weaving with handspun – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Seasons

Daylight Savings is over and we continue what feels like a rapid slide into cooler temperatures here in the Blue Mountains. I welcome snuggling under multiple layers on these cold nights but don’t care much for having to climb out from under them in the morning. We didn’t have Daylight Savings time in Bolivia and I was surprised by how long it took for my stomach to adapt! I kept finding myself restless at 11:30am with my stomach complaining that it hadn’t yet been filled. I still do a large cooked lunch in the way to which I’d become accustomed in South America. And that post-lunch drowsiness is hard to kick too. I can’t blame the tropical heat for it any more.

With the cooling temperatures came the rolling down of shirt sleeves and the layering of coats. I’d have to put away all my wrist cuffs for a while.

In their place out came my woven scarves and neck gaiters that I’ve been accumulating all these years. It was never cold enough in Bolivia to wear them. Sometimes I’d take them traveling to the northern hemisphere spring and fall only to drag them out of a packed bag looking like pieces of crumpled rag and too ugly to wear.

The fall temperatures here have been perfect for wearing things like this light cotton scarf that I wove about eight years ago and never ever got to wear.

I wove this with handspun cotton singles that I’d bought in Guatemala back in 2008. I used my bamboo reed to achieve the sheer open look and used the same cotton as supplementary weft to weave in patterns. It’s a style that I had been wanting to try ever since I bought a sample from the Coban area of Guatemala.

I enjoy my woven book cover in naturally dyed silk even more now that I am actually living amongst these colors. I was very spoiled by being able to visit Vermont on the Columbus Day weekend many years ago and experience the fall colors there. It’s nowhere near as stunning here but it feels special because I’m living it rather than just visiting.

This little book along with others that I made is now settled in my new home next to books about textiles from this side of the world, places that perhaps I’ll be able to visit some day.

I finally finished the project in which I used my Bolivian teachers’ handspun wool. That project traveled through an entire year of seasons with me and I named the resulting bag Four Seasons in One Bag. The wool went from the sheep of the central Bolivian highlands, washed in mountain streams, into the hands and spindles of my weaving friends and teachers.

I’m pretty sure that the wool was spun during the October spinning event in 2024 in which my teachers and other ladies in the community compete for prizes to see who can spin the most wool. I bought three balls of the doubled singles and dyed some of it with indigo while I was up in the highlands visiting with Maxima during my last Bolivian summer.

It traveled with me to Australia where I spent some of the winter and spring dyeing it with Australian plant materials. The following summer, I moved here to my new home in the Blue Mountains and started the long task of plying.

While I love spinning with a drop spindle, I can’t say the same for plying. I find it downright tedious and I just wanted the task to finish. I’d ply at my craft group gatherings, on the train, at the Arts Society gatherings, at the spinning and weaving group….it just seemed to go on and on.

When I had just about finished all that plying, an Ashford Wee Peggy spinning wheel together with a bunch of accessories became available on Marketplace at a bargain price and I was able to buy it. There it sits waiting to be spruced up a bit until I next need to ply. Perhaps I’ll use it for spinning too. Who knows. The wheel came with lots of bobbins, a niddy noddy (I’ve never owned one), hand carders (I’d had to leave mine behind in Bolivia), a flicking tool and even an apron. A friend at my spinning group has supplied me with a new spring and hooks to replace rusty ones.

I managed to squeeze in some time at the loom between hiking trips. It took two attempts to wind a warp to my liking from all those fabulous natural dye colors but I had to face the fact that I just wouldn’t be able to get them all into the one piece.

**Four seasons motifs in progress. The heddle arrangement may look awkward but it works well. I had seen weavers in Bolivia use similar arrangements for their double weave pieces.**

Here’s the finished cloth…

**The figures as well as the colors are meant to represent the four seasons. The yarn I had dyed with cochineal just didn’t belong here. It can wait along with the greens for another project.**

Once I’d decided that this cloth would be a bag, I set about weaving a strap….

I didn’t want to use the handspun wool as weft for either of these pieces and used instead some unidentified soft and very loosely spun ”stuff’ that a friend had given me. It worked well except for the fact that it was somewhat slippery and wanted every now and then to slip out of the shed at the edges rather than lie there snugly. I’d had that very same experience with luscious alpaca yarn that I’d spun once upon a time.

Then came the usual dilemma of deciding which face of the fabric I preferred. The bag would be lined and so one of the two faces would never be seen again. I knew which face I had decided would be the “good” one. The problem was that when I asked others for an opinion, they always chose the other! I stuck with my original plan, though.

