weft twining – Page 7 – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – In the Mood for Finnweave

I am back into fabulous Finnweave after a very long break.

I was trying to think back to when this Finnweave adventure all started and I believe it was in the early part of 2008. I wanted to try and reproduce the structure and motifs on some pre columbian textile fragments that I have which were woven in what Suzanne Baizerman calls balanced double cloth.

Here are some of the fragments that I have collected….

All these pieces were attached to Chancay doll replicas like the one you see above that I have bought in various markets here in South America. I wrote a lot more about these and other textile fragments in this previous blog post.

In Double Woven Treasures from Old Peru (by Adele Cahlander with Suzanne Baizerman) instructions are given for weaving this technique on a treadle loom rather than on a backstrap loom. I have had this book for over fifteen years and had always skimmed those instructions without paying much attention because I had never used or even touched a treadle loom and I assumed I would never be able to understand them. The notation and charts meant nothing to me. However, something made me go back in 2008 to open the book again at that page and take another look. Nope, nothing new had appeared… it all still looked like a mind numbing maze…so frustrating!

Who else did I know who knew about backstrap weaving and these kinds of structures who might have a clue? I had just made contact with Carol Ventura online through WARP. I had her book on Jacaltenango hair sashes and so I wrote to her. She hadn’t tried this particular structure herself, but she suggested I join a thing called Ravelry where there was a backstrap weaving group where I could ask. Ravelry? What in the world was that?!

I also wrote to Ann Rowe as I had met her on a trip to the Textile Museum in DC and she sent me a picture of a Huichol loom saying that I may be able to figure it out from that. The Huichol people of Mexico still weave this technique. It is no longer woven in Peru.

I don’t know what it was in the end that suddenly turned the light bulb on but the next time I went to the book…click!…and I was able to weave the above band. I have to say that the technique is not that difficult. You need to use three sets of string heddles and a shed rod which holds the warps for the fourth shed. That is not as bad as it sounds as it is a balanced weave which means that the heddles can be raised easily and cleanly. What I was having difficulty wrapping my head around was the charting system which takes some getting used to.

It is a technique for those who love pick-up. It uses two different colored wefts and has more steps than warp faced double weave…two weft passes for each layer… but I love the result!

So what happened? Where are all the lovely pre-columbian textile replicas that I had wanted to weave?

“Ravelry” is what happened! But even more importantly, I joined Weavolution, where I started my own backstrap weaving group, and was hit with a tsunami of weaving ideas!

Thanks to Ann Rowe I have two goals now for this structure… to reproduce the motifs on my fragments and to weave traditional Huichol patterns. Actually, the picture that Ann Rowe sent me was not my first encounter with Huichol weaving. It is a funny coincidence that back in 2007 while visiting the National Museum of the North American Indian in DC my eye was caught by a beautiful textile piece. I had no idea what the structure was and did not retain what the label had said but I roughly adapted the motif to pebble weave and used it in a hanging.

And again here…

Well, you probably have guessed that I now know that that is a Huichol weaving. That will be number one on my list of reproductions.

I was feeling uncomfortable by the end of 2008 about this abandoned project and so made it a resolution for 2009 and there it sat for another year as I wandered off on all sorts of weaving paths. Now I have returned but not with the pressure of a resolution weighing on me. I am simply in the mood for Finnweave! What put me there?….THIS!….

Last week Ane Lisbet posted the above image on Weavolution of a wall hanging she made in Finnweave using a floor loom. How beautiful!

And if that wasn’t enough I was inspired to return to a discussion we had had on Weavolution last year about Finnweave and was able to get reacquainted with this amazing piece at left woven by Manicgirl on a floor loom.

Hans Christensson also participated in that discussion and was very helpful. At that time he was taking part in a project to find new designs, usage and materials for Finnweave. The project concluded with an exhibition at the Museum of Bohuslan in Sweden and now I see that he has written a book on the future of Finnweave with his new computerized way of designing and interpreting patterns. He has plans to translate it to English.

I will have to be patient waiting for the translation. So, out came the instructions from Double Woven Treasures again, the pages now covered with my scribbled notes and, you know what?, it looked like a mind numbing maze all over again only messier this time with all my notes!

Back to square one. Well, not really. I warped up to make the same design as last time and after one repeat, remembered, and felt confident enough to move onto something else.

I wove it this time in a heavier yarn and it should be much wider. You can see that the brown areas are more warp predominant than balanced but it helped to refresh my memory and got cut off the loom very quickly.

Thanks to some kind Weavolution buddies I got an article from the Prairie Wool Companion April 1982 issue which introduced me to the wonderful world of weaver and author A. David Xenakis. His article is not a project, not a lesson, he calls it an “Etude”. I love this! Only the other day in one of the forums someone compared sampling to the scales one has to practice when learning the piano and so we can go back to the music lesson metaphor now. I love Mr Xenakis’s writing style…so very proper! He amuses me by saying please when he gives his instructions…please wind the warp…please wind two stick shuttles.

He shows the same charting system as that used by the authors of Double Woven Treasures from Old Peru. Thank goodness, I didn’t feel like learning another! After giving detailed instructions for one half of the motif, we are given this piece of advice…

Take a deep breath, stand up, pace around a bit and relax. Nothing in finnweave will ever be as hard as this first small woven figure. New things always take a bit, do they not? But if you’ll persevere, I truly believe you’ll be rewarded with a sense of accomplishment second to none you’ve ever derived from your weaving.

I am sure the folks in the backstrap weave-along on Ravelry will smile if they read that! The result…

He then gives pattern charts for some lovely traditional Scandinavian designs. So, I am doing my warm-up, my scales and my etudes for the final goal…finding myself comfortable enough with the charting system to be able to chart directly from a textile and reproduce the motifs. I need to experiment a bit with how I turn the two colored wefts at the edges. As always, one edge is neater than the other.

