warp floats – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – When You are not the Loom

Weaving buddies of mine were recently at the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market and shared pictures and video of all the wonderful people, crafts and textiles they saw.

Marge Sume was in the right place at the right time and shared a small piece of video that she took of a gentleman from Kyrgyzstan weaving a narrow band. It was very interesting to see this as I have woven replicas of patterns of Kygyzstan woven in the terme structure and I wrote a tutorial on the method that I use to create the structure. It is always wonderful to be able to see the methods the weavers themselves use but this is not always possible. And so, 6 years after I wove my first Kyrgyz motif, I now have been able to watch one of the weavers at work via Marge’s video clip. Exciting! It turns out that although my loom is different, the method is similar. The gentleman from Kyrgyzstan uses fewer steps than I do and is more efficient.

You can see the loom on which the weaver is demonstrating and you will see more of it in the video. I, of course, use a backstrap loom for all my weaving.

When I am using a backstrap loom, I feel that I am part of the loom myself. The warp is attached to my body by way of the backstrap. My movements back and forth allow me to relax and increase tension on the warp and operate the loom smoothly and efficiently. I am part of the loom. In fact, on the occasions when I stretch the warp between my hips and my big toe, I am more than just a part of the loom; I am the loom.

My body movements enable me to easily open the shed controlled by the string heddles. A few coordinated moves which involve adjusting the tension on the warp allow me to raise the heddle stick and create a clean shed without having to struggle or scrape the heddles along the warp. All of you who have tried backstrap weaving will know what happens if you repeatedly scrape those heddles…fluff builds up, then pills and warp threads start to stick together making it very difficult to create clean sheds.

Watch two Peruvian weavers operating the heddle shed on their backstrap looms…

So, what happens when you are working with a warp that is under a fixed tension? Your body is not part of the loom and you can’t increase or ease tension at will.

If your loom is strong and fixed in place, you can grab hold of the heddle rod and pull with all your might…

Mariana is pulling the heddle rod with one hand in order to create a shed of all the white warp threads. Her other hand holds back the blue threads that want to stick and come forward with their white partners. The vertical loom is lashed to the floor and ceiling beams of the house and Mariana can put all her strength into pulling on the heddle rod without disturbing the loom.

But, what if the loom is not fixed in place like Mariana’s and, what’s more, is made of very light-weight material?

Marta, a Mapuche weaver of central Chile, is using a warp that is under fixed tension and her leaning vertical loom is very light. If she were to pull on her heddle rod, she would simply pull her loom away from the wall. She uses a different system for raising the warp threads that are controlled by the string heddles.

The heddle stick rests against poles which are placed alongside the leaning posts of the loom frame which means that the warps in the heddles are in a raised position. This means that Marta does not have to pull on the heddle stick in order to raise the warps in the heddle shed. You can see in the following video at the 28-second mark that by pushing down on the warps held on the shed rod, just enough space is created to allow her to get her fingers under the warps in the heddles and lift to fully raise them. (You might want to turn down the volume for this video).

Which brings me to the weaver from Kyrgyzstan. His heddles are in a position that keeps them in what looks like a permanently raised position. You will see that, like Marta, he does not need to touch the heddle stick at all in order to open that shed. He simply strums the warps to bring all the light-colored warps to the upper layer. He props the wide flat piece of board on its side to raise the dark threads. Many thanks to Marge for allowing me to share her video here.

The weaver uses what I call a ”simple” warp-float technique because warp floats are used on only one face of the cloth. It is based on two sheds with dark threads in one shed and all the light threads in the other. Plain weave on such a warp would produce a band of alternating dark and light horizontal bars.

You can see him selecting pairs of light colored warps and then adding them to the dark shed. Then he selects dark-colored pairs of warps and adds them to the light shed.

One of my other weaving buddies, Annie, took pictures of the woven band. The motif is not clear at all in the video but in the pictures I could see that he was weaving an ”S” shaped motif.

I was pretty tickled about that as it just happens to be the motif that I use in my tutorial here on my blog.

The patterns are formed by floating certain pairs of dark threads over light horizontal bars and certain pairs of light threads over dark horizontal bars.

