Tag: weft twining

Backstrap Weaving – What’s on the Other Side?

I have been looking at and thinking about what is on the “other side” of woven cloth and about the different attitudes of weavers from different cultures to what can be seen on the “wrong side” of the fabric. Some weaving structures are completely reversible as is the case of most complementary warp structures.

You can see both sides of my pebble weave piece at left and can probably appreciate that sometimes it is difficult to decide which side to make the “right” one as I had to in the case of this guitar strap when putting on the length adjustment buckle. As this is being sent to friend, I have actually left the decision up to her and only pinned the fabric in place around the buckle.
I always start with what I expect to be the right side facing me as I weave and find that sometimes I completely change my mind abut which side I like best once the piece is off the loom.

The wrong side of the weaving can also reveal just the information that is needed to be able to quickly identify the weaving structure.

For a while I was scratching my head over pictures of the yurt band that my friend Lisa had bought thinking it was pebble weave until she eventually sent me a picture of what was obviously its wrong side and I was then able to see that it had been woven using what I call simple warp floats.

At that time I didn’t much care for techniques that didn’t produce two “good” sides but who could resist trying to weave these gorgeous yurt band patterns?

Then it was a matter of getting the charting paper out, searching the net for more images of these bands and getting down to weave.

I must admit that lately I have gone a little crazy about this technique as I find more and more examples of its use in places like southern Iran, Mexico and tropical lowland Peru.

This weaving structure produces a definite right side. However, even though the wrong side with its exposed wefts looks nothing like the upper face, it can still be quite appealing depending on the color weft that you choose to use.
In the case of the yurt bands, only one side of the band is visible anyway when it is wrapped around a yurt. The piece I wove above right was made into a zippered purse and so no one needs to know what the inside of the purse looks like.

I am guessing that the day will come when there is a nasty spill on one of the place mats pictured above left and that I will be wishing that I could just flip it over and have the same design on the other side…oh well.

I might mention here that I just received my copy of The Journal for Weavers. Spinners and Dyers from the UK which has a beautiful article on  Kyrgyz textiles by Stephanie Bunn which includes yurt bands made in this kermé technique. She quotes a Kyrgzy person who says “Kyrgyz weavers are all mathematicians”. Bunn  then goes on to say “I found that trying to make the rhythmic pattern of kermé was the kind of experience that made me want to weep, although time improved matters.” You can read that article here.

I am infinitely grateful that I was taught the base of this technique by my wonderfully patient weaving teachers in coastal Ecuador and so taking the next step to  kermé was relatively easy.
The two pieces if weaving below have been woven in another technique with the same basic warp manipulations but their “back” sides are vastly different…


The motif above right is a smaller version of one of the Bedouin motifs on the belt above left.

The belt has been woven in warp-faced double weave and so the motifs are exactly the same on both faces with their colors reversed.

Unfortunately both sides will never be appreciated as only one face is ever seen! I wove this in double weave as this technique produces something sturdy enough to be used as a belt.

The camera strap I wove at left makes better use of this technique and I didn’t have to decide which face to make the “right” one.

Now look at the back of the piece above right which I show below…

This piece has been woven using the simple warp substitution technique which produces as you can see long floats. Most people do not have a good reaction to these long floats. I have to admit that I am not a big fan of them but it depends on your intended use for the piece. If this band were mounted on webbing, for example, it would make a good strap for a camera or a belt and it is a very simple weaving technique.

And this is where people in different cultures see things in different ways. While we may wrinkle our noses at the excessively long floats, the Bedouin people use this technique to weave motifs into very large pieces of fabric that are used as tent dividers. Both sides of the fabric are seen (although I have read that they are hung so that the  “right” side faces the men’s living area). They are not pieces of fabric that are being continually handled and so I guess that the long floats are not impractical.

You can see the very long warp floats on the back of the Bedouin piece that Tracy in Qatar sent me. Some of the warps have even broken through age or use….hard to say which. What I do love about these particular long floats is that I get to really handle and examine the Bedouin handspun wool.

And then what about all the different kinds of supplementary weft techniques? I have only just scratched the very surface in this having learned the inlay technique on warp-faced fabrics which produces a single face of pattern and a double faced technique from Guatemala .

The double-faced technique can be seen above left on a Guatemalan weaving. This particular technique, as far as I know, is unique to San Antonio Aguas Calientes. My reproduction on the right was glued down onto the cover of my notebook in which I documented the technique so the other equally pretty face cannot be seen!

Even the weavers in Guatemala don’t get to show off the other face as they use this technique largely on their huipiles (blouses) alongside single-faced techniques.

Small babies’ caps are also made with fabric woven using only this double-faced method.

This hair sash from Jacaltenango was woven with a supplementary weft technique that produces two equally beautiful faces.

Sometimes the back of a piece patterned with supplementary wefts is left with small weft tails hanging…

They can be a merry mess while the piece is in progress…

Or they can be cut right off and hidden entirely within the sheds so one would never know by looking at the back of the cloth that the other side was a riot of supplementary weft pattern. Look at the plain red back and colorful front of this hair sash from Aguacatan…

Look how much pattern weft material is used in those tassels!

When the weft patterning is particularly profuse the resulting weft tails on the back can be quite a sight! This is an old piece of huipil from, I was told, Chichcastenango. Many years of laundering have created quite a tangle of weft ends on the back. This is all quite acceptable to the Guatemalan weavers.

I was very much taken with the following Guatemalan belt that Teyacapan has on her Flickr page and asked her to photograph the back so I could see how the pattern had been worked.

I love the blocks of pattern that the weaver has used! As I was saying in last week’s post, the supplementary weft pattern does not have to be worked on a blank canvas. It looks like this weaver has worked her weft pattern on tiny strips of fine warp float designs.