It wasn’t long ago that I knew of only one pick-up technique that enabled one to produce a motif on a solid color background, that is, a background without pebbles, speckles or horizontal bars and with no long floats on the back. Now I know three…

I also finished the warp faced double weave cell phone pouch with the Guarani designs…

And managed to twine most of another word…

There’s an “h” yet to be twined and that will be the Gaelic word for “weave”. I received the Navajo word from DY and the Slovak one from Alexis. This is the strap for my woven loom bag. I am planning the zipper pull. As I have a woven bag and a twined strap I am probably going to braid the zip pull…maybe I’ll do the Margarita braid.

I remembered after finishing Xenakis’s Etude that, on a whim, I had bought his book on weaving four harness textiles on a rigid heddle loom a long time ago. I had done nothing more than flip through it and admire the Finnweave cat on one of the first pages. Here, once more is the very proper writing style. I flipped through it again the other day and his amusing description of string heddles caught my eye. I am a big fan of string heddles. He is obviously not. He says…

“I find the sight of this stringy paraphenalia unappetizing.”

But he goes on to say that if you don’t have a third rigid heddle, you should use a string heddle “without hesitation and appetizing be damned.”

Cracks me up!

So, what’s been happening in the backstrap weave-along this week?

Warping arrangements have been designed and built…

This one was designed by Jennifer and built by her husband.

New places to tie up looms have been found and wool has been prepared…

Phil has moved to his sunny kitchen to weave and has spun a good amount of wool for his next project. He has placed a snake motif on his woven band using a supplementary weft.

New structures have been learned to make thicker, sturdier fabric and a backstrap has been made…

That’s Barry. He finished his backstrap with a five-strand braid.

Pieces were started and finished…

Marsha has started her widest piece ever on her Wave loom. Linda, who is not in the weave-along, has been sharing pictures of her projects with me by email (thanks Linda). She has finished her backstrap.

Jennifer also made a backstrap using a pebble weave motif from The Art of Bolivian Highland Weaving.

Jenny has been very much inspired by all the beautiful things that Marsha has been producing on her Mini Wave loom so, she ordered one and has just joined us to make her first warp faced project.

Another week of progress with encouragement from all when things went wrong…the reminder that mistakes are learning opportunities…the fun of seeing Anja’s “mistake” turn into a new pretty pattern.

I will leave you here with Mr Xenakis’s take on mistakes…(which comes in the middle of an explanation of tie-ups and sequences)…

Probably nothing is ever truly an error. …….it is worthwhile to note that an error – in the words of America’s premier knitter-designer Elizabeth Zimmerman – when repeated, becomes a pattern. Which, were we of a philosophical turn of mind, might be the key to whole new vistas of thought. Think about it: at the very least, the regular repetition of an error indicates persistence.

Your pardon, a freely associative mind hath led us astray.

I think that I will have to drag out my rigid heddle loom just so I can enjoy this author more!

Backstrap Weaving – A Little Product Amongst the Processes

I haven’t wandered off too much around the globe this week but people from around the world, via this blog, Facebook and my online weaving groups, did drop by to help me with my latest twining project…the strap for my proposed loom bag on which I am twining the word “weave” in different languages and fonts.

Here is where I am at so far…

And, if you are thinking that I haven’t advanced very far since last week, you are right! I am used to doing patterns on my backstrap woven pieces in pick up techniques…picking or dropping every single thread across the width of my warp and I don’t find that slow. However, I have to tell you that twining is SLOW! Reeaaaly slow! But, as you know, I am a process driven gal and what keeps me going on this project is the varying fonts. It is interesting to chart one and then see how it works out on the band. I have, in fact, finished the last word shown above which is “away” or “aguay” (I have seen it spelled both ways) which is the Quechua word for “weave” here in Bolivia.

The next word will be the Gaelic one, sent to me from a Facebook friend in Ireland. I am designing my own lettering form for this one….a cursive hand…and am a bit unsure about how it will look.

Here are the words I have …

Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed so far. I doubt that I will be able to fit all these in and so another project will have to be created. The next one will be in double weave and I will make it all my own lettering style. Double weave will be way faster. See how many languages you can identify. Someone remarked on Facebook that I could just use an online translator. True, but this is more fun. This way I will always remember the person who gave me the word and “carry” them around with me. 😉

While on this multi-lingual topic, I thought I would tell you that an online weaving friend in Germany took on the heavy task of translating my Andean Pebble Weave book to German. How cool is she, and how grateful am I?! I am in the process now of redoing the layout as it seems that German folk are more wordy than English speakers 😉 and hopefully that will be available soon as a pdf.

Amongst the processes, there are some real products emerging. The twined band above is going to be a strap for a loom bag which I am modeling on my camera tripod bag.

I discovered that this backstrap that I made ages ago with a 13wpi mercerized cotton, (the same stuff I used in the WeaveZine article), is exactly the right width for the front panel of the bag and so I was easily able to calculate how many warps I needed to get started on the body of the bag. I wanted to keep it relatively simple as the strap will be quite busy with all its woven words.

So, here it is…black with just a strip of pebble weave pattern down the middle. These are two of the 8-rev designs that I have in my Andean Pebble Weave book and they look gigantic in this 13wpi thread. What fun it was to weave this up in one sitting in this chunky-ish yarn!

A couple of shots on the loom…

I just managed to get the length I need from my standard 36″ warp. It is wonderful how little waste there is when using backstrap looms. I will make the other large panel and sides in plain black and will then edge it with a tubular band in black and white. There is also a zipper to go in.

Another product to show…yes this is something that I will keep and use myself…

I finished my double weave belt with the Bedouin designs. I had to get an extra wide buckle for it and there weren’t many choices. Fortunately there is a market stall, just down the street from where I live, called “Hebilandia” or, “Buckle Land”! (hebilla being the Spanish word for buckle). Who knew there were so many people out there in want of buckles! The three belts on the left and the one bottom right are patterned in pebble weave. The other one has a design in simple alternating warp floats.

