and add a tubular edging.

Here’s a nice collage of some of the weave-along bands. I am really happy to see how people are using the patterns and technique from my latest book on complementary-warp pick-up.

Katherine’s latest one looks lovely on her backstrap loom…

I provide quite a few very narrow patterns in my book and it is great to see them being used as borders alongside larger ones as Katherine has done. I love brown and indigo blue together as well as a buttery yellow and blue combination. She also turned the blue bands I showed in my last blog post into bracelets…

The bars that she has at the ends of her band are really pretty. Three small metal loops are sewn to the edge of the band. You can see it better in this next shot of her pink band on which she has added a safety chain…

One thing that KEOG discovered when she added a safety chain to her bracelet is that if the clasp is magnetic it is better to find a chain that won’t be attracted to it. That hadn’t even occurred to me. If you are considering this kind of closure for a bracelet, you should keep that in mind. I have a couple of cheap clasps that came with chains and it just so happens that they are not attracted to magnets.

Rosemary got four bracelets out of the circular warp she put on her backstrap loom. She was also kind enough to show us several pictures of her set-up. When you use a circular warp, you need to clamp the warp in such a way that it doesn’t just slide around the end beams every time you beat. I was taught to clamp it at the end closest to my body. Then I have to un-clamp and un-roll each time I need to advance the warp. Rosemary has come up with an ingenious way of securing it at the far end which allows her to advance the warp without touching anything…

In her own words….

…..”when I apply tension and beat with my beater, the band does not move. However, if I release tension, just a bit, and put the beater in the shed, and pull towards myself, then the whole warp shifts forward. In this way, I never have to rearrange anything – I keep the fell about two inches beyond the bar at my belly, and I can weave and weave and weave, without having to stop and rearrange, and this fills me with joy.”

I love it!

Katycat placed her crimps and clasps on her finished band to create her bracelet…

This is Julie B’s work using a complementary-warp pattern from my second book, the one I like to call the Rolling River. I love seeing how people use various kinds of looms to enjoy these techniques and patterns.

I will finish this post here with a celebration of Taproot Video’s one-year anniversary. I am one of the founding-year members of the cooperative and we celebrated the anniversary via email recently. I won’t be seeing the other members until April when we’ll be able to clink mugs and celebrate again.

What is even more meaningful to me personally, is that Taproot’s launch also marked the release of my first ever instructional video. It was a scary trip at first, but it has been fun and heart-warming seeing my dvd make its way to countries all over the world and receiving such favorable feedback.

The video can be purchased as a dvd or you can buy lifetime streaming.

People very often ask me if it is hard to learn backstrap weaving on one’s own. Most often this question is more about the weaving techniques rather than about the loom itself. The kind of weaving I do on my backstrap loom can be done on many other kinds of looms and I have written tutorials and books about these techniques and plan to keep adding to those with more books, photo tutorials and dvds. My new pattern book is coming along nicely.

What about learning to use the loom? That is a little trickier because the weaver’s body movements are so much a part of the smooth operation of the loom and that can sometimes be hard to understand on your own. It is a lot about ”feel” and that is something that I wanted to be be able to convey via my video class. Many people have told me that they feel that I am in the room with them as they watch the video class. That is exactly what I was hoping to achieve! Even those who were already up and running and using a backstrap loom speak of having had several ”aha” moments while watching.

It has been a great first year with Taproot and I would like to thank everyone who has bought the video so far. There will be more video classes coming.

See you next time with, hopefully, a whole lot more to tell about the paisley progress.

Backstrap Weaving – A Job Worth Doing….

I wonder if you recognize this….

If you don’t, it’s because the last time I showed you this warp, it looked like this…

I had put this warp together very quickly so that I could be filmed weaving it for a documentary that friends Marilyn and Rainer are making. Marilyn offered me yarn from her stash and, between other weaving activities with a group of backstrap weaving friends, I quickly chose colors, wound the warp and wove off as much as I could before filming.

It’s 10/2 perle cotton with embroidery floss as supplementary weft. There wasn’t time to sample which broke my Golden Rule and, for that reason, the weaving gradually widens as it goes along. I hadn’t discovered through sampling the ”sweet spot”…that is, the width at which this particular number of ends in this 10/2 cotton wanted to settle.

I didn’t weave a sample when I used this Harrisville Shetland wool as I was in a hurry to get this band made. Nevertheless, I managed to hit that sweet spot straight away….just got lucky that time!

Once I have found that sweet spot, I never have to worry about the weaving width again. The width will stay consistent without constantly having to measure and control it. It is a lovely place to be. I let the yarn tell me where it wants to be.