I have woven some of my favorite pieces using this technique and motifs from Kyrgyzstan but I have also seen cloth woven using this structure in tropical lowland Peru, Mexico and the Middle East.

Now, let me show you some things I have been working on lately.

I have been continuing to use the tiny skeins of naturally-dyed silk that I was given.

Since I last posted, I have finished the piece using the blue and green tones and created a fourth piece using browns, tans and golds. I wanted to maintain the ”leaf” theme and wove a pattern of leaves and creeper into the blue and green piece and I invented my own leaf pattern in the Andean Pebble Weave structure for the brown piece.

I have yet to glue and finish the book covers.

I need to buy some nice paper in colors that match the fabric I have woven. I glue this paper on top of the ends of the woven fabric that get turned over to the inside of the covers. You can see an example below on the last collection of covered journals I made.

Here are the three pieces I have made so far. The fabric is just sitting around the books for now until I am ready to glue and finish them.

As for the fourth piece with the brown tones, I first needed to weave a sample as I had to see how the silk would behave and what kind of width it would give me in the Andean Pebble Weave structure. The first three pieces I had a woven with the silk were in plain weave…two simple versions with supplementary-weft patterns and one more complex one in double weave. I also wanted to see how my invented leaf pattern would look in case I needed to make adjustments. What looks good on paper often doesn’t weave up with the same happy results.

I was pleased with my new pattern. The light colored silk is finer than the darker colors and I wasn’t sure if the pattern would show up well enough as a result. It’s quite a narrow pattern and so I decided to weave two columns of it in my project using the browns, tans and golds from my collection of naturally dyed silk. Now I can finish the red sample and sew it into a wrist cuff…another one for the collection.

I have to admit that this new warp looked a little drab after the rich reds, purples and greens with which I had been working. However, once the light Andean Pebble Weave pattern started showing up against the darker tones, the contrast brought the whole thing to life.

As usual, it is hard to decide which side I like better. I had planned to use the darker side on the book cover and that is why I used light colors immediately next to the pebble weave section to provide a nice contrast. The back looks nice in its own way because the thicker dark-colored silk makes the leaves stand out more against the lighter finer silk background.

Here are the four finished pieces waiting to be turned into book covers. I haven’t washed and pressed the brown piece yet.

I still have plenty of silk left! There are lots of the deep rich red tones to play with and I might make something using only the finer of the two kinds of silk. The finer silk took the dye colors in a very different way and there are some very pretty apricot, melon, lavender and peach tones.Perhaps I will make some cuffs.

As for the wee journals, they might become gifts…although, I’ll be keeping the berry-colored one for myself! 🙂

Speaking of natural dye colors, I will finish by showing you just a tiny sampling of the bands I just received from Maxima and the weavers in Cochabamaba…

Backstrap Weaving – A Little Online Globetrotting

I’ve been playing with lanyards this week. These are nice tiny projects which have kept me entertained at the loom during breaks from other things not related to weaving that I have had my head in this week. I have been adding more and more string heddles to my bands to make them more and more loom-controlled and it has been a fun exercise.

Here are the first three finished bands which I will send away, as promised, for lanyards…

The one on the left has the heaviest yarn, the center one I will call ’medium and the one on the right has the finest – the 60/2 silk. I set up the center black and white band with 11 sets of string heddles. I could have made the eleventh heddle a simple loop but I got carried away with the fun of making heddles…

Using a system of colors certainly helped. Every second heddle is white. I knew that when my weft was on the left, I needed to use a white heddle. Then it was just a matter of remembering the color of last heddle I had used when the weft was on the right to know which heddle was next in the sequence. I worked my way up through the heddles and then back down again. The thread I used has a lot of twist and is super smooth. That helps a lot when using multiple heddles.

I had to advance the warp as often as possible so that I didn’t have to lean far forward to reach the last heddles. This black and white band is the one with the most heddles and the one I enjoyed weaving the most….so far.

Now I have four made. The last blue and white one is in the 60/2 silk using the intermesh structure that I teach in my second book. However, I am going to re-do that one. I didn’t start it at its ideal width and the width changed a bit before settling. Now that I have a sample from which to work, I can make a better one. I am finding the the silk is the hardest to work with when using multiple heddles as it has more of a tendency to fluff with the extra abrasion.

