wool weaving – Backstrap Loom Weaving

Backstrap Weaving – Another Woolly Week

Another woolly week in the middle of summer! What’s going on? I have friends in Pennsylvania and Vermont writing and telling me about the extreme cold they have been suffering, shoveling endless amounts of snow, using crampons to get about in their yards and feeling almost like they can’t breathe. And then there’s all the talk about the Winter Olympics, although I have to admit that I am not feeling too festive about that right now with the way things have been going in the lead up.

Perhaps the chilly scenes in my head have had my hands reaching for wool. I am on a roll and can’t stop! I have to say that I actually felt more uncomfortable handling fine silk in the heat last summer. So far the wool has not been bothering me.

Here is where I was last week with a couple of inches left to go on this four-selvedge wool fabric. The next step was removing the shed rod. It is a little heart stopping removing that rod. I clung and clung to it. With one swift movement the cross was gone! It felt like the safety net had been pulled out from beneath me and I was left floundering in a mass of threads.

However, there are benefits to removing the shed rod. It means that when you raise the heddles to create a shed, you can actually insert two weft shots. One shot, if you look at the picture above, will weave the fabric on the left and the other will weave the fabric on the right….the two sides that I am attempting to join. And then you use a needle to pick up the threads that were formerly held on the shed rod. Again, two weft shots can be placed within that shed. Eventually the heddles are removed and it’s all needle weaving after that.

Finally, I got to the point where I could see that just two more shots would do the trick. The problem is that you can’t finish with two shots in the same shed. You have to squeeze one more between them. So, I could either put in one more shot or three more. One more was not going to be enough and three more would be too many. This happened when I finished the alpaca ticlla piece on which I had studied in Peru (see picture above). I squeezed in too many weft threads and it really looked too tight. I removed one and was left with two in the same shed, removed one more and was left with a noticeable gap and a weak spot in the fabric.

Here is the finished piece. The gap is most noticeable in the white section (notice how the fabric curls due to the over twisted yarn that was used).

So, I decided to go with one fewer weft shot than I felt was necessary and had a slightly sleazy weak spot in the middle of the piece.

Two things marked the spot where the last weft shots lay…a darkish spot right in the center which was a dimple in the cloth, and wobbly edges. The edge warps simply ended up being too long once I started closing the gap and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it at that stage. Loose edges would not support the weft turns well.

I didn’t like the dimple. I didn’t like the loose weak feel of the fabric in the middle. What to do?

And then it occurred to me…if I needed to stuff more weft into that space to firm up the fabric, why not make the weft a colored supplemental one? So, that is what I did. I needle-wove in a motif with supplemental weft. It turned out to be surprisingly easy to use the blunt end of a needle to get under the warps and weave in the motif. I can’t see myself ever getting away with that with cotton. But wool is friendly and stretchy!

The dimple disappeared but the wobbly edges didn’t. Everything is a bit on the wobbly side in that area but at least the fabric is now stable. Believe me, it is really firm now! You can see the purple motif in the center flanked by green ones on the sides.

And I did have problems as anticipated with splitting the ply with the needle when needle-weaving. I thought that I had it under control only to find five skips on the back of the fabric where one of the strands in the 2-ply had not been caught on the needle. Oh well.

Lessons learned….when weaving a four-selvedge piece, keep an eye on the edge warps as you go so that you don’t end up with loose ones as the gap is closed. Avoid loosely plied thread. I split the ply so many times and had to back the needle out for a do-over and then there were several times that I didn’t even notice that it had happened.

This piece will be set aside until I can get more purple KnitPicks Palette for the tubular edging band and the sides. I have not one scrap left! I am still hoping to use this as a sleeve to protect a laptop computer.

As I said before, I was on a roll…a woolly roll. I found the wool warp yarn for Navajo-style weaving that I had bought at the Mannings last spring. During my stay there, Carol, Tom and Sara had let me dye it using their dye workshop supplies. I found it strangely heavy for Navajo warp but it had a good firm twist..no chance of splitting those strands apart…and any overtwist seemed to have settled.

I had bought it to use for a discontinuous warp project. In order to benefit from the lessons learned in my latest four-selvedge experience, I thought that I may as well dive into a ticlla project, as the discontinuous warp technique is known in Pitumarca, Peru . The ticlla technique would give me the fun of weaving not one, but two, four-selvedge panels in the one piece.

Of course, my piece would be very, very simple! Nothing like these masterpieces!!…..