Another clue to the fact that the warp ends were pushed too close together at the start was the fact that I had to beat extra hard – too hard – to get the picks per inch that I needed to make the supplementary weft pattern look right. By looking ”right”, I mean that the shapes have a nice solid look rather than having gaps between the weft floats from one pick to the next (although, having gaps between the picks is a certain effect that works well in some cases. It’s a matter of personal preference).

Once I got home and finished my big silk project, I decided I really needed to finish Marilyn’s cotton piece before venturing into something new. I pushed all the new ideas that I have competing for space in my head to back and pulled out the warp with its lovely pinks and purples.

However, I found that I just couldn’t face it with its width difference. Even the fell was beginning to slope as it seems that the warp ends were pushed closer together on one side than the other.

I took a deep breath and un-wove it so that I could start over with my new measurements in mind. Boy, did that feel good! So, the piece with the leaf pattern turned out to be the sample that I should have made in the first place. You know the old adage…A job worth doing…..

Now it is rolling along nicely and quite effortlessly. I am using motifs that I created for my silk piece and it is weird weaving them in this much thicker yarn. The cotton is so much more forgiving. I found when using the 60/2 silk that if I pulled too hard on any one warp end as I was doing the pick-up, the end would magically lengthen and not want to go back into place! Of course, it’s much easier to work with, let alone see, these strands of 10/2 cotton!

While I work on this piece I am planning my next silk one. I have a nice collection of colors in 120/2 silk that I would like to somehow combine in one piece….lots of lovely berry tones with some golds.

There you can see the black silk wrap that I recently finished rolled up in plastic ready to be taken to Canada. It will be in one of the Exhibits at ANWG this year. Quite a few of my backstrap weaving buddies will be there and I am looking forward to seeing Tracy and Yonat again and meeting Kristin, who also recently finished a silk weaving on her backstrap loom using a Japanese reed and her own handspun and naturally dyed thread. She has labeled this piece ”naturally dyed striped silk tsumugi” and it is stunning. She will be bringing it to ANWG where I will get to see and touch it.

I love how the colors in this post are going so well together! Here’s another finished backstrap loom project from weaving friend Wendy. She wove a hatband for her fisherman husband’s hat…

Marilyn and the backstrap weaving group in the northwest got together to encourage each other and weave some bands…

I love how these backstrap weaving study groups are sprouting up! Marilyn has a nice wooden post which she calls the ”village tree”around which the weavers gather.

I met Cindy at ANWG 2013 and do hope that she will be able to come to ANWG this year too. This is something she has been working on recently…a nice Andean Pebble Weave pattern from my second book. I love her arrangement of stripes in the borders.

Rosemary sent me this picture of the lovely backstrap weaving set-up that she has in her yard. She told me that she refers to my second book there alongside on her tablet. I love that my book sits there in excellent company with the Cahlander and Cason classic publication.

Jean, who recently got back from Guatemala where she had weaving lessons, sent me this picture of a prepared warp that she bought to take back to the USA. She knows that I like to use bicycle and umbrella spokes and other bits of wire and needles to secure my warps to the beams and she was tickled to see some Guatemalan weavers using such things in their warps as well. It seems that the spoke is tied in place to stop the warp ends from falling off the beam while Jean packs and transports the loom. I am looking forward to seeing what she weaves with this lovely cotton warp. I believe the cotton has been dyed with plants.

Dorinda, who works with the weavers in Cochabamba, is back after her visit to the USA. I had been hoping to travel to the highlands this month for a quick visit with her and Maxima and the young ladies who were having their first weaving lessons back in January but I just couldn’t find the time. I will have to leave that for the end of the year. One of the young ladies, 11-year old Nelva, has been weaving and also drawing and Dorinda sent me this picture she has drawn based on a photo of some of the Huancarani ladies strolling and spinning yarn. I guess the lady on the back of the card is collecting dye plants.

Dorinda keeps them all busy with various art and craft projects. She always arrives from the USA with new craft supplies and ideas for activities.

To finish, I will leave you with the good news that the second volume of Rodrick Owen and Terry Newhouse Flynn’s work on Andean sling braids is coming out this November. I am excited that the sling pictured at left that I made with my teacher in Peru back in 1997, makes an appearance. I made this one with the braid pattern that my teacher called the ‘‘palma’‘. After finishing my sling, he taught me another pattern called ”margarita”.

This new book teaches 50 beautiful patterns as well as how to create and embellish an entire sling.