Before getting into the second version of the intermesh lanyard, I warped another band in a different weight of mercerized cotton…

Again, the colored heddles help a lot with keeping track of the pattern. I am using the Andean Pebble Weave structure for this one with its two Pebble Sheds. I know that after every black heddle I need to use Pebble Shed 1, and then, Pebble Shed 2 after every orange one. These little tricks help keep the process fun rather than frustrating.

Last week, I posted a video that was shared with me by Adem in Turkey. It showed backstrap weaver Kay Seng demonstrating the use of multiple pattern sticks rather than multiple heddles on a piece that she was patterning with simple warp floats. The floats were formed from threads that were in one of the two sheds.

Adem has been weaving a band using this technique. He found a picture of a band online with this sweet butterfly pattern and tells me that it is from a book published in Japan. The image at left is the best I can do to show you the name of the book. Here is Adem’s band….

You can see that he has half of the pattern stored on his pattern sticks beyond the shed rod. Many thanks to Adem for sharing a video he made of himself weaving the pattern and showing how to operate the loom with those sticks.

And now for some more globetrotting…from Turkey and Japan, let’s now travel to Nigeria where I have a new online weaving friend, Roli.

Roli and I had similar experiences when we were first introduced to the wonderful String Heddle. The Question of the Week in one of the online weaving groups was about an epiphany that we had experienced in the course of our learning to weave. I don’t know if mine was exactly an epiphany, but it certainly felt like the light shone down and the choir sang, the moment I was shown these things called String Heddles. I was with the teacher who taught me Navajo-style weaving. How I love them!

Until that moment, I had been using a plastic ruler to go over and under warp ends to create sheds on a very crude wooden frame I had knocked together. The cardboard rigid heddle I later constructed kept breaking and I was becoming frustrated with the whole business of trying to create fabric. This was back in 1994 and 1995.

Roli told me of a similar experience. In 2006, she was trying to revive the traditional ancient costume of the particular group of people to which her husband belongs in the Niger Delta. She tells me that the royal cast who were priests and kings wore the cloaks you see below and still do. She wanted to construct caps and bags and cloaks using strips of cloth that she had woven on a frame loom she designed and made from pieces of the raffia palm tree. It is a very lightweight material.

She, too, was using a stick to pick up every other shed and found it so tedious she almost lost interest. Then, one day, she came across my blog where she learned to make string heddles and she tells me that she has now resumed in earnest.

Not only does she use the raffia palm tree to provide pieces for her loom and tools, she also uses the fiber from the leaves as warp and weft. Often she combines it with colored acrylic yarn.

She produces fabric decorated with pick-up patterns. Bands are sewn into caps and several bands can be sewn together to make the cloaks and bags you see below.

I had never seen a raffia palm tree before. Here is a picture of one from the Wikipedia page. Hopefully, I am showing the same species that Roli knows in Nigeria.

Using wood from the raffia palm, she has created four looms of different sizes to accommodate the different widths of cloth that she needs for her projects. Right now she is working on a custom order for a white cloak and has used a lettering and patterning technique from this tutorial on my blog to create a band for the center of the cloak. She will weave six white panels of 6” each for the cloak and then make a matching bag and cap. Beautiful work!

Roli’s loom is of her own design. She sits it with one end in her lap with the other end on the back of a chair. It can be adjusted to compensate for take-up (unlike the frame loom I built for myself all those years ago. I had no idea about such things as take-up!) She tells me that the traditional loom for these garments is a vertical frame. However, the clothing, the weaving and the stripping of raffia leaves for fiber are all shunned practices now as they are considered ‘’fetish’’. She explained ‘’fetish’’ as meaning that these items of clothing were associated with traditional worshipers.

I hope to see more from Roli. I would love to know more about how she strips the raffia leaves and processes the fiber and I can’t wait to see the finished white cloak. I am hoping its new owner will allow himself to be photographed with it. Many thanks to Roli for sharing this with us.

From Africa let’s move over to North America…..Amanda showed us the backstrap she wove for herself using Plymouth Yarn Fantasy Naturale yarn. That’s my favorite yarn for backstraps. She chose of the variegated options and did a beautiful job.