This piece has multiple four-selvedge panels each incorporating complex continuous pick-up patterns.

This ticlla piece, from the collection of my friend Betty, is stunning in the simplicity of its plain weave structure. However, the layout is anything but simple. Betty has adorned its center with a small brooch from Peru which matches so perfectly the colors of the yarn.

So, here is my warp…..

I wish I had had a warping buddy to help with this. I finished it late at night and put the two sets of cross sticks, one for each panel, in place. You can see that I had used a metal rod around which to dovetail the threads in the center. I guess I was bleary eyed as, when I got up the next morning I could clearly see that despite my best efforts to keep everything straight and even, the metal rod had become distorted. I unwound the whole thing and started again using a wooden rod in place of the metal one.

Below, there is a reminder of the warping path for one kind of ticlla warp so you can better understand what is going on above. You can see that the ladies from Pitumarca are using a wooden rod for their center stick. I have seen pictures of weavers preparing these kinds of warps with metal rods but I think that two pairs of hands might be needed in those cases to help keep the tension on the rod balanced.

I had four colored panels and, perhaps because I have had my mind on crazy weather patterns lately,…the extreme cold in the north and the extreme heat in Australia… I came up with a Four Seasons theme and designed some very simple motifs. There were relatively few warps to work with so I couldn’t include much detail and the weft floats could not span more than five warps without being awkwardly long.

There are the Spring and Summer motifs in place…flowers and suns. The bulky turns of the wool supplementary weft on the edges will hopefully be covered later by a tubular edging band. In this picture I have already removed the dovetail stick and woven on both sides of center for stability.

As for the edge threads, I did not secure them in any permanent way when I finished warping. I have them hitched to the loom bar so that I can easily get at them and pull to take up any slack as I go. Hopefully they will be as taut as all the other threads when it comes time to close the gap in the weaving. I want to avoid having wobbly edges on this piece.

Fall and Winter…leaves with breeze lines between them and a snowflake. Now, all that there is left to do is keep an eye on those edge warps and close those gaps.

With less than a quarter inch to go, I just removed the shed rod from the left hand side (I was using a fine metal rod as shed rod at this point). I might just be able to get one shed out of the heddles before removing them and needle weaving. Exciting!

More woolly pursuits….

I made another keyfob braid. The terracotta and white Navajo warp is standing by for another. I also wound a seven-foot warp with the KnitPicks Palette for a tubular edging band. I was impatient to edge that computer case piece. I went as far as weaving and sewing it to the top edge before I decided that the edging band really need to be based on purple. I will just have to be patient and wait until I can get the purple yarn. Maybe I can use this warp to edge something else.

I uncovered the forked stick that Janet found for me in our garden ramblings when I was on her farm last spring. I had tied the prongs to train them to hold the right shape and it looks like it worked. Should I strip its bark or does this more rustic look contrast nicely with the smooth forked stick that fr. Kyriakos made for me?

One of my weaving friends gave me a bag of Paternayan and other wool yarn from her stash and it works beautifully for my keyfob braids. The latest one on the left is the pattern that my sling braiding teacher in Peru called “Margarita”. There is a tutorial for it here but I recommend starting with the Palma braid first.

I have not 3ven scratched the surface of the world of Peruvian sling braids. In fact, what I learned in Peru is not even a pin prick on the surface! That is why we are all eagerly awaiting the book on Peruvian sling braids on which Rodrick Owen is currently working. In the meantime I will practice the ones that I was taught by Zacarias. Dare I try the Margarita with color changes? I haven’t tried it since my instruction in Peru in the nineties and am wondering just how good my notes are. We’ll see.

Using that Navajo warp yarn reminded me that when I was in Australia, I got to see a Navajo-style weaving that I had made in 1995 when I lived in Chile. I had given it to my brother when he visited me in Bolivia in 1998 and he has placed under glass on his dining table. How long ago all that seems and there’s my weaving looking like it has just come off the loom!

And there’s more wool in the closet! But, it is time to start planning wall hanging number five.

To finish, I have a rather strange story to tell about peering at my wool warp threads as I wove. As weaving progressed, the wool became hairier. Little fingers of fluff extended and accumulated on the threads creating a sort of shadowy effect. In the shadows I started to see wavy lines…not just random wavy lines, but lines that sort of made sense. They started to remind me of something and suddenly I realised what it was. And there was born the new inspiration for hanging number five! I have abandoned the idea on which I have been pondering all this time and am going with this new one. I’ll let you know more when it is all a bit more concrete.