How is this for a canvas for supplementary weft patterns?

These pieces are from the areas of Nebaj and Cajul in Guatemala and again show how one face of the fabric can be completely different to the other. You can choose to show your bright stripes one day (free of any weft ends) or birds flitting about the corn plants another.

Some weavers actually work doing their supplementary weft patterns with the wrong side of the fabric facing up.

I got to visit Burmese weaver Dar Ku on my last visit to the US. She was happy to demonstrate for me while giggling and saying “It’s easy, it’s easy”. Her beat is surprisingly light and she does indeed make it look easy. Of course we all know not to fall into that trap! What fun to turn the piece over and see the right side with its neat patterns.

Franco shared a video of Lahu weavers from Thailand weaving supplementary weft patterns into tremendously long warp-faced pieces. The weaver is using a single-faced technique laying the supplementary wefts from edge to edge within the pattern sheds controlled by heddles and pattern sticks.

Here is another nice video of supplementary weft patterning from Acatenango Guatemala…one of the many videos that Red Corn Tours posts to its Facebook page every week. I watched this happily while asking myself “What’s on the other side?” and then the videographer, good chap, filmed from under the loom and I got to see the other side. What happy colors!

This is what has caught my attention most recently. I fished this out from the hundreds of photos I took on my US trip last spring when I got to photograph some gorgeous textiles from Bhutan in the collection of Betty Davenport.

I wove some motifs from one of the pieces into one of my more recent projects and now I have my eye on doing something like these zippered purses which Betty made from her samples using patterning techniques from Bhutan.

The supplementary weft pattern has been worked on a twill (on the left) and balanced plain weave (on the right) ground. Aren’t these pieces striking? There has been some talk of twills in our Ravelry backstrap weaving group which is what turned my mind to this project…that and my recent dabbling in supplementary weft patterns on interesting ‘canvases”. What’s on the other side? I don’t know…I didn’t think to look!

I wove a small twill sample a long time ago on my backstrap loom.

I don’t know a whole lot about non-warp-faced weaves (but I am slowly learning!) and so I just looked at a picture of a twill  in my copy of Irene Emery’s Primary Structure of Fabrics and set up my loom with three sets of string heddles and a shed rod holding the warps in the four sheds. I am not sure if I got the sett right…it was all guess work.

Not having any kind of reed to use at that time, I spaced the warps by lashing between them on the loom bar. It worked well for this small sample using #3 crochet cotton for both warp and weft. I had just read a discussion on Weavolution about the use of floating selvedges and so decided to try one of those too. And, as usual, I used the tiny sample  as a business card pouch. I learned a lot!

Another one of these non-warp-faced weaves that I find quite easy to handle on the backstrap loom without the use of a reed is finnweave. It behaves well enough for me. I have had the benefit now of seeing ”in person” the Huichol bags woven in this technique in the collections of two of my friends in the US so I know what I need to be striving for.

This is 10″ wide and is one of the storage bags I planned to make this month. Having used up pretty much all my black thread on some unexpected distractions, I chose blue and yellow for this project instead of the planned black and white. The designs are taken from Huichol and Otomi bags and belts. The flower design is actually taken from traditional Scandinavian finnweave pieces. The Otomi use a motif  that is so very similar but I prefer the Scandinavian version.

I am using three sets of string heddles and a shed rod to hold the fourth shed. And what’s on the other side, you ask? This technique I am doing is not truly reversible. You could get away with showing certain motifs on both sides. They wouldn’t be mirror images but they would look okay. However, the patterns I have chosen are not really amongst those.

Now here is the other project about which I am CHOCHA!! (chocha is used here in Bolivia and Argentina to mean “exceedingly pleased”!). I guess a lot of the pleasure comes from the fact that I am not skilled with a sewing needle, don’t own a machine and have never sewn anything from my handwovens larger than cell phone pouches and eye glass cases and a couple of very box-like shoulder bags.

I just love how this all started as an experiment in ikat design with no intention whatsover to end up with a bag. I was bored with weaving the plain black piece of fabric with its two ikat strips and so added some supplementary weft patterns…motifs from a weaving from Bhutan in Betty Davenport’s collection. Then I decided I wanted to do something with it and the bag idea developed. I wove a strap and then another piece of plain black fabric for the back and finally a small piece of plain black for the flap.

How wonderful is the backstrap loom for enabling me to weave up the small pieces to put this bag together with very little waste.

Jentide from the Ravelry Backstrap Weaving Group showed us how she made a flat bottom for her tote bag and so I used that sewing technique and Amber had created a button hole in one of her bags so I did the same by separating the warp in the middle and weaving with two wefts. I wove a small supplementary weft motif on either side of the button hole.

I cut and shaped the flap edging it with a tubular band to cover the raw edge. The bag is still missing a zip. Zips are nice for the way they can hide raw edges.

However, I turned the fabric sideways to sew this latest bag and so have two nice clean selvedges at the top.

And if you haven’t seen enough black yet, here is the other thing that I am still working on…

Here is the supplementary weft pattern on its “spotty” canvas that I wrote about in detail last week. I added some weft twining in the middle and am still working on the weft twining at either end. I have no immediate plans for this piece but am bound to come up with something to further test and hopefully extend my meager sewing skills.

Now I am planning a tote bag in bright Guatemalan style stripes….enough black, right?!

Some progress from the third week of our backstrap plain-weave Weave-Along…

Marsha has chosen fall colors to make a piece which she says reminds her of Halloween, Thanksgiving and candy corn. Amber is making a tote bag by sewing two of her backstrap woven panels together. It is gorgeously simple and beautifully woven.