And, Janet has been using her gorgeous handspun once again to weave beautiful things using the Andean Pebble Weave structure. The pattern is her own design and she says she might use this as a guitar strap.

It’s nice seeing these large projects as I head back to my tiny lanyards. I am having fun. I have always loved things in miniature.

My purple panel sits by waiting for me to produce its twin. I have decided to call it the ‘’lady bug’’ project after seeing the colors in this beautiful picture online…

Backstrap Weaving – Length!

LENGTH!

Finally, I am doing something with the third of my three current weaving goals: 1. go wider, 2. use finer materials and 3. go longer. I have been working this week on the long warp… the yellow 60/2 silk scarf.

After finishing the bands of supplementary-weft patterns at the start which had me sitting in the same spot for days, I am now on to the faster mostly plain-weave part. I slow down every now and then to add a little flower motif with silk supplemental weft.

Sometimes, it is a solid flower, like the single flower you can see above, and sometimes an outlined one. This does not have me sitting still for long. There is a regular need to sometimes move forward as I roll up the woven cloth and then move back as I unroll the unwoven warp from the far end. The cushion on which I sit is glued to a polished piece of wood which allows me to dig my heels into the floor and slide myself forward and back as needed. It’s a lot easier than having to get up and push that cushion across the rug or wiggle it forward or back. It also allows me to make finer adjustments while seated.

I used sheets of paper to roll the unwoven warp to keep everything neat and even. It’s a lot of fun unrolling the warp from the far end and having one of the sheets of paper drop out…progress! I then use that same sheet of paper between the layers of rolled woven cloth. I don’t know if you ever played ”pass the parcel” as a kid at birthday parties. It reminds me of that. Each time I unroll, it’s like removing one layer of the wrapping on the parcel only to find that there are still more layers underneath.

If I had a nice grassy backyard in which a sturdy stake could be implanted, I would enjoy sitting outside in some shade and having my warp stretched out to its full length…

However, I do find there are certain advantages to having the unwoven warp rolled up. I think that it is easier for me to maintain a consistent tension on the warp if I am always seated at more or less the same distance from the end of the loom.

Backstrap weavers who use circular warps are able to do that. They weave around the circle of warp without having to change in any major way their seated position. My teacher, below, can always be seated the same distance from the wall and brace her feet against a wooden block. You can see how her finished woven piece is circular.

I can’t resist unrolling my work all the way every now and then to see how it is going and to make sure that the scattered effect of the flower motifs is working.

There will be a small celebration when the final piece of paper drops off the end beam and I can see the end of the warp. But, I know that event will mean that soon I will be slowing down to a crawl to duplicate the bands of patterning that I wove at the beginning of the piece. I have managed to be disciplined, not measure, and keep the motifs truly scattered.

The cloth is a little on the stiff side now but I know, having worked with this 60/2 silk before in the teal bandana at left, that it will soften beautifully after wet-finishing and pressing. The sheen of the silk will be more obvious then too.

The patterns I chose for the bands are loosely based on those I saw on a Mexican rebozo, or shawl. I made quite a few changes to the original to include my own flower motif. My weaving friend, Franco, shared a lovely video of a parade of Mexican rebozos…the variety is astounding and I love the ways the models wear them. There is a white one and a black one there that I am totally in love with!

My erratic internet can handle this video and so I am sure that you will all be able to enjoy it….Thanks, Franco!

One day I will have a warp for a rebozo on my backstrap loom.

While on the topic of length, I guess the longest pieces of warp-faced weaving I have seen are the Central Asian yurt bands. My friend Lisa owns one and hers is 48 feet long….makes my scarf length seem ridiculous!

Here it is wrapped around her yurt…how gorgeous!

They are not woven on backstrap looms. This is the loom set-up in Kyrgyzstan posted on the site of Little Foot Yurts…

The heddle stick is attached to the tripod which keeps it permanently raised. We saw a similar system being used by a Turkish weaver in a video I shared here recently. The shed rod is a flat piece of wood which is most likely turned on its side when needed. At the weaving line you can also see a small stick holding the warp threads that will float to make the pattern.