And the final product and my favorite for the week is my cell phone pouch. Yes, my cell phone pouch – not to be given away or traded.

I finally own a cell phone but it is not for use here in Bolivia. I am happier having my answering machine take the calls here. The cell phone was actually given to me by a friend in the US for use there. As I travel on standby tickets, I really need one in order to let folks know if I have gotten on my flight and am about to arrive. No more begging kind strangers for change for the pay phone or to use their cell phone.

I modeled my cell phone pouch on that made by Guarani weaver, Angela. I bought two of her pouches some time ago, gave one to a friend in the US, and am saving the other for my friend Lisa.

That’s mine above left modeled on Angela’s blue and black one. It is woven in the technique that the Guarnai weavers call Moisy which produces quite a dense fabric.

You may remember that this was the sample piece that I had made to see if I understood what Angela had shown me. I copied her designs with some adaptations, for example, I rounded the flower head and used one of her leaf designs as a butterfly. Angela’s patterns reflect the abundance of lush vegetation here in the Bolivian lowlands. The designs that the Guarani women use on their Moisy pieces are not like any you will see elsewhere in Bolivia. You can read more about my visits with Angela here and here.

Angela had finished her pouch with a plain band which she had woven and sewn simultaneously to the edges using the weft as the sewing thread. I did the same except I used this edging only around the flap. You can see the band with its heddles and shed loop above left. Then came the scary part…

I really loved the shaped flap that Angela had created but couldn’t bring myself to cut the fabric. I was imagining the whole thing fraying away in a jagged mess while I tried to sew on the band and that is precisely what started to happen.

So I sealed all the way around the cut with diluted white glue, waited for it to dry and that did the trick. I will never make a cell phone pouch with a square flap again! This was fun!

I also copied her idea of making a striped band for the sides and strap. A tab of velcro for the flap finished it off.

Something else that has made me smile this week has been following the Weave Along in the Backstrap Weaving Group on Ravelry. There is a lot of enthusiastic participation and sharing, cheers and, sometimes, commiserations. People have been having their successes and frustrations and I think that everyone pretty much agrees that “baby steps” are required…stay with the heavier and friendlier yarns and narrow projects until you really feel that you have the hang of it. There are so many things to think about and get under control before one is ready to move on to new challenges.

Here are a few works-in-progress and finished objects from, from left to right, Firecracker8 (who found that beating harder made her supplementary weft pattern look much nicer and her pebble motif less elongated), Jennifer (who found that size number 3 crochet cotton makes a pretty band and is easy to handle) and Marsha (who used a Gilmore Wave Loom for her first attempt at double weave). We are waiting to see pictures from other participants who can only weave on weekends. No hurry! We will be around 🙂

Lots of cool ideas have been appearing in the forum and I have some more warping options to show you from himalaya and wanderingskopos…

We just had a new member from the UK join the group and the Weave Along. He is a rope and canvas craftsman and net maker. Well, I was curious about this as I had no idea what that entailed and invited him to post pictures of some of his work and he totally blew us all away! I immediately checked out his website. I love the hammocks and rope mats.

In my inbox I found images from Julia who made a band with a bunch of pebble weave motifs using my book. I love the way she has hung it with all the loom parts in place. She did a good job weaving as close to the end as possible which is not easy with cross sticks and two sets of heddles.

I also asked Steve Pretty if I could show the frame loom on which he has been weaving warp faced bands and, most recently, an Andean pebble weave band using my book.

Steve got the idea for this frame loom with its nifty tensioning system from the web site of Dr Carol Ventura. This page on Toba weaving of Argentina on Carol Ventura’s site shows the loom and the technique to produce the band above left. The technique is similar to that which I call Simple Warp Floats. On the right is Steve’s pebble weave band.

It really puts a big smile on my face to see people in the online groups jumping in enthusiastically to learn these techniques and weave stuff.

I have had the benefit of spending days and, most often, weeks at a time face-to-face with my weaving teachers here. Not everyone reaches their weaving goals without having that personal contact with a teacher and besides, we all have our different learning styles.

So, I would like to tell you that there are still a few more places available in the Andean Backstrap Weaving class called “Beginning and Beyond” that Abby Franquemont is giving at Beth Smith’s The Spinning Loft in Howell, Michigan from January 28th to 30th, 2011.

Beth tells me that Abby Franquemont first went to Peru around the age of five and was there on and off throughout her teenage years travelling with her anthropologist parents Ed and Christine Franquemont.
She began spinning and weaving immediately upon arriving in the Cusco Region of Peru and, although she is best known as a spindle spinner in the US, she is also a fantastic weaver on the backstrap loom.

######################################################

In the post box this week…some inspiration from Turkey. My brother went to Istanbul and got me this locally published book (in Turkish) on Hakkari Kilims. It has lots of luscious photos.

Now to figure out which word from the text is the one for “weave” to add to my band.

And what about those videos that were giving me grief last week?

In the end I had to whittle them down to under ninety seconds so I could load them to my Flickr page and link from there.

So, there is a short video showing warping for one-weft double weave and another on heddle making on the tutorial page.

Nothing new – they are just meant to give further clarification for those who might have doubts. I also added a video on adding a second cross to stabilize your shed rod to this FAQ page.

What I am planning next for the tutorial pages here is a full project – Making a Key fob in Double Weave – from start to finish with a few videos.

But for now…the products are done so it’s back to the process…

Backstrap Weaving – The ‘Tis-Done and the To-Do

I bought myself a good old fashioned acrylic board last year to write my “To-Do” list and hung it on the bedroom wall. It is not that old fashioned when I remind myself that my teaching colleagues are still using blackboards and chalk where I used to teach English here but it is indeed old fashioned in the world of IPads and such gadgets. I really need to have that To-Do list up there in front of me with a list made in brightly colored marker pens. It is so satisfying erasing something and saying ‘Tis done! What I really wanted to do was start the year with a fresh gleaming clean white board instead of one still covered with colorful scribbled lists.