Now….back to the needle weaving…..

Backstrap Weaving – Sunny Side Up

The only “problem” with double-faced structures, like Andean Pebble Weave, is that you sometimes don’t get to see and enjoy both faces of the fabric. I wove the above piece (using a non-Andean pattern) and then folded and sewed it into a bag. I had to decide which was the “sunny side” or, the side I would have on the outside of the bag while the other side, sadly, would be hidden forever on the inside. Actually, in this case, I guess I ended up choosing what you might call the “shady” side, the one on the right, the darker of the two options. The lighter, or sunny side, went on the inside.

Some of the structures I weave have two acceptable faces but there is one that is obviously the “right” one. What I call the simple warp float structure is one such structure.

This is the piece I wove and sewed into a case for my little notebook computer.

Both sides are attractive in their own way. The “right” side on the left is patterned with warp floats. The other face shows exposed weft. So, in the end, I didn’t have to hesitate over which side to use as the outside of the bag.

The same goes for the latest computer bag that I have been weaving.

Remember the wool warp that I showed in last week’s post? It really was just supposed to be an experiment in weaving with loosely spun and plied wool. I was nervous about it but, as soon as I started weaving, I could tell that it was going to work out. I could open the sheds carefully and achieve nice clean openings without stressing the wool much at all. I used nylon heddles (yes, shock, horror…you know how much I hate nylon heddles!).

No fluff accumulated on the heddles but it did between the cross sticks and at the point where I pressed down on warps to help raise the heddles. I just gently removed the fluff each time I had to slide the cross sticks up the warp. This didn’t become a problem as I advanced the warp as often as I could so that the points of pressure and friction and resulting fluffing were never in the same spot for too long.

So, I decided that this warp was going to be a keeper and that I may as well add some patterns with wool supplementary weft. The technique I used is single faced so I won’t have to make a decision about which face is the sunny side.

As you can see below in this cotton example I wove some time ago, the back side of this single-faced technique is plain (which I suppose could be the side you chose to show if you went over the top with your supplementary-weft design and made something that you felt was garish).

The only problem with the wool project was that I had used up most of this little wool stash in the warping and only had a bit of terracotta yarn left with which to make patterns.

You can see that I used a coil rod to prevent corrugation. I wouldn’t really expect ridging with wool as it is so springy and forgiving but I wasn’t taking any chances. The wool was behaving nicely and I didn’t want to push it by having to unweave and start over if ridges appeared.

Two warp ends broke while none of the others looked particularly worn at all.

Eventually I had to change to green supplementary weft. That was okay as I also had a green stripe in the warp into which I could hide the weft turns.This allowed me to save the little remaining terracotta to weave the same design at the other end.

And then just to make things more “interesting” I decided that, since I weave with wool so infrequently, I should use this piece as an opportunity to practice making something with four selvedges. I turned the whole thing around and started weaving in from the other end.

Bring out the little sticks, the skinny shuttles, the umbrella ribs, the needles and a large serving of patience!

In the above picture there are just under two inches left to weave and I am still, thankfully, able to use both the shed rod and string heddles. I think doing all that twining last week was a good warm-up to this. It was taking me forty minutes to twine a single row. Opening the sheds and weaving in this small space, so far, is a lot faster! I expect that to change pretty soon!

I thnk I might have trouble needle-weaving the last rows as the yarn is plied so loosely. I fear that I will be continually splitting the two strands with the needle.

I suspect that the overspun and tightly plied yarn created by the weavers in Pitumarca, Peru would be easier to work with in this case. I needle wove the two ends of the discontinuous-warp piece shown above (my teacher Yaneth is demonstrating in the picture). Now I will be able to see how it compares with using store-bought yarn.

Will my wool project end up being the computer slip case that I had planned? I am not sure. I definitely want to decorate all four edges with a tubular band and am hoping that I can scrape together enough of this wool to do so. We will see what it wants to be when finished.

As for the twining that was giving me trouble…..

….it is done. I have yet to find a spot with good light to stretch this out to full length for photgraphing. Neither of the reds in the above picture are the true color.

After having problems with either the twining buckling or the fabric getting a pleated look, I twined and untwined and finally found the right formula. So, now the three panels are joined across the top and I shall set it all aside while I decide what to do at the bottom. Most likely I will make masses of tiny braids which is how I chose to finish the other three pieces in this series.