Misskineta, our newest active member, has started her first ever warp-faced piece while Tracy, fresh back from her summer vacation has jumped straight back into the loom with a lovely balanced piece which I believe is already off the loom. Janet is making progress on the panels for her indigo-dyed shawl. Her picture collages tell the story…

I dug out all my textile photos from my spring trip to get the shots of Dar Ku and Betty’s purses to post here and now have a whole lot more images and ideas swirling! Let’s see what materializes….

Backstrap Weaving – Delightful Distractions

If all had gone to plan, I would have had one and a half storage bags done by now as part of my three-bag goal for the month of September. My black bag with the supplementary weft motifs from Bhutan should have been sewn and ready to stuff and hang and my Huichol design bag in finnweave should have been at least half woven.

However, some delightful distractions came my way and had me wandering off in other directions. That Worldwide Weaving Web that I am always talking about came a-knockin’ and the Band Weavers’ Grape Vine came a-tappin’.

At left you can see a band woven by JacQueline Teller on her inkle loom. You may remember that I recently posted a picture of a bag she had made by sewing several plain-weave inkle bands to canvas which we were using in our Weave-Along group for inspiration.

Annie MacHale (ASpinnerWeaver), queen of sashes, drew my attention to the band at left on JacQueline’s blog and, apart from the gorgeous multiple tones of blue and peach that she has used, I was fascinated by the fact that she had used spots in her warp to enhance her supplementary weft pattern.

Whenever I have started a supplementary weft patterned piece I have always created a blank canvas of single color weave on which to place my patterns. It never occurred to me that the canvas doesn’t necessarily need to be blank and that colors that have been incorporated into the warp can be used to supplement the inlaid weft patterns. JacQueline has used the light blue warp spots as part of her design and I love how she used the dark blue supplementary weft to create alternating color spots between the main motifs.

So, I wanted to play with this and, again, I just have to point out what a wonderful thing the backstrap loom is for making tiny samples.

The experiment grew from one column of warp dots to three and I found that when I made samples in black, a Sharpie was very handy for making adjustments to the pattern, blacking out unwanted exposed weft to get different effects.

The three columns of warp spots grew to three columns of three and after some applications of Sharpie to the black one, I decided on the design I liked for a bigger project.

So, this is what is on the loom at the moment…(speckled with fluff and stuff)….see what you started JacQueline? This is the black thread that I had just bought for my Huichol design bag!

I have just finished adding a band of weft twining and I will twine that same design along the beginning edge when I have finished weaving.

I think I will do a single large supplementary weft motif in the very center followed by another band of twining and then repeat the beginning. What is it going to be? I have no idea but it has been fun getting back into the weft twining. This is the first time I have done three colors together in one row of twining in #10 cotton. What to do with all those weft ends?…I will try to bunch them into a nice tassel as the Bedouin weavers do. You can read about how I learned the twining technique and watch a video of my teacher Ngach at work in this blog post.

Before the distractions completely took over my weaving week, I did manage to sew up my weave-along projects into little zippered purses.

And I wove the back panel of my black Bhutan/ikat bag before my new ball of black thread got swallowed up by the distraction. And that was when I got side tracked yet again by jentide’s weave-along project which you can see at left.

She made the fabric for this fabulous mini tote bag on her backstrap loom with the strap made on her inkle loom.

I love her stripe design but, apart from that, I am completely in awe of people who can sew. Of course I had to pester her with a bunch of questions about the construction of this bag and she pointed me to this wonderful web page where you can learn how to create a flat bottom for a bag.

This has had me pulling out the Reader’s Digest sewing book, that I had just about forgotten I owned, determined  to learn once and for all some basic sewing skills (without the aid of a sewing machine, that is)and pinning and folding and pulling my poor Bhutan bag into all shapes.

Here is its latest pinned form…

Meanwhile I am looking out for other suitable materials to use as supplementary weft. I have some gorgeous hand painted 10/2 tencel that my friend Lisa gave me that works beautifully and one skein goes a long way. Wool works well too as it fluffs out on the surface to give good coverage without “fattening” the shed in which it is laid.

And then I remembered the fine loosely plied and fluffy skeins of acrylic that I had bought in Guatemala.

What I would really like to do is make super fine supplementary weft pieces using sewing thread as the ground warp and weft just like the ladies do here in Bolivia to make their hat bands. Their supplementary wefts are acrylic and much the same as the Guatemalan thread that I have.

The fineness of the weave means that they can get away with having quite long weft floats.

I love how the wefts are often used to fill in the negative spaces and outline the motif in the ground weave rather than forming the motif itself.

The floats are particularly long when they do that and I have not been able to reproduce these ”negative space” designs  yet as my patterning material has been too heavy and would have resulted in long and cumbersome floats. I have not yet reproduced any of the pretty Bolivian hat band designs.

One more thing I did this week was to experiment with the traditional Bedouin al’ouerjan patterns using non- traditional colors. The most common color combination I have seen is black, red and white.

Can you tell that black, terracotta and yellow is my current favorite color combination?

This warp substitution technique produces long floats on the back of the fabric which are not so bad in #10 cotton.

It is interesting to look at the many different variations of this design to see which one produces the shortest floats.

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I will finish with this week’s Weave-Along round-up…

Peg is weaving on a backstrap loom for the first time ever and using Plymouth Yarn Fantasy Naturale mercerized cotton which I think is just perfect for first projects. See how quickly she has tamed that warped and how much she learned about laying in the weft and controlling the edges in such a short space. That yarn is so pretty. I have never woven anything with these multi-color type yarns. On the right, Janet has warped colorful stripes inspired by a piece of Guatemalan fabric that she has.

Dyggvi turned her narrow striped band into a neat zippered pouch and gave us the link to the instructions. Sylvie in France posted a picture of the making of her continuous string heddles on a gorgeous bright striped warp.

Jennifer’s homespun piece is under construction and Karri, who just completed her third ever backstrap woven piece is casting her critical eye over everything she produces and learning lots of lessons. We think her third project looks wonderful.