Here’s another beauty that my friend Yonat and I found in a store in California when we were out and about. We can only imagine how long it is.

I got pretty excited the first time I encountered these pieces via my friend Lisa online. I thought…Wow, the Andean Pebble Weave structure in Central Asia! But, on closer inspection, I could see that it wasn’t the same structure. It is not a complementary-warp structure at all. Complementary-warp weaves have two structurally identical faces. The colors are reversed on the two sides of the cloth as you can see in my piece below.

I call the structure that is used to create the yurt bands, Simple Warp Floats…this my dull structural name for it. ”Simple” because the floats appear on only one face. In Kyrgyzstan it is known as terme.

You can see how different the two faces look in this picture of a piece I wove replicating some yurt band motifs. The face on the left is the ‘good” face. The face on the right has spaces where the black weft is exposed. You can also see this difference in the first picture of Lisa’s rolled up band above.The same motifs can be easily woven as double-faced ones but they are not woven that way traditionally.

I made this piece into a case for my small laptop…

This became a favorite structure of mine for a while. Yurt band motifs adorn my favorite belt…

I went a bit wider too and made a zippered pouch…

…but I’ll never go as long as those yurt bands!

It was even more exciting to find that the structure is used here in South America, in the tropical lowlands of Peru, for example. I have seen it on pieces from Iran and Mexico as well. These were inspiration for a set of place mats I wove using this Simple Warp Float structure.It’s all based on a basic warp of two colors. One shed holds all the light threads and one shed all the dark. If woven as plain weave, you would produce a band of dark and light horizontal bars. You could then choose to create three-span floats with certain light threads in order to make a pattern. Or, you could do the same with just the dark threads. Or, you can alternate as seen at right….one motif with dark floats followed by another with light floats The horizontal bars act as a sort of background.

Below, you can see a variety of patterns on a belt from Aguacatan, Guatemala. This is a very long piece for a belt…ten feet. The dark and light floats are sometimes used together within one motif. The horizontal bars, again, act as a sort of background to the motifs. The bars really dominate in this belt.
In this next band that I wove a long time ago, dark and light warp-floats working together form the motif on a base of horizontal bars…

You can also choose to float threads in a way that has the horizontal bars appearing to be part of the design itself rather than just being a ”background”. This is a piece I wove after returning from Ecuador where I had stayed with cotton weavers who use this structure in their work. Only the dark threads are forming floats in this piece and, to me, it feels like the horizontal bars are forming their own pattern of large ‘X’s.

And then, you can go all the way and create so many floats with both colors that you completely cover the horizontal bars as in my next example….

This is the terme structure that is used to create the yurt bands I showed. I used it to weave this place mat with a motif from the Peruvian tropical lowlands.

You can see a picture of a weaver in Kyrgyzstan (from the Little Foot Yurts site) saving the dark warp threads on a small sword. These are the threads that will float to form the pattern.

More information on these structures can be found in my tutorials here, here and here. I will be transferring this information to my Structures and Terminology page soon.

I think I was wise to choose a project that included lots of plain weave for my first venture into this kind of length in backstrap weaving. There are times when I am happily zooming along….opening a shed, beating, passing the weft and so on….and only slowing down to weave a little flower, the pattern for which I have by now memorized. I can imagine the time and concentration required to weave those 48-foot long yurt bands with all that pick-up every single step of the way! I wonder how many such bands a weaver in Kyrgyzstan makes in lifetime.

Here are some projects from weaving friends…

Two Andean Pebble Weave projects from two very talented Julias…

Julia T wove the wall hanging at left. It has a mixture of motifs from my books and those of her own. The maze pattern is her own and she has cleverly combined a traditional Andean pattern with her own ideas. The piece recalls time she spent with a team of friends creating a labyrinth in a park surrounded by beautiful bird-laden Australian bush. Julia W’s piece is her adaptation of a Japanese sashiko embroidery sayagata motif to the Andean Pebble Weave structure. The gold twining, hanger and stripes are such lovely touches. She has done several beautiful pieces inspired by Japanese embroidery patterns which she cleverly adapts to Andean Pebble Weave.

Both Julias came up with clever ways to hang their pieces.