These two weaving “To-Do”s were still hanging there from 2010 and I am pleased to say that one of them is about to be erased…well almost.

The double weave belt at left went on a nice trip with me to the US recently. It came out once for a weaving demonstration with a group of Bhutanese weavers in North Carolina and then went back into its bag for the rest of the trip. So, I was determined to at least get this off the loom. You may remember that this belt is a result of my twining investigations with Montagnard weavers which led me to Bedouin twining and then Bedouin warp substitution designs which I then decided to reproduce in double weave on this belt…quite a journey!

You can see the Bedouin design piece I wove above right. The warp substitution technique (see the tutorial here) produces crisp designs on a background of solid color with long floats on the back. The same designs can be produced in warp faced double weave (see the tutorial here) without the visible floats and with the patterns reversed on the back of the band. I have all the hardware ready for the belt and just have to put it together now. I need to thread one end of the belt through the buckle which means having to cut a slot in the band. What I usually do is paint the area to be cut with diluted white glue which acts as “stop fray” and then go ahead and cut.

The finished belt, with buckle in place, in the picture has been woven with simple alternating warp floats using a design from a yurt band (see the tutorial here). So, I am just about to erase this 2010 project from the board.

The other unfinished project that you saw photographed above is the sample I made after visiting Guarani weaver Angela. I had just wanted to see if I could get my head around the Moisy technique she was using so, basically, that was a mission accomplished, but I still think that I could make something useful from this piece and don’t feel like discarding it. So, that is next.

Of course I still won’t be able to wipe the board completely clean as it is now filled up with 2011 stuff. And that is the way it should be!

While I was immersed in double weave finishing off my belt, I decided I would make a video showing how to warp for this technique to add to the existing tutorial. Those of you who subscribe to Handwoven may recognize these double weave keyfobs which are shown in the Jan/Feb issue…

This will probably sound completely ridiculous to those of you who are used to winding warps of several yards or meters for multiple projects on your large looms…I wind a tiny warp for each and every keyfob. Warping for double weave and making string heddles across such a narrow warp is such a breeze for me that it doesn’t bother me at all to have to repeat the process for each and every fob. I love the opportunity to play with colors and not have any two fobs the same. I can create a third selvedge for every fob and save time not having to deal with hemming a raw edge which is tricky and often unsightly in double weave. I did weave thirteen identical fobs on an inkle loom once and won’t do that again.

And, as I always say, the only trouble with double weave is deciding which side you prefer…

Decisions, decisons…which side do I prefer? Here are the backs of some of the keyfobs shown above.

The big problem for those learning double weave is that it can be painfully slow. There are a lot of steps and, until you understand why you are making the moves, it all seems like a terrible amount to have to memorize.

It is easy to miss a step and make a mess or lose your way if you have to leave it for a moment…just part of the learning process.

I have been told several different versions of what this little design represents by weavers here in Bolivia and I wrote a little about this here. In any case it is a simple neat design, easy to memorize and fun to weave.

The pattern chart is on the left.

I made several pieces of video covering warping, creating the third selvedge, making string heddles and putting in a second cross to stabilize the shed rod. This week I am trying to just post the warping and third selvedge segments. These videos take so long to upload and my internet connection is not cooperating today. I will add others each week and have them stored on the double weave tutorial page. I hope you find them helpful (once I get them up there).

While on the topic of warping, we have started the Weave Along in the Backstrap Group on Ravelry and, hopefully, participants have read my three little tips from last week’s post particularly the one about the importance of having a good stable set up for warping. Some photos of improvised warping have been posted in the online weaving groups in the meantime…

This is from backstrap weaver Fliegenpilz in Germany, whose idea it was to have this Weave Along in the first place. She has warped for a pebble weave band following the instructions in my book.

Phil has himself nicely set up to weave in his rocker. Check out how he wound his warp with stakes lodged in kitchen drawers.

I caught the next picture in another weaving group on Ravelry…

Pancha says that her idea for warping, pictured above, originally sprang from her desire to try backstrap weaving. She has used it for other looms too but is now fed up with bending and walking up and down and has ordered a warping board.

Other weavers from Weavolution have shared their finished projects with me…

Deanna wove these bands decorated with Andean pebble weave designs on her Leclerc Dorothy 15″ table loom following the draft in my book. She also backstrap weaves and ties up her loom to her 40″ sixteen-shaft Macomber loom…a nice sturdy place to attach a loom bar.

Speaking of which, here is Jennifer’s pebble weave warp tied to the castle of her floor loom…

She has it angled steeply upward which means that she has the warp threads quite close to her for doing pick up and does not need to bend. Each weaver will find their own way. I prefer a gentler angle.

Marsh Knox of PandulaArts has been following the tutorial on simple warps floats and weaves on a Gilmore Mini Wave loom. I have shown many of her finished bands here. Recently she had some of her bands, which she made with alternating floats, sewn into a mini tote bag for a friend…She calls this the “one-skein project” bag.

I had a few things going on this week. Firstly we got a short reprieve from the heat and humidity and were able to turn off the a/c and have the windows open for a whole day. This gave me the chance to boil up the nasty llama bones I have had lying around since my friend Anna brought them to me from the highlands a few months ago. These are the wichuñas, the bone tools used by weavers here to beat in the weft and pick up warp threads for patterning. They are also used in Peru where they are called rukis.

Several boilings and changes of water were needed to get them cleaned up. The smell!! There they are on the right – white and gleaming. The tips could do with a bit of refining but otherwise they are good to go. Several years of use will have them take on the lovely hue of old ivory and I have seen some very old ones that have the tone and shine of polished wood.