Both Amber and Marsha continue to turn out consistently straight, smooth, beautiful and useful pieces. Amber’s piece is one of two that will be sewn together to make a seat cushion. Marsha has hung her piece on a section of twisted vine. She has plans to modify it for its ultimate use. We’ll see about that next week.


Jennifer has taken the leap from homespun wool in natural colors to wild cotton stripes while Yonat, outside the weave-along, has been experimenting with those eye bending alternating warp float patterns.

Phew, quite a job winding all those colors! Many of us have come to know the “fun” of adding in all those strips of colors on the warping board and the special challenge all that cutting and tying makes for creating even tension. “Perfect” tension is something we all strive for and I think that we all come up with clever ways to somehow compensate for uneven tension once the warp is on the loom long before we are able to create that perfectly tensioned warp on the warping board. Unfortunately uneven tension will show up immediately in warp-faced plain weave in the form of ridging and cotton is particularly unforgiving.

All we can do is make sure that our warping stakes are firm and sturdy and then just practice, practice, practice. Some days are good warping days and some not!

Ridging will turn up unexpectedly and most annoyingly in a piece I am working on and I have found that a worn out hole and a leaning stake on my mini warping board has been the culprit on quite a few occasions. Cranking up the edge warps too tightly caused the particular ridging problem in the piece pictured at left.

Fortunately the ridging shows up in plain weave and not in float patterning which is what I mostly do.  On the other hand, I know people who actually like the effect of the ridging. It’s a pesky and temperamental phenomena! I tried to weave a band specially for this blog post to show the ridging that results from crammed warps. The darn thing refused to ridge!

I suppose we could always do as my Montagnard weaving teacher, Ju Nie, does…

Many Montagnard pieces are woven with a multitude of fine stripes. Ju Nie joins the colors on the warping stakes with slip knots and then, once the warp is on the loom, she unties each and very knot, adjusts the tension and reties. It is not tedious for her. This is the way she was taught to do it and her large pieces woven in that “unforgiving” cotton are perfect!

Oh, and one more distraction to speak of before I go…one of my online friends just came back from Mexico where she bought a Huichol woven bag and is going to send me pictures. So, I am thinking it is just as well I didn’t get my bag project underway as her pictures are bound to have me changing my design plans. Thank goodness for those delightful distractions!

Backstrap Weaving – Prototypes, Samples and Keepers


It’s been a week of bits and pieces…trying out new patterns, practicing new techniques, making width samples and prototypes and then putting everything together into something I can keep and use.

Cochabamba and my teacher Maxima seem far away now as I sit here in shorts with the temperature and humidity rising. Only two nights ago I had the down sleeping bag on the bed. It makes me yearn for the “eternal spring” weather of the Cochabamba valleys but, then again, today I walked outside to the street and bought big glorious golden dripping slices of pineapple, saw tiny green mangoes up high in the trees and realized that the markets will soon be brimming with the tangy achachairú. I read recently that this fruit is now being grown in tropical areas of Australia with its name changed to the more manageable achacha.

This week I tried out a supplementary warp design that was on a bag at the PAZA stand in Cochabamba. This piece had not been woven by Maxima who seems to specialize in pebble weave. I hadn’t even noticed the pattern when I was there. It was, as usual, a bit of a case of information overload…a very intense three days of weaving, sights, colors and sounds.

It is fun for me now to slowly review the videos I had taken of Maxima weaving and listen to the birdsong and the melodies made famous by the Cochabamba band Kjarkas playing in the background…details that were obscured by my concentration on all that Maxima was teaching me. For that reason I did not see the lovely supplementary warp design until I came home and went through my photos.

You can just see the design on the bag on the ground in the picture above left. Supplementary warp is not one of my favorite techniques and I guess that is why I had not paid much attention to it but I was quite struck by the pattern when I got home and had time to examine my pictures. If I had run across this design on the internet I would never have thought that it was Andean.

I wove it into a small piece which I sewed into an eye glass case and then used it as an opportunity to practice a tubular band in pebble weave. Not wanting to complicate things too much, I just did plain pebble weave (that is, a pebbled background with no motif) for this band setting up the warp as I was taught in Peru and thus avoiding having to do any pick-up.

Maxima’s way of doing pebble weave would have her picking up threads even for a plain pebble band. The advantage of her method is that it can be worked more easily using just finger tension rather than having the band attached to the body by way of a backstrap. No doubt I will discover other advantages as I delve further into her method.

Here is the chart for the supplementary warp design if you would like to try it yourself. I have no idea if there is a standard way for charting these supplementary warp designs but this way works for me. I have also started a new page here where I will put charts for designs in this technique.

I have not done a tutorial on this pick-up method as there are plenty of good resources out there already. I believe that most inkle weaving books include it and Sue Foulkes recently did an online workshop in the Yahoo braids_and_bands group on Sami band weaving which uses the same technique.

If you would prefer to have a “real live” teacher with whom you can interact, Daryl Lancaster will be teaching an online class on this pick-up method for inkle loom weavers on Weavolution. Check out the details here.


You can just see the pebbles on the tubular band in the picture above.

So,  this particular sample found a use. I would like to weave this design again having the pattern extend right to the edge of the dark blue section. I think that would look even nicer.

This meant that two of my three pairs of glasses were nicely accommodated in woven pouches. I had made an eye glass case from a discontinuous warp experiment many months ago. I figured that I may as well make the third one which would give me a chance to try out another experiment.

I wanted to make a pouch taking advantage of the fact that weaving a warp-faced double weave piece that doesn’t have motifs woven into it will create a tube. This meant that I could weave the front and back of the pouch simultaneously as two layers of cloth joined at the edges…..”instant pouch”!