Julia W’s wrapped ring and bamboo stick are beautiful in their simplicity. She has created two very different faces by having not only the pebble weave but also the intermesh borders in reversed colors. This way, the piece can be hung on either a dark or light-colored wall. Julia T wove a stick into the last few inches of her weaving so that she can change the face that is being displayed simply by flipping the end and fringe. That’s the thing with these double-faced structures. You want to be able to enjoy both beautiful faces.

And then, there are some bands. Marieke has been working with the double weave technique from this tutorial. I learned it as a two-shed technique which means that it can be easily adapted to the inkle loom on which Marieke prefers to work. Kathy and I got to weave together a couple of years ago and she continues to enjoy Andean Pebble Weave on a backstrap loom using patterns from my books. I love her jolly ”saver cord” but mostly, I love the fact that she is using one. Not everyone falls in love with it as I have.

I could see from my stats that there were an enormous amount of hits on my link to the site with the triangle purse tutorial last week. I hope that many of you go ahead and make one and show me the results. The link to the tutorial along with other goodies can be found on my RESOURCES page.

So, it’s back to my long project. I think there are only two more pieces of paper left on my rolled-up warp. I can’t wait to wash and press the piece and feel its liquid slinkiness slide through my hands.

Backstrap Weaving – Simply Red (and Black and White)!

These are the best light conditions I could find for photographing the red-on-red pattern on the two side panels of my wall hanging.

The late, low, winter sun was drifting in through my bedroom window and I looked up from my weft twining to discover how well the light and shadow brought out the relief pattern. I have posed these pieces all over the place…on the floor, on the table, in this room and that…used natural light and flash, held the camera in my hand, and used a tripod, and was not happy with any of the results. All I got was a flat red mass.

And then, there I was, happily seated with my backstrap in place and the warp stretched out before me. The light came to me through the window and gave me the shot at last.

It was great after all this time to be able to see how the red panels looked beside the center one. The tricky part was lining the three panels up precisely and have them suspended under the same amount of tension so that I could twine across the top of all three at the same time.

I still can’t decide which face of the double weave looks better…

I used the solid stepped lines and the arrow motif as part of the weft-twined pattern in much the same way as I had in the red panels…

I need to do a bit more solid black twining to finish. That will be the part that gets clamped within the wooden hanger. Once off the loom, I will decide how to finish the ends of the twined wefts and how I will cut the fringe around those long woven tabs at the other end (see below).I need to contemplate that for a while. Once cut, that will be that, and I want to get it right!

So, it is time to move on to the next project….a clean slate and a bunch of sticks…exciting!

I bought a large cone of UKI 20/2 cotton for the next project with which I have never woven before. That means it is time to sample the yarn while I play with ideas for the ikat in the next wall hanging. I’ve been at the sketch book creating hooky designs. Whether I am creating a design that is way beyond my limited wrapping skills, remains to be seen.

First, I need to get an idea of what kind of width I can get with X number of ends in the 20/2 cotton and so I wound a short-ish warp as a sample.

To make it more interesting, I decided that I could play a bit with the silk that I recently bought at CNCH and try a new-to-me supplementary-weft technique that is used for decorating hair sashes from Jacaltenango in Guatemala. Dr Carol Ventura has written a book about the Jacaltenango hair sashes. I have owned this book for years and once dabbled with the technique many, many years ago. As is always the case when using supplemental weft, the success of the project is very much dependent on finding the right kind of material for the supplemental weft for the weight of the ground cloth. While I understood the technique, my sample was downright ugly because my supplemental weft was too “light” for the ground cloth and there were large gaps between the rows of pattern. Then, I got distracted and wandered off in another direction.

I don’t even know where that sample is now. It was obviously not worth keeping. However, seeing a Jacaltenango hair sash that one of my students brought to class in Seattle last spring re-ignited my desire to try this technique….

I have made mistakes in my new sample and my count is off. I will un-weave this and start again now that I have a better feel for handling and counting these fine warp threads. Hopefully the next attempt will be better. In the meantime, this 20/2 white sample will give me a good idea of how many ends I will need to wind for my next wall hanging panel. I like two-fers.