Here is the blurb from the Schiffer catalog…

Sling Braiding Traditions and Techniques: From Peru, Bolivia, and Around the World

Rodrick Owen & Terry Newhouse Flynn

Available November 2017 $39.99

This comprehensive, full-color guide features dozens of images of slings from various cultures, both ancient and contemporary. Slings had great significance in many cultures, particularly in the Andes, and were often used as both prehistoric weapons and herding tools. The book shows novice and experienced braiders how to make 50 designs, from 8 to 32 strands, on a braiding card or with a braiding stand and bobbins. Learn step by step how to make an authentic Andean-style sling with braided cords and a tapestry-woven cradle. A range of techniques useful for beginning, ending, and embellishing slings are included, and can enhance a wide variety of other items, like jewelry, garments, and accessories. This book is a key resource for historians, ethnologists, textile artists, weapons experts, and others to learn the practical skills for understanding sling braids’ structure. Includes braiding card and plans to make core stand.

Size: 8 1/2″ x 11″ | 457 color photos, charts/drawings, and weaving diagrams | 176 pp
ISBN13: 9780764354304 | Binding: hard cover

Backstrap Weaving – Over the Hump

I am back home and over the hump. Normally I don’t have a hump to get over because, as soon as I return, I simply jump into a new exciting project at the loom that has been slowly developing in my head during my travels.

This time, however, I did what I normally consider a ”no-no”. I left a major project unfinished on the loom before I traveled. I have found in the past that it is quite difficult to pick up an unfinished project like this, especially when I have been away from it for two months. The flow has been interrupted. I can see on other projects that have been interrupted in this way precisely where I had stopped and then started again. Something changes…perhaps tension or beat…something.

This is the silk project I had left behind unfinished…

There are a mere five inches of patterning to go to match the start but these five inches will be very intense.

I had started the piece with a 3-color pebble weave when I had a beautifully-tensioned, happy rolled-up warp and I now need to match that patterning at the other end. Now that I am approaching the end, the warp is being a bit beastly as variations in tension of the fine silk strands become increasingly apparent. I know how to deal with these variations but when you are working with hundreds of strands of 60/2 silk it can become quite tedious. So, that was the hump that had to be overcome. I needed to sit down and take up the slack on the looser ends and get everything back into that happy place I had so enjoyed for the first eighty inches or so.

Now it is done and I am on my way! Over the hump I go!

I sit down on a cushion on the floor in my weaving space. I can’t see out the window. My view is of the side of the bed.

A question was asked in one of the online groups about how people felt about their weaving space…how inspiring it is and what they would do to improve it. I gave that some thought and concluded that my weaving space is not one bit inspiring. But, I also concluded that it doesn’t need to be. It’s simply cluttered and chaotic!

It seems that I am completely absorbed with what I am doing and living inside my head when I am sitting at my backstrap loom. Sometimes I pause and imagine what I might see outside my window if my room were to be suddenly picked up and deposited elsewhere. I can hear the palm trees rustling outside. Just for a change, rather than a busy, noisy and sometimes smelly street market, perhaps there’s a beach just down the street and the movement of air from my ceiling fan is a nice cooling coastal breeze. I have to admit though that I do love that chaotic street market!

Even though the kind of pick-up patterning I do requires a lot of concentration, I can still pause and let my mind travel. I recall some of the lovely things I experienced on my latest trip away. Like the gorgeous views from the plane as I traveled from place to place…

There was a glorious parade of snow-capped peaks on the way up to Portland. Here Mt Shasta looks like it is floating with the clouds above the blue-tinged landscape.

The beautiful farm and barn in which I weave with my friends in Petaluma. Northern California looked so green, fresh and luscious after all the rain. It looked like a land in the process of healing.

Stunning views of the city of Seattle as we come in to land. As the Space Needle passes by I remember having dinner there with Tracy to celebrate Marilyn’s birthday as well as enjoying the Folk Life Festival with the Space Needle soaring above us.

Enjoying a peaceful lunch with birdsong and the view looking out toward Yosemite at Anne’s place on top of the hill.

Winding warps for my trip to Australia while taking in the view of Betty’s blueberry crop and lovely forested property.

I missed Marilyn’s birthday on this visit to Seattle and I was too early for Folk Life. We found something else fun to do instead.

I was lucky to arrive just in time for the annual Kyoto Sale.

I had never heard of this event before but Marilyn is a frequent visitor. She told me of being able to buy short kimonos for as little as $10 and showed me some exquisite double ikat examples that she had purchased in previous years.