It’s no big deal really! All this meant is that I would be saving a bit of seam sewing but I thought it would be fun to see what I could do with this. The tube, of course, is beautifully seamless! You can see, above left, a little sample I made a few weeks ago with some left over warp. There is no motif in that piece and so what I have created is two layers of cloth joined at the edges…a tube.

I sealed the bottom of the tube by weaving a pattern of triangles. Weaving motifs is what bonds the two layers in warp-faced double weave.

Although there was no need to do so, I decided to try to weave the triangles up the sides as well but soon discovered that the difference in take-up between the patterned and plain areas was considerable and that I would not be able to continue with that.

So I threw in a couple of supplementary weft figures woven in one of the ways I was taught in Guatemala with the turns of the weft outlining the motif. Then I just managed to get away with squeezing in three more triangles to balance things out. I was really just making it all up as I went…not like me at all!

I created another row of triangles at the top with a supplementary weft (next time I will put the weft turns on the inside of the tube so they won’t be seen). I couldn’t weave them in double weave as they would have sealed up my tube. Finally, I twined along the bottom to secure the weft and then I cut a fringe.

Probably the most fun part was creating the “flex” closure and I have my online weaving buddy Bobbie to thank for that.

When I met her in Portland last year, she showed me a bag made by a friend in which a closure had been created using pieces of an old tape measure. You probably know this kind of closure….you squeeze the sides of the bag and the top pops open. I am trying to show that in the picture above left.

My boyfriend patiently dismantled our tape measure, cut off a length from the inside end, wound the tape back up and put the case back together. No harm done. We didn’t need all ten feet!

I cut two pieces of the tape a little shorter than the width of my pouch. I then cut them down to about two thirds of their original width and rounded the ends. I turned down the top edges of the pouch and sewed them with the lengths of tape within and yes, it works! Above you can see a picture of a commercially available and far more sophisticated version and one of our Ravelry group members provided this link to various sources of these “flex frames”.

That was another experiment that can be used. Nevertheless I think I will make another taking into account lessons learned and with much more planning in the design.

I resisted starting on that straight away as I had another idea bouncing around and so, this is a prototype for a new set of mug rugs that I would like to make…seen here dappled with sunlight…

Actually the prototype turned out pretty well and so it may be a keeper.

I edged my little 4 x 4 1/2″ piece with a tubular ñawi awapa. I am thinking of mounting the mug rugs on cork as the reverse color combination on the back doesn’t really work alongside the other colors in the tubular edging.

The cork will also serve to hide the raw end of the tubular band.

It was so nice being able to sit beside Maxima in Cochabamba last week and weave tubular bands. I had already learned how to weave and sew them but mostly through various brief observations of indigenous weavers over the years as well as through a large group class I took at the Tinkuy last year.

It was wonderful being able to have this one-on-one experience and watch how Maxima held her work, placed her sewing needle and tensioned the warp, smoothly coordinating all the moves. I was so absorbed that the sewing part was the one part of my instruction that I completely neglected to video or photograph! (although you can see a Bolivian and Peruvian weaver doing so in my videos here).

However, I did take video of many other things and have put some bits and pieces together for this post.

This first clip shows Maxima using her spindle to put extra twist into some plied yarn so that we would be able to weave with it.

I had been complaining during the Tour de Fleece of an aching thumb which developed from the way I was turning my spindle for plying. I really need to practice the Andean way of setting the spindle in motion for plying or respinning commercial yarn.

Maxima tied for first place with a Peruvian lady in the speed spinning contest which was held one night during the Tinkuy de Tejedores in Urubamba, Peru last year. The two ladies spun over six meters in two minutes.

The various segments in the next video show the stages of setting up a warp for weaving. Maxima winds a warp using her finger and big toe as warping stakes. You can see her winding two colors together with which she will pick her designs and then the final single edge warps. After tucking the end of the warp into her waist band she rearranges the warp cross separating the two colors into different sheds. Then she makes her heddles.

This final piece of video shows how Maxima opens her sheds and then forms a picking cross from which she selects the colored warps for her pattern. Not a stick in sight!!

If you would like to hear more of the music that can be faintly heard in the background of some of the video segments, check out this powerful live version of Wayayay by Kjarkas.

Before we leave Cochabamba, I would like to pass on Dorinda’s thanks to all those who visited the PAZA blog last week some of whom helped out with donations. Postscript: I see that Dorinda has just posted a thank you note on the PAZA site.

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The Ravelry Backstrap Group Weave-Along starts next week. We have a good bunch of people all ready to go. I am especially happy to see an old online weaving buddy Franco joining in.

Sharon aka Fiberaholic1 wove a bunch of 8-rev patterns from my Andean Pebble Weave book and did a beautiful job but this is a pre weave-along project as there will be no pick-up patterning in this latest weave-along. We are going to play with stripes and color.

And here are some more pieces to inspire our Weave-Alongers….my online weaving friend Caroline, in Australia, sent me this picture of a striped and ikat patterned textile from East Timor and JaQueline Keller on Weavolution allowed me to show her cheery bag made by sewing several plain-weave inkle bands, made with yarns of various weights, onto canvas. Such wonderful things can be made with plain warp-faced weaving!

And to finish I was just given this link from a Ravelry member to a book by Mirja Wark of The Netherlands about the weaving of a special belt called the si’ira  by the Wayuu people of Colombia and Venezuela. Colombia seems to be making its way bit by bit into my life…a little contact, a little information from here and there. I wonder where all this may lead?!

Backstrap Weaving – Sett and Match

In the mail this week…a book on “Tejido Huave” by Erica de Ruiter which is described as “Easy pick-up patterning on two, three or four shafts”.

I had quite recently seen images online of Mexican Huave textiles decorated with supplementary wefts and used a butterfly motif from one of them on a warp-faced sampler of inlaid brocade patterns.