This fourth hanging was inspired by hatbands used by the women in the Bolivian highland community of Calcha (the one bottom left in the picture at left).

I visited Calcha in August 1997. It was a festival weekend and I hadn’t known. Because of the big party in progress, none of the women were weaving. A small boy ran home and brought back a hatband to show and later sell to me when I asked about weaving. I always wonder if he had taken it right off his mother’s hat and if he had gotten in trouble over it later.

Now to dye some cotton red for number five in the wall hanging series. Thank you, Bobbie, for giving me some of your Guatemalan cotton so that I can over-dye it for my projects.

So, we will see the end of the woolly adventure next week. If it gets frustrating, I will get up and do some more keyfob braids. I added one more to the collection this week…the one on the left. It is simply the Palma braid done with only two colors instead of three.

And if the wool project all goes horribly wrong, I shall cut the piece in two and use the two pieces as front and back for a computer slip case anyway.

I think I will be looking more closely at wool when I am visiting the Mannings yarn store. I can usually quite safely breeze through the store without getting too tempted by anything. I would like to see what other wool I can find that works so nicely on my backstrap loom (the wool for this current project is KnitPicks Palette, by the way. It comes in so many colors! I am almost scared to name it. Every time I fnd a wool designed for knitters that I like to use for weaving, it gets discontinued!).

Last time I was at the Mannings I was checking out the Harrisville Shetland as I had had success using it for warp-faced weaving straight off the cone on a floor loom. I made this band with it on my friend Pam’s floor loom. It felt so good!

I have had success with Navajo warp on my backstrap loom too. I bought a ball in natural white and dyed it and made the bag with Mapuche designs below when I was still living in Chile. It was overtwisted and easy to use and made a good sturdy fabric for a bag but I am looking for fabric with a softer, kinder feel now.

Why am I buying wool and not spinning it myself? One reason is that there simply isn’t any available here to spin in lowland Bolivia where I live.

I think of all those years I lived in the Chilean Patagonia and all the sheep! Wool? It was everywhere! My boyfriend down there worked as a shepherd for many years. I could have all the fleece I wanted. I did spin some of it and wove it as a plain balanced-weave piece that became the back of a vest. I used the rest of the handspun to knit the front. And then…. I moved to the tropics!

The picture above is from a free e-book entitled The Patagonian Loom, A guide for Beginners the link for which Weaving Southwest shared on Facebook today. It describes the continuing weaving tradition in the southern parts of Chile (not as far down south as where I was living where, unfortunately, I never came across anyone weaving).

It’s a lovely book crammed with pictures with text in both Spanish and English. It gives a short history of the loom and then describes, the spinning, dyeing and weaving processes. It also provides instructions for warping and setting up the loom for projects that are typical of the region…saddle blankets, saddle bags, sashes, even a poncho. Thank you Weaving Southwest for sharing the link!

Look at that gorgeous chunky handspun on the cover of the book which is used for warp-faced weaving on the vertical Patagonian loom. It reminds me of the fabulous yarn that Ace, one of my US friends, spun to weave into a backstrap. I had a lot of fun weaving with that yarn. It looked hairy and scary but wove up beautifully!

Now to get back to the loom and get my hands into that wool warp. Enjoy the e-book with its glimpse of life in the Chilean Patagonia.

Backstrap Weaving – The Positive and the Negative

I have been working a lot with wool this week as I sew pieces of woven wool bands from Cochabamba into little pouches and dress them up with all kinds of pretty finishing techniques. Some of the finishing stitches are easy but they require precision and doing this work increases my admiration for those who do fine embroidery work. I am using wool for my stitching thread.

Working with wool is wonderful but, above all, working with wool is forgiving! This is one of this fiber’s big positive features for me. It fluffs out happily and fills in tricky spaces. Never mind if you didn’t insert the needle the exact same distance from the edge of the woven piece every single time…wool will forgive this…it has a certain rustic look that forgives even if it doesn’t always hide the imperfections. I love it. I am glad that I have spent years getting my “training” using cotton for these sewing techniques. When you switch to wool, it is all so much easier. My indigenous teachers used acrylic when they taught me these things.

I added multi-color cross knit looping to the top edge of this little pouch and wove a strap. You can just see the grey cross knit looped stitch along the right hand edge.