That was another 2010 task to gladly erase from the board.

As for the ongoing twining obsession, I started a loom bag project and am twining its strap with letters. Just when I started thinking that I was taking the twining obsession a little too far with this lettering fad, I was shown these fabulous images of Batak twining…The Batak people live in northern Sumatra in the hilly region of Lake Toba.

These amazing textiles are part of the collection of Pamela Cross and she has allowed me to show them to you here on my blog. She describes the above piece as a Toba Batak sadum (a woman’s shoulder cloth). Twined lettering! This twining is so very different to that done by the Jarai and Rhade weavers with whom I studied. How beautiful.

Here are some more images that Pamela shared of the twined bands on other Batak textiles…The following one is a ragi hotang which I understand is a shoulder wrap.

Gasp!

The following is a surisuri. Pamela says that the surisuri is one of three types of indigo-dyed textiles used for Toba Batak rituals.

Here are twined bands from several different types of Batak textiles. The design on the second one from the top is so Andean-looking don’t you think?!

It is exciting to know that there is a book available now by writer/researcher Sandra Niessen, PhD on Batak textiles:

“Legacy in cloth: Batak textiles of Indonesia offers the first definitive study of the woven heritage of the Toba, Simalungun, and Karo Batak.

The most complete analysis of Batak textiles ever published, it provides a record of more than 100 different design types, including archival and contemporary photographs showing how the textiles are woven and how they are used in Batak culture.

Legacy benefits from fieldwork conducted over two decades and consultation of all major European collections of Batak textiles and private collections in Indonesia.”

Even more exciting for me was being able to make contact with Sandra.

She kindly shared some pictures taken by MJA Nashir of a Batak woman twining. The process is not at all like that practiced by my Montagnard friends.

The weft appears to be tensioned between the toes and a small stick seems to be used to aid in the twisting of the two wefts. No doubt Sandra’s book thoroughly discusses the process and I am itching to get the book and have my curiosity satisfied and learn more about the Btak people and their textiles.

Sandra tells wonderful stories on her blog of how she has been returning to the villages where she conducted her research to present copies of her book to the weavers.

Well…after all that eye candy here is the humble twined bag strap I have been making with twined letters.

The idea is to twine the word “weave” in several languages. I have just begun the German version. I hope to do French, Portuguese, Quechua, Aymara, Guarani, Russian, Jarai and many more, if they will fit, with each word in a different font. I would love to hear from blog readers around the world who can tell me how to say “weave” in their language.

The letters are a munched version of those in Linda Hendrickson’s book Please Weave a Message. Remember that Linda’s letters have been designed for card weaving, not twining, and are far prettier than the ones I have used here. Check out Linda’s page to see her gorgeous lettered bands.

So this will be the strap for the loom bag in which I will carry my backstrap on future trips. The shape will be based on the camera tripod bag which I have been using until now. I haven’t put much thought yet into the body of the bag but I will weave it on my backstrap loom using a heavy-ish black mercerized cotton and some of my new Tahki Cotton Classic thread for patterns and embellishments.

And continuing on the lettering theme, weaving friend and blog visitor Sharon Kersten completed the chart of letters for the Montagnard warp float lettering tutorial that I did last week and has sent it to me to pass on to all of you. She saw my photo below of various bag straps woven with letters and used it to chart what she thinks the missing letters could look like as well as the numbers. Many thanks!

I will leave you here for this week with this new Bolivian beverage…

Peru has its Inka Kola and now we have”Coca Colla”! It’s a play on words, not bad spelling…”colla” being the word to describe people of indigenous origins here in Bolivia (pronounced coya- the oy sounds like the oy in “boy”). It is made with coca leaf extract, is heavy in caffeine and slightly carbonated. All I can say is that…weeeel…. it tastes as good as it looks. 😉 Cheers!

Backstrap Weaving – Three Tips, Twining and a Tutorial

new places — Central Asia, Mexico, Vietnam and the Middle East were new weaving territories for me this year.

I am not one for making New Year resolutions but I got caught up in the moment last year at this time and went public with three weaving resolutions in one of the online weaving groups. I am happy to say that I did not even come close to fulfilling them. I say “happy” because my weaving path for the year took me off on several tangents and led me to interesting and unexpected places.

I am not going to make new resolutions. I do have two or three things mapped out for the coming year and I will happily allow the gaps in between to be filled with whatever comes my way. I have to say that a lot of those gaps are being filled by you guys, my blog readers, who email me with video links, images and ideas from all corners of the world.

What was on the loom this week?…firstly, I will show you what was on the weaving –

My cat loves to leave all her little beige colored hairs on my black weavings. You can see the twining at the bottom of this piece where I have finished the second part of the design.

Above you can see the three parts finished. I was still debating at this stage what to do with this piece. You may remember my mentioning table runner and then center piece. Who am I kidding?

This was never about the product. I just wanted to weave something to put the various Montagnard weaving techniques into practice. So I finally decided that the piece would be cut in two and used as the cover for the journal in which I will document the processes. I have over twenty supplementary weft motifs to chart from photos I took when I visited the Montagnard weavers as well as their warp float designs and twined motifs which I will put in the journal along with step-by-step photos.

Above left are a couple of my finished journals from other weaving trips. One has a woven cover which I made to practice the double faced supplementary weft patterning that I was taught in Guatemala and the one on the right documents all I learned in coastal Ecuador.

But first I had to twine the other end of the piece. I needed to weave some more in order to have enough fabric for the book cover and then I twined the edge using one of the same patterns from the other end but doubling it, that is, I twined two rows for every row of pattern. What a difference that made!

You can see that the design on the center strip of twining on the first end is the same as that on the second end. A closer look…

I have the pages, now I just have to get the cardboard for the journal’s cover. I stitch and bind everything together myself. Then I have to get the scissors out, take a deep breath and cut the weaving in half – yikes.