I am interested in seeing the variations that Erica de Ruiter has developed using the Huave textiles as her inspiration.

It will be fun to play with more than three sheds on my backstrap loom and, to get into the swing of things, I set up my loom for a four-shed weave this week using three sets of string heddles, a shed rod and my lovely bamboo reed.

Finally this bamboo reed gets to do some real weaving with its new owner. I got two reeds like this at a stand selling textiles and weaving implements of Chinese minority groups at Convergence last year. My mind wanders off thinking about who may have been the previous owner/s of these reeds, what kinds of warp thread passed through their slots, what kind of weft they beat into place and the fabric they were used to produce.

I made a tiny sample a few weeks ago to see how suitable my thread was for the spacing of the slots and since then have been dithering over what kind of weaving I want to do. This reed is 23 dpi and I am using my #10 crochet cotton. I guess I am working backwards as one usually chooses their yarn, figures the sett for the desired technique and then uses the appropriate reed. I, on the other hand, have the reed and am figuring the rest out with that as my starting point.

You can see my tiny sample above. I wove just enough to be satisfied that my #10 crochet cotton works well in this reed. I was thrilled with how it looked after weft finishing.

I went ahead with a four-shaft, four-treadle shadow weave using a draft I found online. I made string heddles for the threads on the shafts for each of the treadles…three sets of continuous string heddles with threads for the fourth treadle held on a shed rod. So the threads for shafts 2 and 4 (treadle 1) went all together in one heddle and so on.

Of course the whole business is a lot more stable with this width. When I wove the tiny sample it was very awkward handling the wide reed on the narrow warp. The reed sits up  nicely on this wider piece and it is really quite a comfortable set-up.

I mis-counted in the sequence at the start before things really got underway. Now I am really enjoying this!

I don’t care for the edges and have yet to find a good way to turn the two wefts. I warped two ends of double- stranded black thinking that that might make a good edge…well, not so much!

This has been all about the process so I had no thoughts at all in the planning stage about what this piece might end up being. I only wound a one-yard warp and now I am thinking that I might use it as lining for a bag.

It is odd for me having to wait to wet-finish this piece to see what it will really look like. In the kind of warp-faced weaving that I do, what you see on the loom is what you get. I am really impatient to get this off the loom, wash it and see the final product but, at the same time I am really enjoying weaving it…just raising heddles and passing wefts…such a change not doing any pick-up!

Two very different projects on the loom this week. One was all about matching designs and the other about yarn and sett for shadow weave…sett and match!

The other weaving I did this week did involve pick-up. I made a set of mug rugs in double weave to match the patterns on the four place mats I recently finished.

The patterns on the place mats were woven with simple warp floats and I tried to include elements of the various motifs in the matching double weave mug rugs.


I used weft twining on the edges of the mug rugs to match the finish of the place mats which also allowed me to incorporate the third color as each place mat had been woven in three colors.

The “Worldwide Weaving Web” has brought all these wonderful patterns into my home which I have seen mostly in images online.  A wonderful book on Tejido Huave has come my way as a result of internet wanderings and a box of goodies arrived just today from an online weaving friend.

During the Tour de Fleece on Ravelry our Backstrap Weaving Group organized a fiber gift exchange and here is what I got from Bobbie…some suri alpaca fiber to spin…so soft!! and four balls of cotton for my backstrap weaving. The colors were dyed by Bobbie herself. After having met Bobbie online I actually did get to meet her in person when I was in Portland last May.

The rigid heddle segment was not in this box from Bobbie but came to me from another online friend who I haven’t had the chance to meet yet in person…Sharon in Florida.

I have taken this heddle out in preparation for the Weave-Along that we are planning for the Backstrap Group starting at the beginning of September. (Read more about this in last week’s post.) It is a plain-weave Weave-Along in warp-faced or balanced-weave and some participants are going to use these bought plastic rigid heddle segments while others are making their own from sushi mats, popsicle sticks and plastic folders. Others are planning ikat designs, colorful stripes and horizontal bars for their warp-faced pieces.

Home made reed and rigid heddle by Dyggvi and Janet.

We have found some good sources online for the heddle segments for those who would like to do narrow weavings. Some people are going to use the heddles that came with their rigid heddle looms. Janet is planning a 24″ wide shawl.

The segments can be found here and here (this link was provided by Traudi) and Joanne from Glimakra gave us information about all the heddles that they have available including some beautiful traditional-style wooden ones for band weaving with handles.

And if these gifts aren’t enough from the “Worldwide Weaving Web”, a real live person arrived from the other side of the world…all the way from Doha, Qatar! Fellow Ravelry member Berta aka mountainbird is traveling across South America on her vacation away from the temperatures in the high forties (Celcius) that are typical in her part of the world at this time of year. She is Canadian but has been living in Qatar teaching English for eleven years.

Berta is friends with Tracy who is a Backstrap Weaving Group member and who has been learning to weave Bedouin-style textiles in Qatar and sharing her findings with us in the group. She sent me this wonderful piece of Bedouin weaving with Berta…

This fabric is part of a tent divider which has been cut up to make a bag. The black and white pattern has been woven using warp substitution technique as has the grey and orange “molar” design. You can also see small segments of weft twining which is what brought me to study these textiles in the first place.

I had learned weft twining with the Montagnard (Vietnamese hilltribe) weavers in North Carolina and google searches on the subject led me to fantastic images of Bedouin weaving which I was able to reproduce being already familiar with the warp substitution and twining techniques.

And now many months down the track I am holding a genuine piece of this weaving, a beautiful gift from Tracy all the way from Qatar…what a thrill. I was aware that the yarn used in the traditional pieces is quite heavy but didn’t appreciate how thick it actually is until now. I can now imagine just how terribly heavy a full tent divider must be in this yarn.

There is something so very wonderful about the coarseness and chunkiness of this piece not to mention the gorgeous wool aroma…definitely constructed to withstand some harsh elements

My reproduction piece below in the #10 cotton just doesn’t seem right at all!!


I had a fun couple of days with Berta who, in true Ravelry style, arrived with yarn and knitting in hand with a couple of pairs of socks already finished.

She is overlanding from Lima to Buenos Aires…many many bus hours in which to knit!

We spent August 6th together and invited an Australian girl from Berta’s hostel (home of Simon the toucan) to join us so we had an Argentinean, two Australians and a Canadian celebrating Bolivian Independence Day in a Brazilian restaurant!

Now she is on her way to Iguazu Falls on the border of Brazil and Argentina.

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To finish this week, I have put together some pictures and video for what will be the start of a new page on intermediate-level techniques and I wanted to start with a short explanation of what is meant by “complementary warp pick-up”. You will probably run into this term when you read about warp-faced backstrap weaving. Andean pebble weave is just one of the techniques that falls into this category.

The idea here is not to teach you a specific weaving technique but simply to show you how the weavers pick up the warps to form their patterns when weaving a complementary warp method. Irene Emery defines complementary weaves as those where “two sets of elements play equivalent and reciprocal parts on opposite faces of the fabric,”….

This creates a double-faced fabric. The design on one face of the fabric is mirrored on the other face with its colors reversed as in the pebble weave example below.

When weaving a complementary warp technique, the warps are generally arranged in two sheds with the colors separated as seen above. The warps in one color will go into string heddles and the other color will be controlled by a shed rod. In the example above, each black warp has a red partner. One black warp together with its red partner is called a complementary pair. In the example, the black warp sits on the right of its red partner. I have separated two complementary pairs from the rest of the warps so you can see how they lie.

Weavings like these Jalq’a textiles above from Potolo, Bolivia have been woven in a complementary warp technique using red and black threads on a warp that would have looked like my examples above. You can see that the faces of the textiles show red figures on a black background. The back of the textile will show the same figures except that they will be black on a red background.

The pick-up is done with the aid of the cross. The cross keeps the warps in strict order so that the weaver knows which warps are complementary pairs. If the weaver wants black to show on the upper face of her weaving she will pick up the black and drop its red partner. The dropped red will show on the back of the textile.

The way weavers choose to form the cross and carry out the pick-up varies greatly from region to region. There is no one correct way to do it.

Above you can see two weavers from Potolo with their red and black weavings. The first weaver has created a ”picking cross” down at the weaving line. She has a stick under all the red warps and has opened up the shed with all the black warps. From this cross she will select the warps she needs for her pattern. When she picks a red she will drop its black partner and vice versa. Like this, she will create a shed of red and black warps through which she will pass the weft.

The weaver on the right is doing likewise except that she has inserted a stick under the black warps and has opened the shed with the reds. From this “picking cross” she will select the warps for her design.

Both weavers are using sticks to pick up the warps.

This weaver from Tinkipaya, Bolivia uses her hands to pick and drop the warps for her design. Her weaving has bands of many colors. She has a permanent cross in her warp. You can probably just make it out in the picture. Two cords are holding her cross rather than sticks. She is working her way across the warp picking the color from one side of the cross which she wants to have showing on the front of the weaving and dropping the complementary partner in the other color which will show on the back of the weaving.

This is the way I was taught to do pebble weave in one region of Peru….picking from a permanent cross with my hands. The pick-up method varies from region to region.

Here is a video that I made showing the theory of complementary warp pick-up. This is how I pick one pattern shed of red and black warps through which I will pass the weft to form my design.

Here are several video clips of Bolivian weavers from Potolo,  Isoso, Tarabuco and Tinkipaya doing complementary warp pick-up. See the hundreds of threads they are working with and see how fast they go! The first weaver you will recognize from Potolo, followed by a Guaraní weaver from Isoso, a lady from Tarabuco and one from Tinkipaya.

The second weaver in this video is my Guaraní weaving teacher here in Santa Cruz. The Guaraní weavers have their own very special way of doing the pick-up and are the only ones I have seen who don’t pick from a cross when doing complementary warp pick-up. Angela has her two colors, brown and white, separated into two sets of string heddles and simply pulls on the appropriate heddle when she needs a color. Somehow she manages to keep her complementary pairs in order and doesn’t mix up or cross the threads!

Well, I hope that these videos and explanations have been interesting for you. Those who have my Andean Pebble Weave book may like to see the theory of the pick-up I am describing therein with step-by-step pictures, in action here in my video. Note that none of the weavers in these videos are doing pebble weave. Pebble weave is just one of several techniques that fall into this complementary warp category.

I am off to the highlands tomorrow for some weaving lessons and will be meeting up with my Tinkuy roomies Dorinda and Maxima and seeing a bit of the Virgen de Urkupiña festival. I’ll be back next week with some new weaving knowledge and hopefully lots of pictures to share.

Backstrap Weaving – Oh, Those Sticky, Sticky Sheds.

Oh, those sticky, sticky sheds.

I am sure you all know what I am talking about if you have done warp-faced weaving with fiber like wool, llama or alpaca. I have not been heavily over-twisting my hand spun yarn and the advantage of that is a nice soft fabric but the disadvantage is hairy warps which make clearing the sheds a bit more challenging.

And it is not only the woolly stuff that can create this sticky problem. When I get into wide-ish warps with fine cotton, there is also a certain resistance, created by all those warps rubbing up closely against each other, to deal with too.  I had to apply a few different strategies to get the sheds to open on the warp pictured above.

So, this week I made a very short video on the “strumming” that I employ to help open the shed rod shed.

I am quite gentle with my strumming and just use my fingers for this width of warp.

After my video segment I have added a short clip of Felicia in Candelaria using the tip of her wooden tool to strum the warps on her oblique loom. When I start working on wider warps, I will need to use my wichuña (llama bone tool) to strum. For now I just like to use the ready-made tools that I have quite literally “on hand”.

I have added this video to the FAQ page on this topic. That page already has a video I made showing how to open the heddle shed on wide and/or sticky warps. Hopefully these tips will help you to create clean sheds without any kind of heddle wrestling and the pilling and possible warp breaks that that can cause.

I also added another thing to the FAQ pages behind the scenes in response to people who were having trouble rolling up their warps. There is an FAQ page here on my blog showing how to roll up your weaving as you advance so that you can always be in easy reach of the heddles and weaving line. The method I show is dependent on two things: the second stick which you use to roll up the weaving needs to be of similar girth to the loom bar and the cords on your backstrap loom need to be chunky.

However, some people just use string or twine for their backstrap cords and so I have put together some step-by-step pictures for another, and far more common, way to roll up the warp. You can see that here.

You may be wondering about this green apple and eggplant warp that keeps appearing in this post. That is the second place mat in the set of four that I am making.

The design is based on what I am assuming was a Mexican belt that I was shown when I was traveling in the US recently. The belt was also made in purple, green and white but the tones of purple and green were completely different to those I used and were subdued and worn with age. I used the same two-color alternating warp float technique. It all looks very pebbly but it isn’t pebble weave. This is not a complementary warp structure.

What I particularly liked about the Mexican belt was the weaver’s use of supplementary weft along with the warp floats to introduce a third color. Some of the supplementary wefts had in fact deteriorated thus exposing parts of the horizontal bars and I liked the way this looked and so incorporated a little of all these features in this place mat design.

So, these two are part of a set. The first was influenced by Shipibo design of Peru. Could they be any more different?! I am looking forward to seeing a table with my four colorful and vastly different place mats and I am already planning the runner for the center. Actually, there are a few elements that tie these two pieces together. The pick-up technique in both is the same, that is, two-color alternating simple warp floats (or “warp floats galore” as I called it on my tutorials here). The little “X” design on the sides will be common to all as well as the weft-twined ends.

I have chosen the colors for the next one which are inspired by the culture from which I am taking its design…

I confess that I spent a lot more time at my loom this week than at the spindle. Maybe it’s because we have returned to our warm tropical splendor (although my Montagnard weaving teacher, Ju Nie, rolls up her warp for the summer and won’t touch it until cold winter weather once again keeps her indoors).

I did put in a bit of spinning everyday but have pretty much run out of colors in my Ashford prize package with which I would like to weave. Looks like I will need to do some dyeing which is always fun.

I don’t have access to this kind of prepared roving here in Santa Cruz and I really haven’t paid much attention to this stuff before.

I pulled out a strange blend of pink and brown from the package and was surprised to see the nice even kind of red that spinning it produced. Then there was an odd combination of what I am calling “Siamese cat brown” and “blankie blue” and that spun up into something rather nice too. Now you can see that I am into a straight yellow…a winner’s color in the Tour de Fleece. I can imagine combining all these colors in a piece.

The rest of the stuff in my bag will have to be dyed. As you may know, the Tour de Fleece is being run in conjunction with the Tour de France cycle race but there is very little interest in that over here when we have the Copa America in progress especially since I live with the Argentinean team’s number one fan.

I am very pleased about having woven this first Shipibo design in my place mat set as I would like to learn more about the textiles and the people who live in the lowland regions of South America and be able to show it all to you. Highland weaving, particularly that of the Cusco area, has been very well promoted and exposed to the world. It is a shame that not more is known by the general public about the textiles being produced by people in the lowland areas too.


Above are a few pieces I have made that have been influenced by textiles created by weavers living in the low-lying valleys, coastal regions or tropical interior of this continent.

These people include the Mapuche of central Chile and Argentina, the cotton weavers of coastal Ecuador, the Guarani of lowland Bolivia and the Huni Kuin, or Kene, of tropical lowland Brazil.

While I have used motifs of the Kene in my weavings, I have not used their technique and I give many thanks to Helena who introduced me to these people and their work.

Helena has woven pieces employing their techniques an example of which can be seen above. She also gave me a link to the following video showing the Kene at work.

I hope to be able to study one day with weavers of the Shipibo, Mapuche and other lowland cultures as I have with my weaving teachers here in lowland Bolivia and coastal Ecuador…thanks to Kathleen Klumpp who invited me to accompany her to Manabi province, Ecuador in 2007. And this is all just a tiny part of it.

And while I ponder the multitude of places  to see, weavers to meet and textiles to admire here in South America, where I have barely scratched the surface, I am forever grateful to have been able to meet and study with weavers from the other side of the planet like Ju Nie and Ngach from the highlands of Vietnam and Dar Ku of Myanmar.

Betsy Renfrew, who is working with backstrap weavers from various Vietnamese hilltribes who have now settled in the USA, has just put a new video on You Tube about the Montagnard weavers in her community in North Carolina.

Please take a moment to watch the video and I will also give you a glimpse here of Ju Nie and Ngach at work during my visits and the beautiful textiles that they now have the means and motivation to continue creating thanks to the work of people like Betsy. I also met Naomi Northrop of WRAP Weavers in Massachusetts who does similar work with weavers among communities of refugees from Myanmar.

And finally, here is Colleen’s (aka Pancha on Ravelry) daughter Kira Luna showing off “this key tool in her make-believe job as a fairy messenger”. Colleen wove the body of the messenger bag using the tutorial on a yurt band border in two-color warp floats and finished it with weft twining (I am so happy that folks are trying the weft twining!) The strap was woven in double weave with a Bolivian flower motif. How cute is this?! Maybe this fairy messenger will leave me a comment.