**I somehow always find myself on the floor at the planning stage. I didn’t have a choice in Bolivia but I’m in a bigger place now with table space. I still end up on the floor.**

I rounded off the flap of the bag…always scary cutting into the cloth…and covered and protected the raw edge with coil stitches. The sides then had to be woven, lining attached and everything sewn together…the most challenging part for me.

Here ‘s the completed bag being displayed at the Blackheath Arts Society members’ Easter exhibition. It was so much fun seeing it out there on display!

I managed to also get it in at the last minute, thanks to a kind friend from my spinning group, to the Hawkesbury Show where it won a blue ribbon. I was never able to enter shows like these when I lived in Bolivia and I am very excited about this ribbon!

A buddy from my craft group went to the show and surprised me with this photo while she was there….

So, you will have gathered that my hand and shoulder are now allowing me to be busy at the loom. The one-year anniversary of my accident has passed and things are improving. My wrist at the carpal tunnel level is still clogged and blocked by scar tissue which I don’t believe will ever stretch. My hand is a block of wood first thing in the morning but here I am typing, weaving, spinning cotton and plying. My shoulder is thawing very slowly and my range of reach out to the side to pass shuttle and insert sword is improving.

I am, however, in easy reach of all of this beauty and I just have to ask myself every day what I have done to deserve it!

**I’m in a couple of hiking groups and get to go out at least twice a week.**

I wonder if some Blue Mountains scenery and colors will start creeping into my work. I have a long-ish list of things I want to weave, some of which I spent a great deal of time designing last year when I couldn’t weave at all. I remember starting out charting with my left hand and the great deal of concentration that was required to fill within the lines!

I’ve actually started sampling for that large project now that I’ve decided on the thread that I will use. I need to get an ends per inch reading and also make sure that the proportions of the woven figures match those of my charted ones.

**The “real” project will be much wider than this.**

I started off the year weaving various narrow items just to make sure that I didn’t overdo things, Last year I had jumped back into weaving too early and messed up my shoulder as a result.

The Canberra Guild of Spinners and Weavers asked me to weave bookmarks/award ribbons for their AGM. This seemed like a great way to start the year even though they weren’t due until March. It’s extremely rare for me to take on commissioned work but the guild folk had made it easier by choosing and providing the yarn and being very specific about the layout. I got to choose the patterns and I had a lot of fun with that. I used the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave.

I wove a name tag for myself once again in the structure that I call Andean Pebble Weave which produces a quirky style of lettering. The lettering on the award ribbons is less so because the letters are capitals and well spaced. I have joined so many new groups up here that it is a struggle to remember names. At least this tag will help them to identify me and then I can embarrass myself by not being able to identify them in return!

I live above the Aboriginal Health Services office and one day while chatting with the ladies, I admired their lanyards with their indigenous art print. The next thing I knew, one had been popped into my mail box. So, I replied with a woven keyfob. I love these kinds of exchanges.

I had no trouble at all finding a place to set myself up for weaving on my backstrap loom. The previous resident left one of those huge Ikea book cases with 25 cube spaces. I have it filled now with cubes holding pretty much everything I brought over with me from Bolivia. I place C clamps on the edge of the lower shelves and can place my warp beam behind them. It’s a good sturdy anchor point.

Here I sit weaving with some of my late mother’s treasured possessions. She would have had to make the tough decisions about what to take and what to leave behind, just as I had when leaving Bolivia, when she left India in 1962 to come and live in Australia. These things had been in storage waiting for me since my mum died in 2013.There’s a biscuit tin with images of places of interest in Bombay, a pressed tin trinket tray with images of Hindu deities and her sewing basket…all selected by her as being too precious to leave behind. I love that I am able to have them here near me as I weave.

And…one more thing I wove….I converted the pouch I’d made from my handspun llama yarn into a phone carrying pouch for my hikes by weaving and adding a strap…

Between weaving and hiking and other activities, I try to turn this flat, which had been left in a somewhat shabby state, into a cosy home. This town of Katoomba in which I live is Op Shop heaven and I have acquired most of my things there or via Marketplace. Op Shop is the Australian term for a thrift or charity store. There have been a few flat-pack furniture purchases too. Assembling them on my own made me feel like I was playing a game of Twister.

Would you believe I got these Indonesian ikat pieces at a local op shop for the equivalent of US$ 3.50 each?!