Here you can see the bottom edges of the two pouches on which I have been working this week. The one on the right has been edged with a tubular band and I added what I am calling a “coil stitch” to the bottom of the other…lots of fun to do albeit rather fiddly. I made a braid with a couple of pom poms for one pouch and added tassels to the other. It was fun weaving the strap. I am using just regular knitting wool for these finishes and am not re-spinning or treating it in any way. It stood up wonderfully well for weaving the straps which were woven on 72-inch circular warps.

Note to the pebble weavers out there: can you see the “blip” in the pattern on the pouch on the right? The weaver used the same pebble shed twice instead of alternating them. You see, even the experts get caught sometimes!

And then I played with some decorative joining stitches on some of the left over pieces. That’s where wool really was my friend. It was really hard to count the warps and place the needle accurately on that variegated grey wool. If I had tried this with cotton, it would have looked awful. Wool is Cool! (Too bad that doesn’t really rhyme. But try making it rhyme…it’s kind of funny. Ah, the English language!)

Weaving with wool, on the other hand, is a different story. It can be rather unfriendly depending, of course, on your level of expertise in preparing wool for warp-faced weaving.

If not well prepared, each warp will extend its little hairy fingers to grasp its neighbor and protest loudly as you try to open a shed. Worse still, they will start to break. But, you can learn to deal with that stickiness.

Even if you haven’t learned how to prepare the wool to the state of fine, smooth, even, perfection like the spinners in Chinchero do, there are strategies for dealing with those sticky warps. It can slow things down, and I guess you could call this one of this fiber’s negative aspects. The results, however, are always worth the effort.

Maxima in Cochabamba adds extra twist to her hanspun yarn before winding a warp for a pebble weave band.

Speaking of beauiful handspun, Janet, Ace, Connie and Gina from the Humboldt backstrap weaving gang got together at Ace’s place in amongst the gorgeous redwoods for a weave-along.

It was a chance to practice among friends and lend a hand to those with a little less experience.

Janet and Connie helped Gina and Ace remember how to make string heddles. Ace is working with his own handspun wool and Gina is using Tahki Cotton Classic to make a backstrap. Janet gave Ace tips on how to handle the wool warp and open the sheds smoothly.

Janet and Connie worked on pebble weave projects. Janet, of course, is using her handspun while Connie used 8/2 tencel to make the lanyard for her name tag for CNCH (pictured at left). I imagine that must feel gorgeously silky in that tencel.

And there they were on Ace’s balcony with their warps attached to the railing calling me to join them from Bolivia via Skype! How cool is that?

Above you can see Ace with his wool warp and freshly installed heddles next to Connie’s latest tencel warp…yummy colors!

Janet gets to work on her wool warp while Gina installs heddles on her cotton one. I love that this group is finding time to get together and do this and support each other and I hope that they Skype me every time!

Back at my own loom, I have been sampling supplementary-weft inlay while playing with positive and negative spaces. I showed you in the last blog post how I want to try covering the negative space on a band with supplementary wefts leaving the ground weave exposed to form the motif. So, I have been sampling away and have made some useful discoveries about the changes in weaving width that happen when you do that. This will be something to keep in mind when planning bigger projects later. I have to say that I am loving the way this looks! I am using the 60/2 silk on the Guatemalan cotton warp.

I think I will still try to sew this in to something despite the width inconsistencies. I will just keep on sampling and see when I am done what can be made with it. I am keen on dressing it up as I did the wool pouches but I will use cotton instead of wool for that.

I continued and added a bit of “positive” pattern just to compare.

Now I would like to adapt some Andean warp patterns where both the positive and negative spaces form the same motif and weave those with supplementary wefts.

There are certainly many of those to choose from and I am sure that I can find many on textiles from other cultures too. If you are not sure what I mean, take a look at the motif at left which is from the edge of a belt woven and used by Russian Old Believers.

I will leave you this week with a couple of pebble weave projects.

Larisa has been writing to me via my Andean Pebble Weave Facebook page and sent me pictures of her first pebble weave band using some of the 4 rev patterns from my first book on a wider band. I like the way the hearts look with the border around them. She is going to use this band as the tie for her end loom bar.

And Julia continues to adapt traditional Japanese embroidery patterns to pebble weave. She uses the spotted charting system that I show in my second book to sketch the patterns ready to be woven using the pebble weave structure. Inspiring! Background, pattern, positive and negative spaces merge into a spectacular pattern.

See you next week….