Tag: weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Tiny Tapes

The time to pack up and hit the road is approaching and so I decided to pack away the five months of creative chaos that has accumulated on my bedroom floor…pattern charts, sticks of various sizes and lengths, swords, shuttles, cable ties, metal rods, pick-up tools, heddle string, sewing thread, yarn, cardboard strips, needles, string. Everything went back in its proper place and I could see the rug again and I didn’t need to play hop-scotch on the way from my bed to the door.

But then I decided that there was still time to weave some tiny projects and I started planning a lanyard that a friend has been asking me to weave for her for some time. I also want to weave a strap for a pouch that I have been thinking about for years as well as a bookmark that I promised another friend. And, with just that, wouldn’t you know it, I am back to Square One and can’t see my rug any more! The books, and charts and yarn and worksheets are all over the place along with the shoulder-bag project that I continue to sew.

This is where I was with the bag project when I last posted. The zipper is in place and sides have been installed. On my weekly visit to the supermarket I was happy to find a long table runner that I could use as the lining material. It looked like it was just the right width and I loved the color and subdued pattern. This seemed to be a safe bet for me who knows nothing about fabric and I was happy to pay a bit more than it would have cost me to just buy fabric in the street market. I doubt that I would have found anything that I liked as much in the market stalls.

That un-ripping tool got a workout as I sewed and re-positioned over and over. Now it’s done. This is the opening for the quirky pocket…the one that sits on the outside but is accessed from the inside. I got to use a beautiful button that one of my students made by hand as a closure for the pocket. The loop around the button is an eye-pattern tubular band that I wove.

I edged the pocket and the sides with plain-weave tubular bands in blue. Tubular bands are such wonderful finishes. The pocket and sides are so sturdy with those nice firm bands in place. And that is where this project sits until I can get more blue yarn for the straps. I was hoping to use this bag on this trip but that won’t be happening. I’ll come back home with the yarn and weave some nice sturdy straps in the intermesh structure.. The bag is the perfect size for my books!

As for the tiny tape projects, a friend asked me to weave a lanyard for her name tag using the cat motifs that I designed for my book of 100 Patterns. My online weaving friend Andrea had designed cats with intertwined tails which she allowed me to adapt to more closely match my own three cat motifs. All four motifs are charted in the book. The lanyard needs to be 3/4”- 1” wide.

Here’s the first little guy on my width-sample warp which confirmed that I had enough ends to get 3/4”. I am going to continue weaving this sample and make it into a wrist band for myself while I plan the layout of the lanyard. I’ll probably mix the cat motifs with some paw prints, the charts for which are also in the book of 100 patterns.

At the same time, I am getting a start on another band that has been on my mind for several years. I have been collecting the word “weave” in various languages which I would like to weave into a strap for a pouch. Many years ago I wove and constructed a carry bag for my backstrap bits and pieces and I used weft twining to decorate the strap with just a few words in different fonts.

I am using the intermesh structure this time and using just the one font to weave my words.

I have about twenty-four words collected now from online friends ranging from Cherokee to the Yoruba language of Nigeria.

Here are the cats in guitar-strap size woven by Julie Beers for her husband’s guitar…

Kathy King combined patterns from the book of 100 patterns (Complementary-warp Pattern Book) and my very first book, Andean Pebble Weave. She calls her band The Birds and the Bees. I love the blue and brown together.

Margo wove this wrist-cuff combining various patterns that are charted in my books, as well as designing some of her own and giving it all an original twist to create a cycling-inspired theme for a friend. I love this!Colleen Turner added a strap that she wove on an inkle loom to a shoulder-bag. The pattern is charted in the Complementary-warp Pick-up book which also gives step-by-step instructions for those who use any kind of loom to weave warp-faced bands.

Marsha’s band in 20/2 silk is spectacular. The red and blue are her own hand-spun threads. She has combined patterns from two of my books and the result is gorgeous!

And here is Kristin’s latest piece of awesome-ness in her own hand-spun wool. She has named this “Celestial”. The star pattern is one that was created by Kurt Laitenburger for tablet weaving and which he allowed me to adapt to the Andean Pebble Weave structure for my More Adventures book. I like to call the smaller pattern that Kristin used on the sides “Sunrise, Sunset” and this piece makes me think of a sunset with the evening star rising. The red, orange, blue and yellow all come from natural dyes. Kristin is going to sew this into a long zippered bag for for her backstrap loom.