An interesting thing about the supplementary pattern on this piece…usually I don’t recommend having weft floats of less than two warp spans as they barely show up on the fabric but I had to have floats that only spanned one warp on this piece in order to faithfully reproduce the Montagnard motif and, to my surprise, the design shows up very well. My base warp and weft are number 10 crochet cotton and I used one and a half strands of embroidery cotton as the supplementary weft. The white thread for the warp floats is number 3 crochet cotton and the twining was done with number 20.

Staying on the topic of Montagnard pick up weaving, I have put together a tutorial on the woven letters that some of the Montagnard weavers are using to weave biblical phrases on their woven bag straps. I really like the shape of these letters and it is quite a simple pick up technique. The drawback is that there are some longish floats on the back of the piece which doesn’t bother me too much as bands with letters are essentially single faced anyway with the letters being reversed and unreadable on the back. The technique does not produce an entirely warp faced fabric.

You can see the tutorial here.

One weft double weave can also be used to weave letters which don’t have long floats on the back. The one weft double weave tutorial is here and the chart with some basic stick letters is here.

These letters, which were woven by Guarani weaver Angela, are the ones that I really want to learn…

These are woven with the same technique that I used to weave this copy of Angela’s cell phone pouch design…

I would like to have Angela weave a complete alphabet for me to use. I really like the solid “blocky” nature of these letters.

Other beautiful, fluid and non-blocky letters can be found in Linda Hendrickson’s book Please Weave a Message with charts designed by Linda as well as adapted by her from the work of Michael Cook for card weaving. I have just set up warps to make my first attempt at twining Linda’s lettering. Her charts don’t work for the double weave pick up that I like to do on my backstrap loom but should work perfectly for twining. Hopefully next week I will have some progress to show and I will try to make something useful from the sample!

You may remember in last week’s post I showed you pictures of Li weavers from Hainan Island and their looms. I have since found someone else who owns one of these looms who also has the backstrap. I don’t remember seeing one at Pam Najdowski’s stand. Susan Stem of Tribal Trappings has this photo of a Li weaver’s backstrap…

The one on the extreme left is the Li backstrap, made from fiber, which is believed to be from the weavers who speak the Meifu dialect according to collector Pamela Cross. The one on the right is probably from a completely different part of the world. This was gifted to Tracy who lives in Qatar and who unfortunately does not know anything about its origin. I love them both and wish that the weavers here in Bolivia had such interesting ones! Most weavers I have met here have had no interest whatsoever in constructing any kind of special backstrap and have been quite content to use any old piece of sacking that is lying around.

I find backstraps almost as interesting as the textiles that are being made on the looms. I really like the way the two backstraps above have been constructed with the pieces of wood on the sides. So, I dug around and found a weaving that has been sitting neglected at the bottom of the basket. Another one of those things that I wove for my interest in the process rather than for any real interest in the finished product…

It started off as an experiment on my friend Lisa’s four-shaft loom. I wanted to weave a long Andean pebble weave piece after having made only tiny sample bands in order to put the draft together for my Andean Pebble Weave book. It came home with me to Santa Cruz and went onto my backstrap loom to be finished…

When it was done, it was too wide to be a guitar strap and too long for anything else that I could think of. So, it got shelved to be later made into a loom bag of some sort…again, I was kidding myself.

Now here it is resurrected as….my new backstrap…

It isn’t quite finished yet. I have just joined the two pieces together with rough tiny stitches and am now using the cross knit looping or Van Dyke stitch to make a stronger and more decorative join. You can see a video on the Van Dyke stitch in this blog post. I used bamboo sections on the ends of the strap stolen from a cheap set of panpipes and the dark ends on the bamboo are pieces of tagua nut that I bought in Ecuador which are only held on with Blutack until I can get some strong glue.

I have collected nice backstraps from a few other countries – a fiber one from Peru, a leather one from Guatemala and a very unusual hide one from Ecuador but nothing interesting from Bolivia.

A nice sturdy hide backstrap from Otavalo, Ecuador. The hairs tend to tickle while you are weaving.

I found the image at left on this site about backstrap weaving in Timor.

Timor is so close to my former home in Australia. I am seriously thinking about making a trip there the next time I go back to Sydney.

In the picture it looks like the weaver is making two pieces at once side by side as Montagnard weaver Ju Nie often does.

I love the backstrap. Ju uses a large pad which I think is stuffed with some kind of fiber. She just passes a rope behind it to hold it to her back which she then loops around her loom bars. It is very comfortable. You can just make it out in this picture…

Some blog readers, Weavolution and Ravelry members have made backstraps this last week…

Claudia from Weavolution finished her backstrap (on the left) and found a good place to tie up her loom in the process…to the bottom of the sofa (but with her back to the tv!). Anna who you may remember is cycling down to Tierra del Fuego wove her own backstrap while on the road. She has been weaving pebble weave and double weave until now and told me how lovely it was to cruise along with plain weave for a change. Anna does not, of course, have a regular tie up spot for her loom and I always look forward to seeing where she is weaving. You may remember seeing her warp tied to her bicycle on the Uyuni salt lake in a previous post.

Jennifer has her backstrap on the loom right now and I caught this image of Melisende’s “ceinture” on a French forum called Tricofolk. I didn’t ask her permission to post this here and hope she doesn’t mind!

Bonjour et bienvenue aux tisserands de la France!

I know that at least Jennifer is getting ready for a backstrap Weave Along that was proposed in the Backstrap weaving Group on Ravelry some weeks ago. We all agreed that post holidays would be the best time to start and we should be underway in January. The exact date is yet to be announced.

This will be a chance for beginners to make their own bands and backstraps with lots of support and advice on the forum. Those who have already woven their first pieces on a backstrap loom can try their hand at a project or two. I will be putting several proposals and ideas in the forum based on the tutorials here on this blog. A few weavers have asked about forming a group to work through my Andean Pebble Weave book too. So, all levels are welcome to join in.