**I couldn’t believe that after having admired the Indonesian ikat textiles for so many years, particularly the ones from Sumba, that I should run across these in an op shop?!**

Next on the agenda is dyeing with lichen. A friend gave me a jar of lichen that she had collected from fallen branches on the coast. It’s been soaking in a mix of cloudy ammonia and water for almost two weeks now and the color it’s releasing is amazing. I still have some of the Bolivian wool left. I just have to wash it and then give this color a go. I hope to find lichen locally that will perhaps produce other colors although I doubt that anything could be quite as astounding as this.

**This photo was taken after one week. It has developed even further since.**

The sun is streaming in through my sunroom windows and I feel so guilty for being indoors on such an utterly gorgeous day. But at the same time, I have been feeling bad for having neglected my blog for so long.

I want to thank everyone for making purchases before Taproot Video closed at the end of March. I really appreciate your support and hope to have the PDFs back up for sale elsewhere soon. I thought that launching a new publication would be a good way to introduce my new point of sale but I don’t see that happening quite quickly enough. Hopefully it won’t be too much longer before I have my publications available for sale once more. The flurry of purchases at the end of Taproot Video will help keep me afloat until then.

For those who don’t see my blog banner on their particular device, here’s what it says….Stay tuned.

Backstrap Weaving – My Books!

My Books, My Books, My Books…..I have been researching my options for a new home for my books between settling into my new home, finding new community, rehabbing my frozen shoulder and wrist, which is all stuck up with scar tissue again and, and, and…..!!!. So….I haven’t settled on anything yet…. but am getting close!

If you have no idea of what I am talking about, you may have somehow missed the announcement emails that the folks at Taproot Video, who sell my books, have been sending to their entire customer base these last months telling everyone that the website will be closing on March 31, 2026.

No need to panic if you’re hearing this for the first time.

If you’ve purchased one of my books in PDF form and downloaded it to your device, there’s nothing you need to do. If you haven’t yet downloaded it/them, you need to do so before the website closes. You have until March 31.

If you’ve purchased the PDFs that come with supplemental video clips, you don’t need to do anything either. You will continue to have access to the videos by clicking on the link to the folder of clps that you’ll find in the chapter titled Videos. Access to the clips will continue after the Taproot Video website closes.

There are four titles that come with clips:

Andean Pebble Weave on Inkle Looms

Warp-faced Double Weave on Inkle Looms

The Eye-pattern Tubular Band and Other Decorative Finishing Techniques

The Eye-pattern Tubular Band of the Peruvian and Boliviain Highlands

ACTION NEEDED FOR THE FOLLOWING:

If you purchased a printed copy of one of my books that comes with supplementary video clips (‘those listed above), you will need to download the clips to your device before March 31 if you haven’t already done so.

Access to these clips is provided via a link on the Taproot Video website. Naturally, that link will no longer be available to you after the site closes. So, if you haven’t downloaded the clips yet, please go to taprootvideo.com and…..

Click on the Purchased Items tab.

Click on the title of book you purchased. That will take you to a page with the link to the folder of videos.
Clck on the link.

Download the videos to your device.

These instructions are also outlined in the books themselves in the chapter titled VIDEOS.

There are only two or three titles now at Taproot Video that have remaining copies of the printed books. I won’t be selling printed books again after Taproot Video closes. My books in PDF form will soon be available elsewhere and I’ll let you know as soon as that’s up and running.

In the meantime, yes, I have been weaving! And so, I ‘ll finish this quick post by showing you what I’ve been up to using the handspun wool I purchased from my Bolivian weaving friends in the highlands in January last year. You may remember that we dyed some of it with indigo while I was there. I dyed the rest in Australia last year with local plants. I love that my new community of friends in my transition home up on the mid north coast contributed so much to that project with their contributions of mango leaves, silver dollar eucalyptus leaves, local info on where to find a peppercorn tree, onion skins and rusty nails for my iron water.

This a celebration of connections made in what I’ve left behind and where I now find myself. The images depict the four seasons considering that now that I live in a place that truly experiences all four. We had two at best in my tropical home in Bolivia! I’m going to make this into a bag so I can carry those connected memories with me.

Bye-bye Taproot Video and thank you.. Thank you to all those who have purchased my publications over the years and supported me through following my blog as well as leaving me kind comments and reviews here and on my other social media pages.The blog will continue. I have a lot saved up to post! You’ll be hearing again from me soon.