And, do I feel confident about this next ikat project? No, not at all! My experience with ikat has been quite limited but I figure that I may as well just jump in there. I do know from my own experience that the wrapping and dyeing part, although painfully slow, is relatively easy. For me, the hardest part has been keeping the warps well enough aligned while weaving so that my motif remains recognizable. Yet, I don’t want them to be so rigidly aligned that I lose the feathery outlines that make ikat so charming. This is one of my tiny attempts…

Here are some narrow strips of ikat that I placed in a piece that includes supplementary-weft patterns…

And finally, this experiment involved dyeing and then removing some of the wraps to dye again for a second color.

Way back in 1998, my weaving teacher in Candelaria, Bolivia showed me the first piece of ikat I had ever been able to handle. It was a bedspread on which she had been working on and off for several years. This was something she was weaving for herself rather than the usual pieces that she weaves for the store in the museum in Sucre. She was weaving with rather coarse handspun wool and her name and her husband’s had been worked in amongst the flower motifs..

I’ve examined the wrapped warps, the finished cloth, and watched the weavers at work in many different places in my travels in South and Central America, trying to capture the secret of limiting the amount of movement of the warp threads and the resulting image distortion. Below are examples from Chile, Ecuador and Peru.

The simple backstrap loom of Tacabamba, Peru on which the indigo ikat-patterned "panones" are woven. They are up to one-meter wide, covered with tiny motifs and have patterns knotted into their fringes. — The simple backstrap loom of Tacabamba, Peru on which the indigo ikat-patterned “panones” are woven. They are up to one-meter wide, covered with tiny motifs and have patterns knotted into their fringes.

So, that is what I have been up to this last week….

Meanwhile, there has been a fair bit of red, black and white appearing online in the various places where band weavers hang out.

Cheryl wove with me last spring and now she is already designing her own motifs and weaving more than just samples.

She designed the gecko figure and I love the arrow motifs at the bottom which remind me of little boomerangs. This will be a strap for her camera. I showed you some weeks ago the sample bands that she wove in preparation for this project. Here is the completed weaving…

The center motif is charted in my second book and is a pattern that I adapted from tablet-woven band by Louise Ström.

Ann Mester created this enticing warp for backstrap weaving which could be used for complementary-warp pick-up techniques like Andean Pebble Weave, or simple warp floats, or just to create attractive horizontal bars of black and white…

Rufio, the kitten (who would look very stylish with a red collar) was rescued from Pet Rescue of Mercer.

And, if you are wondering about what I call “simple warp floats, the technique that I used on the red-on-red panels, Susan Anderson’s example. above, very clearly shows the single-faced nature of this pick-up technique. Susan has floated the warp threads singly. For me, this gives a more delicate yet solid look to the motifs than that which is achieved by floating pairs. The pattern is from Anne Dixon’s The Weaver’s Inkle Pattern Directory. Susan wove this on an inkle loom and has done a beautiful job.

So, it will most likely be all about winding the warp and then finding a comfortable position and set-up for wrapping many many threads for ikat this coming week…

This was my first ever attempt, around eight years ago, I would guess. It’s wool warp…Navajo warp…wrapped with cassette tape. The wrapping and dyeing were successful…the weaving was not! This is another sample that has disappeared!…nothing to show for those hours of work except this picture and “experience”. And I am sure that there will be much more experience to be gained and many more lessons to be learned in this coming week.

See you next week…

Backstrap Weaving -The Bag of Tricks

I had to dig deep into the bag of tricks this week to come up with a new idea for finshing off my latest three-panel wall hanging. Two days of experimenting with the structure that I had hoped to use for the two outer red panels finally led me to the conclusion that it just was not going to be as I had envisioned. It was time to plan again and take a look at all that I have at my disposal in my “bag of tricks”. And there is a lot of stuff in that bag of tricks after having spent almost 18 years now studying weaving techniques and simple looms used in South America.

The main panel for the wall hanging is now finished. I can’t cut it off the loom yet to better show you the stepped effect of the woven fringe as I will need to place the two red panels, when I am done weaving them, on this same loom and then twine across the top of all three to join them together.

It is always fun turning a finished piece over to look at the other side. I have been looking at white squiggles on black for so long now as I inched my way through this weaving. Yes, literally inched. I took note of my progress on the woven fringe part and it was pretty much an inch a day.

This side actually looks more like the painted Shipibo cloth that inspired this project. It is much more common to see light cloth with dark lines. But I don’t have to make any decisions here about which side to show. It needs to be the dark side in order to match the other pieces in this wall hanging series.

I want this second wall hanging to represent the weavers of the tropical lowland regions of Peru. For that reason I had chosen to use the structure that is used by people of the upper Amazon Basin to make wristlets.

I have never been to that part of Peru and so was relying on a sample that I had been given from the work of Nora Rogers and Ann Blinks as well as notes by Cheryl Samuel in order to reproduce the structure. I bought red hemp twine for this project while in the USA. The weave is based on having twined warp threads lying next to what Samuel calls a “half basket weave”.

I did succeed in reproducing the structure but the hemp twine did not give the design the relief that I had been hoping for. It was just a flat red mass at which I had to peer in just the right light in order to make out the pattern.I tried all kinds of weft and beat but I simply could not get the desired effect. Nevertheless, I found myself sitting alone stupidly squealing with happiness as the piece started to take shape. It was a joy just to able to reproduce it but a disppointment not to be able to use it in my hanging.

Back to the drawing board. I wanted something that would be all red but with texture and, of course, something that would represent textile techniques of the lowlands.

But, of course….simple warp floats!

Some time ago I had woven the placemat, above, using a two-color simple warp float technique. I copied the pattern from a cotton bag from tropical lowland Peru that Teyacapan shows on her Flickr page. The design is one that I have also seen painted and even embroidered on Shipibo cloth.

The set of placemats I wove became a study of the use of this structure in several regions across the globe…

At the Encuentro de Tejedores that I attended in Cusco in 2012, I was able to observe Matsigenka backstrap weavers from Bajo Urubamba creating striking black and white pieces with their handspun cotton. The pieces were decorated with patterns that were created from simple warp floats.

The picture above was taken at Tinkuy 2013 in Cusco and shows a weaver from Pacaya, in tropical lowland Peru, weaving a warp float pattern with handspun cotton on a backstrap loom.

It isn’t necessary to have two colors to create patterns in this structure. If I used an all-red warp, I could create patterns of raised red-on-red….textured patterns rather than colored ones. I also had a Mexican sash that my friend Annie MacHale had given me way back in 2010. I then remembered that weaving a single- colored piece with warp float patterns had been on my to-do list for some time. It was all coming together nicely!

The weaver of this Mexican sash has alternated a heavy warp thread (doubled threads) with fine to create a high-relief pattern in white on white.

Above, you can see my red experiments…the hemp twine wristlet structure and the red-on-red simple warp floats.

I experimented with floating pairs and floating single threads and decided that single was the way to go. I wanted the pattern to be fairly delicate and subtle so as not to interfere with all that is going on in the main black-and-white panel. I decided to weave the solid lines of the main panel with the arrow motif in the center.

I set up both panels on the one loom in the same way that I had done for the first wall hanging. This would ensure that both came out the same way.

You’ll have to trust me when I tell you that these panels are deep red and not the weird pinkish-red that you see here.

Now it is time to start sketching ideas for the weft-twined pattern that will go across the top of the finished three panels. I remember I had a heck of a time with the twining on the first wall hanging trying to group the warps correctly so that the twined width matched the woven width. Hopefully it won’t take as many attempts this time to get it right!

And in my spare moments I doodle and think about wall hanging number three…the ikat one. Luckily I have a giant cone of thread and a a huge roll of ikat tape (thank you Betty!). I expect there to be a few do-overs for that one! I am also hoping to use supplementary-weft to create patterns on that piece. These ideas are just sloshing around in my mind for now but I hope to base the overall design on hook motifs in positive and negative space like the ones I played with recently in silk supplementary weft on cotton…Then there will be the third series of wall hangings in which I hope to put what I learned with my ticlla (discontinuous warp) experiments to use….using wool and the red-black-and-white combo, of course!

I have spent a lot of time putting that big bag of tricks together. It is nice to be able to use these experiments to create bigger things. I look way, way ahead and I get excited about all these projects as I inch my way along!

See you next week.