One of my weaving teachers, Maxima, took a liking to this same star pattern when I was up in the highlands. Of all the samples that I took to show her, this was the one that she wanted to learn. We wound a warp and Maxima took over after she watched me weave a few rows. I was able to show Mr Laitenburger how his pattern was being enjoyed on the traditional leaning loom in the central Bolivian highlands. He was very pleased.

Kurt Laitenberger does beautiful work with tablets and I really appreciate his allowing me to adapt some of his patterns to the Andean Pebble Weave structure for my books.

Speaking of tablet weaving, I was looking through some of my old folders on my desktop about which I had almost completely forgotten and I re-discovered some awesome pictures that Taylor had sent me of tablet weavers in Bhutan. Taylor and I had been corresponding by email while she was living in Bhutan and we were able to meet up once in the USA when I was on a visit. She gave me an incredibly fine and stiff tablet-woven band and told me about how some of the tablet weavers use x-ray film to make the tablets for the extremely fine thread that they use. After our get-together, she sent me these photos that she had taken f a family of tablet-weavers.

It’s fascinating to see a classic backstrap loom set-up being used with the tablets. I am guessing that the structure that is used for the bands that are woven using this set-up is one in which the weaver does not have to deal with built-up twist in the warp threads.

Taylor had been working on a project teaching women to construct tote bags from strips of plastic cut from soda bottles. I think that you can just make out the green handle of one of the bags in the foreground of this photo in which the weaver is preparing her warp with the thin film tablets.

I love the rocks and the weights that she is using to hold her stakes in place. I managed to scavenge an old paint can filled with cement that I sometimes need to use when I warp using certain set-ups.

Until next time, let me leave you with this message: A limited number of hard copies of all my books in English will be available while I am traveling. Please leave a comment on this post, if you are interested, and I will get back to you. 

Backstrap Weaving – A Pocket-Guide to Pockets

Happy 2019 to you all! New Year’s Day for me was more about celebrating finishing my latest e-book. And now that that project has been put aside , I am back at my loom and working on a large piece of fabric. This will be sewn into a shoulder bag. Don’t ask me what shape or form that will take. I am not skilled at sewing and I’ll have to figure that out later! I have worked on this for more hours than you might imagine. If you compare the first and second pictures, you might notice that the green stripes that flank the center pattern are missing in the second picture. They were begging to be removed and so I spent one evening un-weaving back to the start and cutting them out so that I could get up the next morning to a fresh warp and pretend it never happened! That left me much happier with the project. Ofcourse, I will be finishing the cloth with decorative stitches and tubular band edgings. How could I not after finally getting the instructions down in my latest e-book, The Eye-pattern Tubular Band and Other Decorative Finishing Techniques.

This bag will have a built-in pocket. If you look closely at the picture above, you will notice that I began by weaving across the whole width of the cloth. Now I am only weaving the center section. You can see that the weaving there has advanced far beyond the side sections. In that center section the warp is longer than the two side sections and this is what will form the pocket.

This is the warp for the black pocket bag that I recently wove. You can see how the center section of warp extends all the way to bottom of my bed, which is my usual anchoring spot for my warps. The two side sections don’t extend that far. They are suspended on a separate beam which is extended on rope (my lovely braided llama-fiber rope from Peru :-)) away from the bed. I guess for me that is the trickiest part of the set-up….having the two shorter parts of the warp sitting at just the right distance from the bed so that tension is exactly equal the whole way across the three sections.

That involves a lot of sitting in my backstrap to feel the tension across the warp and then laying the warp down so I can go to the far end and guess how much the rope needs to be adjusted…back to my backstrap….back to the far end, another minute adjustment…and so on! You can try to feel for tension differences all day and night but they will only really show up once you start weaving. Ridging, or corrugation, in the plain weave is the warp’s way of telling me that it is unhappy!

It was a lot easier to equalize the tension when I learned this technique in Potosí, Bolivia back in 1997. We used a horizontal ground loom and wove a very small piece. Adjustments were made by simply shifting a stake within easy reach that had been whacked into the ground.