Backstrap Weaving – The Flip Side

Lots of people ask me about how the pandemic is affecting me here in Bolivia and there is plenty to say about all the negative ways in which lives have been changed. But, there’s also a flip side…at least there is in my case…and there are some positive things going on as well as a direct result of not being able to travel and being obliged to stay in one place. I was thinking about it and this is the longest period of time I have stayed here in Bolivia since 2005! There was a period prior to that during which I hadn’t left South America for nine years but, after 2005, I seemed to be regularly picking up and flying away.

This long period at home has my Ideas Notebook crammed with planned projects and leaves me with plenty of time to play with those things that do require more sampling, planning, charting and trial-and-error which, for me, is best done over one long uninterrupted period of time. I have lots of uninterrupted time.

I showed my finished Finnweave sampler in my last post and am pleased to tell you that I found a use for it beyond just being a sample to which I can refer for future projects. It makes a wonderful cowl. Having worn my hair long for most of my adult life, I am very much aware of my bare neck and how cold it can get now that I have cut my hair short. I was very conscious of that on my winter visits to Australia and New Zealand last year.

Yes, I had a moment of frustration the other day and took it out on my hair in the form of yet another DIY haircut. At 10:30 pm with toothbrush in mouth this suddenly seemed like a good idea. While we are certainly not in cowl-wearing weather here south of the equator, the time will come when I can be back visiting the USA in the spring and fall, and hopefully Australia in the winter months, when the air can get a little nippy.

Quite a few people have been curious about the Finnweave I have been doing. I explain that I chose this structure simply because the pre-columbian textile fragments that I have were woven this way. There are of course other kinds of double weave pick-up structures that can be used to weave figures and the figures will have a certain appearance on the front and back of the cloth. Weavers can choose the look that they prefer. As always, I refer to the Doramay Keasbey article in Handwoven Jan/Feb 2011 in which she compares the front and back of bookmarks that she wove using five different doubleweave pick-up structures.

So, what about the flip side of my Finnweave? The Keasbey article includes Finnweave and I can show you the two sides of a motif on a piece that I wove some years ago using 8/2 cotton which I think is much clearer than trying to show you the example in the finer 20/2 cotton that I just wove.

You can see that smooth horizontal lines on one face look like toothy lines on the other . This particular motif does not have any fine vertical lines but a fine vertical line on the “good’ face looks like a column of small disconnected horizontal dashes on the back. Occasionally, I prefer the way a particular motif looks on the back in that from a distance it resembles blurry ikat with those toothy edges. It’s a softer look. The upper face has a much smoother and sharper appearance.

So, I will keep my Finnweave cowl on hand as I think about my next project using this structure. There’s not much chance of it being used as a cowl any time soon as we have temperatures in the high 90s with one day at 100 degrees forecast for the next eight days. The tropical “winter” is over!

What has been keeping me busy lately is refreshing my memory on three-color reversible pebble weave. It’s another one of those things that grabs my attention every few years. I showed you in my last post the sample I wove in tencel using this technique some years ago in which I used yellow and white on a blueberry background.

I can’t find that sample anywhere now but, thank goodness, I am better at keeping tabs on my notes. However, my notes could have been better and it was frustration with trying to interpret them that led to the late night hair-cutting incident! After a good night’s sleep, I got the notes all sorted and I chose primary colors in 8/2 tencel once again to test whether I had indeed understood the steps.

Examples from Peru shared with me by Mary Spanos with the red, green and yellow sections of three-color pebble..

I am using my backstrap loom with string heddles as you know. If you are a tablet-weaver, three-color double-faced pebble weave is apparently quite straightforward. I have read about people doing it by using triangular tablets but also square tablets that have holes in the sides. So, if you are in a great hurry to learn this, you might want to go with tablets. I’ll leave you to investigate that further.

I will be writing a tutorial on this eventually for those who use string heddles. “Why don’t you just use tablets?” you might ask… I am more interested in the string heddle process as that is the way the technique is woven here in South America.

I have examples of three-color pebble weave in pieces I bought in Peru on my very first visit in 1996. These particular pieces were relatively expensive and I had to think long and hard about investing in them back in my do-it-on-a-shoestring backpacking days. They blew my budget for the following ten days. I am so glad I bought them, though. My weaving friend Mary also sent me pictures of some similar pieces that she owns.

The three-color pebble weave figures in these particular pieces are not identical in appearance on the back of the cloth.

Here you can see the back of one that I wove myself many years ago in a non-reversible technique….

I haven’t yet had the chance to sit with a weaver who knows how to do the double-faced version and so my efforts have been guided by the writings of Adele Cahlander and Marjorie Cason in The Art of Bolivian Highland Weaving and a lot of trial-and-error of my own. Just by chance I was able to pick up a small piece of cloth that was woven using the double-faced three-color version. It was being used as the cover of a small photo album that I found in a souvenir store right here in Santa Cruz. I grabbed it! Thankfully, it had only been glued to the photo album along its edges and I could easily remove the cloth.

Bolivian cloth with pattern in double-faced three-color pebble.

The cloth is so very tightly woven as is the way here in Bolivia, that it is impossible to separate the warp threads to perhaps get some clues about how it was woven. In any case, I am using a series of steps for my own experiments and am getting the results I want. I feel that I could replicate the pattern on this cloth if I wanted to.

I would, however, love to be able to spend time with the Bolivian weaver of this piece of cloth and see if she has some other less laborious and more efficient way of achieving this which will no doubt have me slapping my forehead and exclaiming “Of course!” On the other hand, perhaps I am doing it just the way she does….I would love to know! Bolivian weavers think nothing of what may appear to us as extremely laborious weaving tasks….think of what they go through every time they finish a piece of warp-faced cloth with four selvedges, or the thread-by-thread pick-up that goes into weaving pieces like the red and black one you see here….

A weaving of the Jalq’a people of Potolo, Bolivia.

So, here is the piece in tencel that I wove to practice creating patterns using all three colors as outlines, background and fillers. My sample motifs got smaller and smaller as I gradually centered my focus on just some very specific aspects. These patterns are charted in my Complementary-warp Pattern Book.

The idea was to refresh my memory about this technique and, as it turned out, improve my notes for next time. But it was also about wanting to weave something using the wool I had started spinning during the Tour de Fleece. My spinning output is quite sad. I simply can’t manage to motivate make myself to devote that much time to it. I am more interested in charting and weaving. In any case, I have some yarn to use and after sampling in tencel, I was ready. I had originally planned to sample in some industrially spun wool but everything I found in the closet was either too heavy or too stretchy. I do have some Knit Picks Palette but I didn’t want to push my luck with that. The method I use has a lot of heddle action and I wasn’t sure how well the Palette would stand up to it.

A couple of wrist cuff projects seemed like a good way to start….

I used a little leaf motif that I had created for my Complementary-warp Pattern Book (slightly modified here) as well as part of a larger flower motif that I had created for the same book in the Garden-themed section.

One of the challenges for me when using this three-color technique is finding three colors that will work well together on both faces. I have a light color -white, a very dark color – black and a medium color- let’s call it tan. These three work well together. Other combinations may not. If, for example, I use two medium colors like purple and green, I can have them sit on either side of the lightest color on one face, but they will have to sit right next to each other on the other face. In that case there may not be enough contrast between the two for the pattern to be easily distinguishable.

You can see that tan and black sit right next to each other in the leaf motifs on the upper face and are separated by white on the lower face. I played with the outline color in the flower motif using both white and black as shape outlines and tan and white as the fillers.

My hand spun yarn stood up well. Admittedly, this is only a very short and narrow piece but I can tell thatf it will do well even in something much larger.

I added an eye-patterned tubular band in the same colors and then played around with different buttons for the button-and-loop closure. I love this cuff!

Next on the loom, was another cuff project using the green and purple that I mentioned above. I didn’t do any outline color-flipping in this one. Here it is getting its tubular edging. I love weaving and sewing that edging! (Check out my book if you would like to learn how to weave this patterned tubular band to use independently as jewelry, for example, as well as weave and sew it as an edging).

These are the buttons that I eventually chose…a flower one for the garden-theme and an interlocking shape to match the interlocked motifs which are charted in my pattern books.

The last thing is to braid and sew on the loops that go around the buttons to close the cuffs.

So, what’s next? While I am in wrist-cuff mode, I might make one in Finnweave. I do like to have examples of the various structures that I use in my wrist-cuff collection. I also feel motivated to spin some of the colors that I am least likely to use and then dye them so I that I can continue to play with three-color pebble. If you have suggestions for three colors that would work well together no matter how they sit in relation to each other, please let me know. I wove this wool three-color pebble some years ago in which the orange and green played well together when placed right next to each other….….and look just as good on the other face where they are separated by white.