As the WAL (weave along) approaches, I have three tips for you as you prepare…

1. Think about how you are going to wind your warp…

An evenly tensioned warp is essential. The warp will not be cut, threaded and retensioned once it comes off the warping stakes so you need to get it as evenly tensioned as possible while you are winding it. Beware of using stakes that are loose and may lean in as you are warping. The photo above right is from Franco’s blog. I am sure that Franco made sure that those stools were heavy enough to not move during the warping process. You can read more about warping and see videos here.

2. Find a strong and secure place to tie up the far end of your loom. It is always better in my humble opinion to lash your entire loom bar to something rather than have it swinging in space. Experiment with the angle of your warp and find what is most comfortable for you.

Backstrap Weaving – A New Anniversary and Past Lives

Never mind that I am back home here in Bolivia with Christmas lights in the palm trees and ninety plus degree heat and that I spent my entire childhood having summery Australian Christmases… I still think of snow and glowing fireplaces at Christmas time, particularly so this year. Perhaps it is because I just came back from the US where I got a good taste of the wintry chill or maybe it is the constant talk on the news of the big white that has hit Europe. My brother was piloting one of the QANTAS flights that was supposed to land in Frankfurt while one of my best friends from high school just flew to New York from Sydney in the hope of meeting and spending Christmas with her daughter who has been studying in London. All of this has kept snow very much in my thoughts.

Believe it or not I spent much of my twenties, one of those “past lives”, here for Christmas…

This is part of the old village in the ski resort of Val d’Isère in the French Alps. Nature usually cooperated and gave us a nice cover of snow for Christmas. I spent five months of the year every year for five years here.

We lived in the lower level of this old stone farm house in a village just outside the resort. In the old times the animals would be housed there for the winter and we had the original stone feed troughs in our home which the owners had covered over with wooden slats and converted into sofas/beds. The small building on the left of the farmhouse is the chapel in which a small service was held on the night of December 24th attended only by those in our village. After the service everyone would place large candles in the snow between all the houses. It was magical!!

This is how it would look early in the season. There I am at the front door ready for a day of skiing. And then the BIG SNOW would come!

Here you can just see our door and windows. Fortunately there was another well protected entrance. My friend, who was a heavy smoker, would go out in any weather and conditions to smoke his Davidoff cigars!

And then this would occasionally happen…

We would get cut off from the resort due to avalanche danger. The first time we got stuck for three days with little more than potatoes to eat. We always made sure that we had supplies after that.

Christmas day would be like any other. We were all ski bums there living without our families and so we would just get up and go skiing. I have kind of gotten used to not celebrating Christmas and we let it pass here in Bolivia as if it were any other day.

I got back last week from my US trip buzzing with ideas. There had been plenty of time on trains and in airports to think about what I wanted my next projects to be and so I didn’t waste any time getting warped up and back into my backstrap loom when I got home.

starting montagnard — I wanted to put the weft twining I had learned with Montagnard weavers Ju and Ngach into practice and I decided on a table runner using their traditional colors and designs. I want to twine both ends of the piece. The Montagnard weavers usually twine only one end of their skirts and blankets. I warped for two strips of pick up designs and planned a traditional supplementary weft motif for the very center.

warping wide — People often ask me how to keep the warps in better order when warping for a wide piece. The picture on the left shows how chaining doubled yarn as you warp can help do this. It also helps you keep place in your count. I didn't, however, chain this Montagnard warp. I find that simply using thick cross sticks and binding them well together helps keep everything in reasonable order when I take the warp off the warping stakes.

I placed a piece of cardboard in the warp to leave enough room for the twining and got the weaving underway. I then returned to twine a little.

I will do this first twined edge on the loom. I plan to take the weaving off the loom for the final edge and suspend it on a stick as my teacher Ngach does. See previous posts here and here for details. This way I can compare both ways for speed and neatness. On-loom twining appears to come out neater but it is SLOW!

The off-loom twining that I did with Ngach wasn’t as neat with small gaps appearing now and then between the “stitches”. I don’t seem to have developed the knack as yet of preventing these gaps. In any case, I can’t wait to put my new bobbins to use.

You can see the little cement bobbins that I bought from Ngach alongside the larger and heavier ones made by Ju’s husband. Ngach told me that heavier ones worked better and so I bought another pair from Ju.

At left you can see the warp float design with the supplementary weft motif in the center. At right is the first part of the weft twining. I am using the same Cebelia number 20 thread that my Montagnard teachers use. This first part of the design is the same motif that Ngach and I twined together in our classes. I am going to do another design taken from other Montagnard textiles that I photographed for the next part.

I found I needed a break from the twining…several hours just to do seven rows! and so I went on to finish the woven part of the table runner…more like a table center piece really.

Then I returned to continue the twining and you can see that I am more than halfway through the main motif. The piece does widen with the twining and I think that twining around larger groups of warps may be the solution to that problem. I did notice this same problem on the skirt that Ju had just gotten back from Vietnam on which her sister had done the twining. There was a slight rippled effect on the skirt edge.

Now all that is left to do is twine away! Once the first row of design has been done, it all becomes quite mindless and I can use the time to plan my next project….There are several projects in my head all fighting to be next. Some were inspired by all I saw and learned at the Tinkuy de Tejedores (which you can read about here and here) in November…tubular bands, discontinuous warps and the tocapu designs on which Mary Frame spoke.

More recently, my friend Lisa sent me a link to this amazing documentary video on the Li weavers of Hainan Island.