I envisioned having to dig through racks and racks of expensive garments to find the one or two super low-priced items, but no! every kimono on the rack was $10 or $15!

After attending the Seattle guild’s meeting, a group of us set off with flashlights to explore the dark warehouse stuffed with Japanese clothing, lanterns, baskets, chests and ornaments.

And, when our weaving group got together the next day and we told of our purchases at the Kyoto sale, guess where a few of the ladies rushed off to at the end of the day. They appeared wearing kimonos for our second day of weaving.

Here’s my $10 score which looks surprisingly good over jeans…

And there were these…a basketful of obijime…

I caught up with many old weaving friends on this trip and met several new ones. I got to spend time with 7-year old Lily once again when I wove with Lori and the group in northern California. Lily had lost several teeth and experienced an incredible growth spurt since I saw her just six months ago. She also spent the entire day weaving with us when all she could sit still for last time were two or three picks on her pebble weave warp before bouncing away to pick flowers and enjoy the farm.

On this visit we wove a traditional patterned tubular band of the Peruvian and Bolivian highlands. We then wove and sewed a band to the edges of handwoven cloth using the weft as the sewing thread. I bring pieces of cloth that were woven by my weaving friends in the central Bolivian highlands. The handspun wool is dyed using local plants as well as cochineal. The colors and the way the weavers combine them are stunning.

The cloth can be edged with patterned tubular bands…

or, a plain-weave tubular band can be used instead. The piece can be further embellished with various decorative stitches…

The mouth of Ashli’s small pouch is decorated with cross-knit looping…

Here’s Lily sewing a band to her piece of cloth. Tiny hands had to manage the cloth, the needle and operating the backstrap loom all at once. She is wearing one of my woven silk bracelets.

Here is Narciza, one of my Bolivian weaving friends, attaching a patterned tubular band to the edge of a woven bag. At first you wish you had a third hand to help but you soon get the hang of it.

Lily’s activity soon attracted a friend. Oliver took some time out from tearing about the farm on his bike to come and watch…

And, there was still energy at the end of the day for some tether ball…

I got to see the wide project that Lori started last time we got together. Lori plans to make this into a pouch. She finished it on this visit. Like me, me she wants to ponder the finished piece for a while before cutting and shaping and sewing it into the finished product. She then plans to add edgings and decorative stitches.

Lori showed me a beautiful Huichol bag that she had bought. I have seen woven bags in her collection on past visits, woven in the balanced double-weave structure with pick-up patterns that is typically used by the Huichol people. This one is different in that the peyote and deer motifs are embroidered. The entire surface of this bag is embroidered in cross stitch.

The strap is decorated using the same single-faced supplementary-weft technique that I learned here in Bolivia.

It is so wonderful seeing youngsters like Lily being attracted by weaving and I adore this Mothers Day picture taken of my backstrap weaving friend Janet delighting her granddaughter and great nephew with her spinning…

I got to head to far northern California to visit with Janet on this trip too. The ladies up there were still buzzing after having had workshops in sprang braiding with Carol James. Tracy, who often weaves with me on these visits, has been busy making pouches using various sprang techniques.

I fell in love with the second one from the left and so Tracy and I arranged a swap….I’ll weave one of my silk ribbon necklaces in exchange for a pouch.

Janet has taken off in a different direction with her sprang. She is making garments and using her handspun cotton (of course!)…

This sprang tunic is gorgeous. As the sprang structure stretches, this is truly a one-size-fits-all piece. The typical one-size garments that are sometimes sold always make me crazy. They never fit me. Here’s what the back looks like. Unfortunately we didn’t notice that one of the fringe bundles was tucked under…

Janet is using the Ecuadorian-style vertical loom that she constructed after her visit to coastal Ecuador a couple of years ago as her sprang frame…

She has a new piece ready to go in her handspun cotton…

Here’s Tracy working with the frame that Carol James uses with her students…

And, Tracy took advantage of the fact that there are lots of willow sticks at Janet’s to gather some and bend them into shape to make nifty sprang frames.

Ta-da!…

While Tracy and Janet did some carding,

Alli came over with her bub to do some Andean Pebble Weave with me…

She was very comfortable standing to weave with her sleeping baby on her back…so sweet! She could tie the warp to the strap of the carrier.

In Portland at the guild meeting, I got to see my Braids Conference companions Barbara Walker and Linda Hendrickson. Linda gave us a brief run down of her recent trip to Myanmar for her continuing studies of the tablet woven sagzigyo (Burmese manuscript binding tapes). She promises to give a more comprehensive description in a program to the guild later this year.