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

I wanted the pocket on my current project to be 10cm deep. That means that the center section of warp is 20cm longer than the rest of the warp. I wove the center section, as I am doing in the second photo in this post, for 20 cm. Then I placed the entire warp together on just one back beam, put the llama rope aside, and anchored the beam directly to my bed as I normally do. The long piece of pocket fabric then gets pulled toward me and folded back and out of the way so that I can continue weaving across the entire width of the warp once again.

The next challenge is folding the pocket and somehow securing it so that I can once again put tension on the warp.

That was easy in Potosí when I was learning and relatively easy on the small pocket pouches that I have been weaving lately. In Potosí we just used a long needle and pinned it to the rest of the cloth. We were weaving with re-spun acrylic. It had a lot of twist added to it and it was tight and firm. Added to that was the hard beat on which my teacher always insisted. My cloth, like the yarn, was stiff and firm. I could just pin something to it and it would not budge.

The 20/2 wool that I am using, on the other hand, has a bit of stretch to it and the cloth that I am weaving is not stiff. After trying many ways to secure it, none of which were satisfactory, I ended up using crochet cotton to sew the folded pocket down. The stitches can be removed once I have finished weaving.

It’s a quirky little pocket. It sits on the outside of the bag and is accessed from the inside. I have been wanting to weave a large piece with one of these pockets for years. Now that the exciting pocket part is done, the rest of the weaving will be less technically challenging. Maybe some warp threads will break to provide some additional challenges…ha ha. Actually, that’s quite unlikely. I am not needing to do any strumming on this piece to get sheds to open and so the 20/2 wool should remain in excellent shape. The bag will be 30cm long and so I am quite near the half-way point where I can start working on what will be the back.

These patterns, by the way, are all charted in my Complementary-warp Pattern Book.

I am also working a bit on another book while I weave this piece (I have a lot of started book projects on my laptop!). I am actually always working on something like that when I am not at my loom.

I have seen a few eye-pattern tubular bands being woven in my online groups since I launched my latest e-book on the topic earlier this month. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. Nancy, aka yarndragon, was the first to post a picture of hers which she made on her inkle loom..

I wonder who will be the first to post a picture of one they have sewn to cloth.  I am pretty sure I know who it will be but I won’t reveal that here!

But, you don’t need to wait until you have woven a piece of fabric to which you can attach an eye-pattern band. One of the happy discoveries I made while writing the book was that the tubular band can be attached very nicely to store-bought cotton cloth. I had actually planned this to be a sample that showed how light cotton cloth cannot support the spiraling energy of the tubular band when it is simultaneously woven and sewn to the edge using the weft as the sewing thread. Light cloth can buckle and get distorted with all that spiraling energy.

The eye-pattern tubular band used to dress up a simple pouch made with commercial cotton fabric.

However, after having folded the cloth to make a little pouch and seaming the sides, I was actually sewing to four layers of fabric and that was more than enough to support the tubular band. I had bought interfacing to use but didn’t need it in the end. I am very tempted to make a bunch of little pouches now as gifts using lovely Japanese cloth pieces that I bought at the indigo exhibit we visited as part of BRAIDS 2016. Tubular bands along the sides and cross-knit-loop stitching along the top are nice finishing techniques. The legs of the cross-knit-loop stitches completely cover the hem at the mouth of the pouch. The strap is braided ( a 4-strand round braid) and there is a simple snap closure in the center. The button, or rather, pendant, is just decorative.

I pulled out examples of my eye-pattern tubular bands used as edging so that I could photograph them for my book. I completely forgot this quirky piece that I wove some years ago. It lives with my travel bags as I only use it as slip-cover for my laptop when I am traveling. Hence , it was forgotten and didn’t make it into the book.

I made the circle shapes in ikat and then filled them in with pick-up patterning. The piece is edged with the tubular band as are the circles. My ikat circles which were quite round (I was very proud of them) got slightly flattened as I wove because silly me forgot to consider take-up!

I am very fond of this piece because of its quirkiness and the somewhat unconventional application of the techniques I have learned to do while living here in South America. I love that I have created something that can travel with me everywhere.

Knowing how to turn corners while attaching the tubular band is something that will open up even more possibilities for adding decorative finishes to bags and pouches. I have covered the various ways that the bands can be placed on these kinds of projects in the e-book and there is a tutorial and supplemental video clip on turning corners.

Now I am thinking….wouldn’t it be nice to have a laptop bag with a pocket for the cable….hmmmm.

Until next time I will leave you with a reminder of my new e-book….

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.