Finally, I would like to promote my publications…in this case, the one I produced on the eye-pattern tubular band which you have seen along the edge of the cuffs I made. My ability to earn has been greatly reduced with my inability to travel to teach and book sales help to keep me afloat. Perhaps you would like to try weaving an eye-pattern tubular band. I have two versions of the book. One, which is only available as a pdf, teaches how to weave the band as an independent tube which can be used in jewelry and other accessories. Ideas are given in the book.

In addition to this, the other extended version shows you how to weave and sew the band to the edge of cloth as I have done. It also goes on to teach two other decorative finishing techniques that are used by some of my Bolivian weaving teachers. This extended version is available as a pdf and as a spiral-bound book.

Both the short and extended versions, in either pdf or book form, give access to supplementary instructional video clips and are available at Taproot Video.

I’ll be donning my masks and venturing out a bit more in the next week or so as I need to re-stock the pantry before our national elections this month. I plan on staying in and well out of the way during and after that event.

Take care and please stay safe.

Backstrap Weaving – Forehead Slaps

I have a small zip lock bag full of left overs of my handpun llama fiber.

There’s less yarn in those balls than you might think as I remember having wound the thread around clay beads. What to do with them?

For me, combining them all into one project won’t work as I don’t feel I have enough dark colored thread to create a decent amount of contrast. Maybe I could darken some of the colors by over-dyeing with tea, or I could come up with some small projects to weave using just two or three colors.

And then I remembered the beautiful handwoven cuffs I had seen on the Peruvian Connection website…

Aren’t these gorgeous?! When I first saw these pictures I longed to try making a cuff with my own handpsun and edging it with a tubular band. Then I got distracted and carried away with other projects. I did make cuffs in the end…several of them, in fact…but in silk without tubular edgings.

Now I could finally get around to trying this with my handspun. The reason I was looking for small projects like these is that I really needed frequent breaks from tying plastic strips around warp threads for my latest ikat experiment. I like to be able to weave every day. Even taking a whole day off from warp tying was most welcome…talk about tedious! So, it was very nice to be able to take a break and pick up a small project and weave away.

Here’s the second cuff I made which is the one with which I am most pleased. I used the Tinkipaya star pattern that I recently used on a wool bag project.

That’s the first one I made on the right. It’s a little rough and I wish I had put more thought into the layout. The pick-up pattern in the center would have looked better if it hadn’t been bordered by red, I think. I guess I wasn’t very confident about it being a success and was a little careless as a result. Both are edged with tubular bands. The red one has an X and O pattern that I saw being used for a tubular band by a weaver in Pitumarca, Peru. The other has the eye pattern that I learned in Chinchero, Peru.

I didn’t manage to make any sweet yarn buttons like the Peruvian weavers have in their beautiful cuffs. I used buttons made from tagua nut that I had bought in Ecuador many years ago.

One end of the cuffs that I wove is a selvedge and the other end is raw. I turned the raw edge over, sewed it down and then stiffened it with diluted white glue. This enabled me to then securely apply the tubular edging. I wove and sewed it to the edge at the same time.

The tubular band does a pretty good job of covering that turned edge. As always with these tubular bands, you can start with a selvedge but then have to get creative with the finish where you are left with a bunch of unwoven warp ends to somehow hide away. When edging a bag, this is easy. All sorts of things can be hidden on the inside of a bag. You can see the place where the end of the tubular band meets the beginning in the picture above. Like I said, you just have to get creative. If you can’t see it, that means that I did a pretty good job ;-).

Of course, I had already woven three cuffs before I realized that it would have been wise to position and hide the join in the tubular band under the button! Forehead Slap #1.

A braid at one end of the cuff loops over the button to secure it around my wrist.

I made three and each is edged with a different tubular band. The third has the Chauaytire style of tubular edging. The pattern does not show up so well due to the lack of strong contrast in the colors.

The third one has a pattern that I adapted from a belt made by the Tarahumara weavers of Mexico.

So, the cuff weaving was a welcome distraction that got me through the tiresome process of applying ikat ties on my larger project. I have seen pictures of young ladies in Uzbekistan seated around a horizontal frame and tying bundles of warp together for ikat. It could be fun as a group activity. It doesn’t really require concentration if the design has been already marked on the warp threads.

I had originally intended having four circles on this warp….two on the front of what will hopefully be a slip cover for my laptop and two on the back. But, after two, I was done! I am still in the experimental stage and I figured I could learn plenty from just two circles…and indeed, I did. I already have new strategies planned for the next attempt.

One of the big lessons…Forehead Slap #2…is that the original tied shape will contract considerably lengthwise if it is being filled with patterning. So, I have a squat circle underway. You can see my original cardboard template on the floor nearby. I hadn’t even noticed this happening when I wove the block-like patterns in my Bird ikat project. However, I don’t mind this squat circle too much.

But, one of the best things I learned this week was the value of having time to let my mind wander freely. This is probably why I seem to solve all my weaving problems when in the shower! When traveling, I have plenty of time to do that…all the airport waiting time and bus trips give me lots of opportunities to let my mind wander and I get my best ideas that way. Once I am home, I spend all my time implementing those ideas, very focused and concentrating on pick-up patterns….a wandering mind leads to mistakes. All the time I spent standing at the ikat frame and a few hours spent sitting at the doctor’s office this week (where I was surprised to find that I was the only one without an electronic device) have allowed my wandering mind to bring me a whole new set of fresh ideas.

I am going to leave you this week with a couple of videos. The first is a 14-year old Peruvian girl singing Michael Jackson’s The Way You Make Me Feel in Quechua. I love it! This was produced as an effort to promote young people’s pride in their native Quechua language. A word of warning…I have had this song in my head for the last three days.

This second video was produced in Argentina and the song is about Doña Ubenza who, according to this web page, is a shepherdess who spins while she tends her grazing sheep. Inspired by the spinning and sheep, the producer applies the fiber theme to stop motion animation with felt figures to tell the story. It is adorable as is the song itself. Unfortunately, Doña Ubenza is not spinning in the video but you can see here there with her sheep.

ENJOY!

Backstrap Weaving – Braiding and Thinking

No, haven’t been spinning. I have been braiding and thinking about projects new and old. I am aware from my visits to Ravelry that the great annual Tour de Fleece is underway and, while I am not participating, I was motivated by all the excitement connected with the event to dig through the cupboard and pull out some old handspun projects which I have woven with the alpaca and llama fiber you can see above. If you are wondering what’s in that bowl, it’s llama jerky.

I had bought that llama fiber while wandering around a tiny country settlement in Uyuni, Bolivia back in 2002. It was coarse, dry and brittle but I knew no better. I was thrilled just to have it as it is impossible to obtain down in the jungly lowlands where I live.

I had already learned to spin but I think that spinning that rough llama fiber was the best spinning training I could have had. It was awful to card. I had a wheezing attack each time I pulled the dusty stuff out of a bag and the memory of the smell of that dust still turns my stomach. The first things I wove with that spun llama fiber still sit framed on my wall. It had been such a business that I never thought I would do it again!

Later, when my friend Janet in the U.S gave me some prepared alpaca fiber, I couldn’t believe how easy it was to spin. It felt like cheating. Here’s one of the alpaca projects on the loom…

I dyed some of my yarn made from the llama fiber with cochineal and plants.

I ended up making quite a few pieces of coth which I sewed into shoulder bags and pouches. These are the things that I have been pulling out of my closet. They were obviously made in the days before I started weaving tubular bands and embellishing my pieces …there is not a single tubular band or tassel to be seen!
The long pouch had some forgotten tools in them. It was nice to unzip it and discover those. I decided that this whole lot needed some sprucing up. The black bag will get a new strap and have its flap edged with something decorative. The brown bag could also do with a more interesting strap.

I decided to edge the long zippered pouch with a tubular band. This would be my chance to apply the band that is used to edge cloth in the community of Chahuaytire. Although I have sewn this kind of tubular band to pieces of cloth in samples as you can see above, I had never used it in a real project and I had not woven it with wool.

Cloth from Chahuaytire, Peru edged with a tubular band in beautiful natural dye colors.

When I visited Marijke van Epen in The Netherlands in 2012, I worked with her on figuring out this band from a picture. Almost immediately after that visit, I went to Peru and was lucky to be able to watch one being woven and buy a warp in progress to see how it was set up.

While I have seen the patterned tubular band on the right, which I learned in Chinchero Peru, also woven here in Bolivia, I have never seen what I will call the ”Chahuaytire style’,’ on the left, here in Bolivia at all.

Maxima at the Tinkuy in 2913...photo by Dorinda Dutcher — Maxima at the Tinkuy in 2913…photo by Dorinda Dutcher

One of my weaving teachers in Bolivia, Maxima, has an older sister, Narciza, who knows how to weave the Chinchero style of tubular band and frequently attaches it to the edge of her woven coca-leaf bags.

Dorinda, who works with Maxima, recounted one of Maxima stories in which she told of how her mother did not know the figure on the tubular band to teach them and so bartered corn to have a neighbor teach her oldest daughter, Narciza. The neighbor had recently moved to the area from Oruro (also in Bolivia).

Maxima was not interested in asking her older sister to then teach her the pattern as Narciza was in the habit of giving her a smack when she made a mistake. I always wondered if my weaving teachers sometimes had the urge to give me a wee slap when I was learning! I can remember their frustration with me back in 1996 when I broke my warp threads while trying to operate the heddles.

Maxma is currently weaving items for her husband in his new role as Mayor of Hucarani. There are several items that he and Maxima, as the Mayor;s wife, are required to have. Here Maxima is weaving a ch'uspa with columns of figures in double weave. The woven pieces need to be bright and festive and so she is using store bought acrylic rather than her own handpsun and naturally dyed wool. — Maxma is currently weaving items for her husband in his new role as Mayor of Huancarani. There are several woven items that he and Maxima, as wife of the Mayor, are required to have. Here Maxima is weaving a ch’uspa for her husband with columns of figures in double weave. The woven pieces need to be bright and festive and so she is using store bought acrylic rather than her own handpsun and naturally dyed wool.

And so, it was only in 2013 when Maxima had the chance to attend the Tinkuy de Tejedores in Cusco, Peru, that she had the opportunity to learn to weave the ñawi awapa pattern in much the same way I had in 2010.

However, Dorinda has since told me that Maxima seems to have forgotten how to weave the ñawi awapa band since returning to Bolivia. She sends her weavings to her sister if she wants them to be edged with a ñawi awapa.

As with everything new like this, if it is not immediately put into practice, it can easily be forgotten. Ask any of my students!

One day I hope I can go out to Independencia and help refresh her memory.

I have had so much fun with the ñawi awapa since learning it, attaching it to so many things and, most recently, using it for jewelry.

But, back to the ”Chahuaytire style”. I enjoyed weaving and sewing it to the edge of the pouch. It came out beautifully in wool.

I added a braid to the zipper and I think the bag looks a lot more interesting now. There you can see all the swords and shuttles that I will be storing in it.

Not all tubular bands need to have pick-up patterns. I have often woven and attached them in just one solid color and have also used ”threaded-in” patterns, that is, ones that are created by the order of the colored threads in the warp rather than with pick-up.

These two pouches have solid color plain-weave tubular edgings.

The blue and green piece has a tubular edging with a simple thread-in pattern. The pattern was warped off center to appear on the upper face of the fabric and show as solid green on the reverse.

Maxima often uses simple Andean Pebble Weave patterns in her tubular edgings using two sets of heddles and I have also seen weavers in Pitumarca weave tubular bands with the pattern set up in multiple heddles.

A weaver from Pitumarca weaving and sewing a tubular band edging.

Having learned the discontinuous-warp, or ticlla, technique with weavers from Pitumarca, I used the particular tubular band pattern used by weavers in their community to edge my workshop piece when I got home and finished it. You can see how the edges of my cloth rolled when I took it off the loom. This was due to the high amount of twist in the handspun alpaca yarn that we were given to use. The cloth lay flat once the tubular band was applied.

Of course, I didn’t spend my entire week on this one tubular band. As the title of this post implies, I was braiding and thinking…..braiding the enormous number of ends on my wall hangings at four minutes per braid. There are still plenty more to go.

And I was thinking about the shapes I want to weave on my next ikat ”sample”. Yes, I don’t feel ready yet to dive into the real project. I think that just one more sample with curved shapes needs to be done.

I also thought about the new slip cover I need to for my new laptop. This new one is slightly bigger than the notebook I have been using these last five years and so a new cover is needed.

Here’s the one I have been using so far with its pattern taken from Central Asian textiles…

It has been on many trips with me.

And, while I think, I pull out books, look online and make sketches. While going through the cupboard, I also pulled out a lot of fiber crying out to be spun. Maybe I will also set myself a wee spinning goal for the next months.

I will leave you for this week with this final picture of an event which is creating a lot of excitement here in Santa Cruz.

We are on holiday today as the Pope is in Santa Cruz where he is celebrating his only Mass during his Bolivian visit. BoA, the Bolivian airline that transported him, has been posting pictures of the visit on Facebook and kindly gave me permission to show one here. Pope Francisco was presented with a handwoven souvenir of his visit when he landed and walks hand in hand with a boy who is dressed in the typical green and white outfit of Santa Cruz with his sombrero de sao.

See you next week…..