While on the road, I did a little bit of weaving and study. Marilyn and her husband Rainer are filming a documentary called Interlacements and wanted some footage of me weaving on my backstrap loom. As I hadn’t brought anything with me, I was invited by Marilyn to choose yarn from her stash and create a warp. Just grabbing yarn and creating a large-ish project without much thought or planning is completely foreign to me! But, we had limited time and I set to it. I decided to weave something that I would later give to Marilyn but, at the same time, I wanted it to look like ”me” for the documentary. So, of course, I included what I have come to see as one of my signature patterns…the leaves in supplementary weft. I used Marilyn’s stash of 10/2 perle cotton and embroidery floss for the leaves.You can see the result of not having woven a sample first from which to take my measurements. There wasn’t time for that! I (almost) ALWAYS sample! I didn’t quite get it right when judging the width and so the piece had widened slightly. I will take advantage of that and use the narrower beginning as part of a shaped flap for the bag I will create.

The other thing I had time to play with was trying to find a way to neatly finish off tubular bands when they are woven and sewn around the perimeter of a flat piece of cloth. When attaching tubular bands to pouches, there all sorts of clever ways to deal with and hide the 20 warp-ends that remain once you have finished weaving the band. It’s not so easy to do that when you place the tubular edging around the perimeter of a flat piece of cloth. Thee is nowhere to hide the ends! You can see the two wrist cuffs that I wove and edged with patterned tubular bands…

On the one on the right, you can see the kind of ugly join where the tubular band starts and finishes (look just above the bottom left hand corner). On the one on the right I got smart and hid the (ugly) join under the button 🙂 The Andean weavers are able to join the two ends of the tubular bands in a way that makes the join barely noticeable. One advantage is that generally the tubular band is dwarfed by the large pieces of cloth to which the are attached and the eye is drawn more to the patterning on the beautiful cloth than the edging band. But, even so, the join is beautifully done.

I decided to work on creating a neater start and finish to my tubular bands when I use them to edge a flat piece of cloth. I needed to figure out a way to hide those twenty warp ends.

The example below is in heavy wool yarn. The join really jumps out at me on this piece but it is a much neater finish than I have been able to achieve so far. I am confident that if I keep playing with this and use increasingly fine yarn, I will be able to eventually create a quite acceptable join. I am really pleased with this! You will see some measurements written down for those who have ever wondered how much warp to measure to edge a piece. These measurements ensure that you have a comfortable amount of space in which to operate the loom right until the end of the band. My general rule is to add 50% to the perimeter measurement but my warping pegs just happened to spaced at 39” (rather than 36”) so I just went with that! 36” would have worked just fine. I have a tutorial on weaving and sewing these kinds of edging bands here.

Lastly, I would like to show you a backstrap that Mary, whom I met and wove with in Alabama on this recent trip, has woven since I saw her.

How gorgeous is that! This was woven using Peaches and Cream cotton. Anyone who is a regular reader of my blog will know that I emphatically steer people away from that kind of cotton when one is a beginner. I always recommend a mercerized cotton for starting out as it is smooth and more resistant to pilling. Un-mercerized, soft, loosely-twisted cotton, like Peaches and Cream, used for warp-faced weaving on a backstrap loom will shed, fluff and pill dreadfully in unskilled hands. Any scraping of the heddles will cause the warp threads to fray and the heddles will start sticking together.

However, when a weaver understands how to use the body to operate the loom, as Mary clearly does, abrasion is reduced to a minimum.

Result: a stunning, thick, cushy strap!

Backstrap weavers use their bodies to relax and increase tension on the warp at will and it is these constant adjustments of the body position that enable them to open clean and clear sheds without having to struggle with or scrape heddles or over-handle the warp threads.

Once these coordinated body movements have been mastered, a backstrap weaver does not have to be limited to only the smoothest, friendliest, mercerized cotton.

These coordinated movements are precisely what I teach in my Operating a Backstrap Loom dvd on Taproot Video. I finally watched it having brought back a copy to Bolivia 🙂

I was thrilled to be present when people responded to my last blog post and ordered the dvd while I happened to be at Taproot Video in Seattle. It was fun being able to sign copies and go along with Marilyn to mail them. Thank you so much! Of course, Marilyn and Rainer at Taproot Video continue to sell and ship my dvds along with Joan Ruane’s, Kris Leet’s, Marilyn Romtaka’s and Linda Hendrickson’s.

I will show you more projects from my online backstrap weaving friends next time.