(EDIT: I have heard from a blog visitor who can’t view this video. Here is the YouTube link just in case)

I had taken a picture of the loom pictured below at Pam Najdowski’s Textile Treasures stand at Convergence. Pam confirmed that this is indeed a Li loom. She has these looms to sell as well as other implements from Chinese minority groups. Although they are not shown on her website you can contact her here and ask about them. I bought a couple of bamboo reeds from her. Which reminds me…that’s another project on the list.

She was also kind enough to share pictures taken at the Folk Art Market in Santa Fe. That settles it! – I am definitely going to this market next year, not to buy anything…just to marvel!!

Well this led me on a little hunt online for other Li textiles and Chris Buckley, who is a collector in China, allowed me to use this image of a Li blanket he has which I love and can see myself reproducing, perhaps not in its entirety…it’s so big…but at least a small part of it.

Which brings me back to those “past lives” and a saying my friend David told me…”Youth is wasted on the young”(or something like that).

Would you believe that I spent six weeks in China and made two trekking trips to Nepal in my world wanderings back in my “youth” and didn’t go out of my way to seek any weavers? That was in my life before weaving. I was into running up and down mountains in those days and I did the three-day trek up the stone steps on one of the seven sacred mountains in China staying in monasteries along the way. It was a wonderful trip in itself, but imagine all those wonderful textiles and weavers that I didn’t notice!

Well, it wasn’t all about mountains in China. We did and saw a lot in those six weeks including these rock-cut Buddhas near Datong at the Yungang Grottoes which were constructed in the 5th and 6th centuries. There are over 51,000 stone Buddhas in this site.

After the mountain adventures in Nepal, I did go to see a workshop where yarn was being prepared for weaving and rug knotting. We even bought a rug, which got stolen, but that’s another story!

So, now I try to make up for the wasted weaving opportunities through the wonders of the internet and books but I have to say that I have no doubts that I will get back to these countries one day (as long as my brother keeps working for QANTAS, that is!)

Here are a couple of books that I bought fairly recently…Spiritual Fabric by Japanese author Sadae Torimaru was recommended to me by a Weavolution buddy and is subtitled “20 Years of Textile Research among the Miao People of Guizhou, China”. The book covers an enormous range of textile topics and the photos are beautiful. It is not quite a “how-to” but is certainly inspiring and gives a lot of information about the techniques with numerous photos. The author herself states “My only regret at the time of publishing this book is that the scope of my research has become so much broader than I initially expected that it has compromised the depth of my probe”.

The book on Nepalese Textiles is a new acquisition and I haven’t looked at it closely yet. I wish I had had it with me when I met the weavers from Bhutan last month. As we did not share a common language, showing them pictures from the book would have been a nice way to communicate. I am assuming that there is probably some kind of resemblance in techniques and designs between these two neighboring countries.

Swinging back now to this side of the globe and a country in which I have had some weaving adventures…I was recently gifted this….

It is a Guatemalan loom and was given to me by Lorraine in California. She contacted me through this blog with her wonderful story of having learned to weave in Guatemala in 1979. This loom was given to her by her teachers and it is a real treasure. There are loom bars (two of which are not in this picture), heddle rods, shed rod and four wonderful wonderful swords of different widths. Included is what I have seen used as a spindle but which Lorraine was taught to use as a shuttle. The shed rod, the thickest piece you see there, is especially beautiful. It is a good size to hold open the warps for that shed without being heavy. I am not sure what kind of wood gives it these handy properties. The very finest sword is also a beauty and will work beautifully when I want to weave four-selvedge pieces.

Also included in the large box that arrived for me in Maryland were copies of Lorranie’s notebook with all her instructional notes and sketches as well as all her letters home during her stay which her mother kept and typed up. The cover of the booklet of letters shows the huipil that she wove with her teacher in Todos Santos Cuchumatán and the letters themselves tell the delightful, amusing and often moving story of a twenty-two year old girl and her discovery of a simple life amongst dangerous times in the Guatemala of the late 70s.

I will be warping this loom soon with a special project for Lorraine.

I have been doing some housekeeping behind the scenes on this blog organizing the tutorials. I have extracted the tutorials that had been embedded in posts and put them on separate pages so that they appear in the tutorial list on the side bar. You can still use the TUTORIAL tab at the top of the page to find them all. Another FAQ has also been added.

And for all the Spanish-speaking visitors another tutorial has been translated into Spanish.

Now you can find the instructions for Supplementary Weft Patterning in Spanish. Thank you for your patience.

El tutorial “Diseños con Trama Suplementaria” ahora está disponible en español. Pueden encontrar los enlaces para todos los tutoriales que he traducido a español hasta ahora aqui. Gracias por su paciencia!

And what about the “New Anniversary” I mention in the title of this blog? That is my blog anniversary. I announced this blog to the world on December 13, 2009 after it had sat for a few weeks with a couple of posts and me agonizing over how to get it started with a bang. Finally, I got the thumbs up from my brother who told me to pretty much “just do it” and then I had all my Weavolution buddies come along and give me their fullest support. And from there it went on…Thank you all!

And to end, I am waiting on the arrival of the Jan/Feb 2011 issue of Handwoven where I contributed a tiny piece on the meaning of cloth. I hear that Carol Ventura also contributed and I am looking forward to reading that. Carol is the one who got me into online weaving groups in the first place which pretty much started this whole adventure. It sounds like a great issue with many projects displaying ethnic influences.

I had a fair bit to say on this topic of “Meaning in Cloth”, obviously WAY too much as only a very small portion of my article actually made onto the printed page. The magazine editors have allowed me to place the article in its entirety here on my blog. If you would like to read it, take a look HERE.

A topic opened up in one of the online weaving groups this week – a Christmas gift wish list for weavers. It started off with small and simple gadgets and worked its way up to entire looms. I had a think about this and am pleased to say that I have my sticks, my string, my World Wide Weaving Guild via the internet and, most importantly, TIME and so I simply can’t think of anything weaving-related to put on a wish list. Lucky me 😉

HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYONE!