A Few Unconventional Moves…..If I am to talk about some unconventional things that I did at my backstrap loom this week, I think that I would have to first define what is meant by “conventional” in the world of backstrap weaving….an impossible task!

What is normal, or traditional, or conventional in one backstrap weaving community may not be so on the other side of the world or even within the same region or country.

Adding string heddles as one winds the warp, as Montagnard weaver Ju Nie does, would certainly be  looked upon with wonder as something strange and unusual by backstrap weavers here in Bolivia.

The way that many backstrap weavers in Ecuador spread the threads in the shed rod shed over two shed rods is something that I have not seen outside of Ecuador. This makes opening the shed rod shed, with its heavy load of wool warps, easier. You can see the two shed rods in Miguel Andrango’s warp above. Unconventional, you might say, but to weavers like Miguel Andrango, this is perfectly normal. And Mr Andrango is up for a bit “unconventionality” in his weaving  too by using motifs that are not traditional in Otavalan weaving.

The use of a tiny sweet wooden temple on even the narrowest of warps by the Montagnard backstrap weavers is something else that would seem less than normal to many backstrap weavers on this side of the world.

I have yet to see a circular warp being used by backstrap weavers in Bolivia but it is commonplace in Ecuador as is the use of a foot brace.

Burmese weaver Dar Ku weaves her patterns with supplementary weft while facing the wrong side of the cloth. She kept smiling and telling me how easy it is. I wonder what the Guatemalan weavers with whom I have worked, who also work with supplementary wefts, would think of that!

In Ecuador I never saw women weaving wide heavy wool pieces on backstrap looms. This was a task for men. The work is considered too heavy for women, I was told.

In Peru, men do weave at backstrap looms and there are communities where most of the backstrap weaving is in their hands. However, this is the exception rather than the rule.

I wonder what the male Ecuadorian weavers would think coming to Peru and seeing the wide and heavy warps being managed by the female weavers.

I wonder what the belt weavers in Salasaca, who use an enormous meat cleaver type of wooden implement to beat weft into place on their narrow belts with a couple of quick, heavy and powerful slams, would think seeing the way a Bolivian weaver pushes weft firmly into place bit by bit across the wdith of the warp with the tip of a llama bone tool.

All the implements were strange and unusual in my hands the first time. I can’t tell you how many times I forgot to let go of the weft before slamming that meat cleaver tool down….ouch. The llama bone was a bit more subtle but I still ended up with blisters from tightly clenching it and pushing that weft into place with all my strength. My weaving teachers considered tightness of weave to be a very important feature of well made cloth and I was determined to achieve their approval.

On the other hand, it was interesting to watch the gentle tappy-tapping of the beater in Dar Ku’s hands in contrast to the yell of “wham-wham” as Ju Nie showed us how firmly weft should be beaten! Clearly there is no general rule about how firm warp-faced cloth woven on a backstrap loom should feel.

I would love to see my teacher Maxima’s reaction to the set-up and way that weavers in coastal Ecuador add bands to the edges of their fabrics with their wooden rigid heddle that slides from side to sde along the floor to change sheds.

So…conventional? What is conventional in the world of backstrap weaving?

As for my aforementioned “unconventional” moves…let’s just say that I did some things that I haven’t seen backstrap weavers do. Of course, the day will probably come when I see this done somewhere. I have, after all, just scratched the surface of the backstrap weaving world here in Latin America and have had but the slightest glimpse into Montagnard, Burmese and Bhutanese weaving.

I have been finishing off the little supplementary-weft sampler that I have been working on these last couple of weeks. I wanted to get a piece off the loom and make it into a bag to take along as a sample on my next trip. I had experimented with positive and negative space. However, there was still a fair amount of warp left and the Guatemalan cotton is precious to me as I am not sure when or if I will be able to get more. I really didn’t want to waste any of it.

So here is what I did…I wove a dowel into the warp so that I could cut off my little bag piece and continue weaving the left over warp.

I will probably fold that little flap of cloth over the dowel and tack it down and then lash the dowel to a bigger one. I think that should be sturdy enough to allow me to keep weaving. I have to admit that this wasn’t my idea. There was a discussion in one of the online groups where a floor loom weaver wanted to cut off her first towel on a long warp and then continue weaving. Someone said “weave in a dowel”. I am not sure if what I did is in fact what she meant when she said that but it’ was enough to have me wanting to try to “weave in a dowel”. I think it will work!

I still have this Bedouin patterned embedded double weave piece that I cut and then clamped so that I could continue working on it. It is still there….I feel that that the woven-in dowel is a more secure system. We will see. Now I can compare!

Here is the wee pouch that I made with the first part of that warp.

So, the piece of supplementary-weft patterned fabric was cut off the loom. Now to see how best to fold it.

There are the back and front views.  I decided to leave the flap on the front unpatterned as I wanted to edge the whole thing with a tubular band and I thought that things might look a bit too busy with pattern on the flap as well.

However, I thought that it would be cute to have a design on the inside when the flap is open.

And that is another place where I got kind of unconventional.

The design on the inside of the flap had to be on the “wrong” face of the fabric to be in the right position once everything was folded. So, I turned the warp over and wove on the other side leaving the heddles on the back side of the fabric.

I wove the flower head pattern that I had been creating in the negative space at the beginning of the piece. I think it gives a nice touch to this little pouch…a nice little surprise when you open it up.

Folding and then sewing done…it was time to start embellishing.

This is all I have done so far… a ñawi awapa tubular band around the outside. The eyes of the tubular band are red on the back side which matches the predominantly red patterning on that side. I will decide what to do with the tassels at the bottom and whether I should add some kind of finish to the bottom edge. Then there is a strap to be made and a button to be found for the front for some sort of closure.

So, after that experience with flipping the warp upside down and weaving on the other side so easily, I have a clear idea about what to do with the rest of the warp. I am excited to get started on that. I would like to continue with the supplementary-weft patterning but use both sides of the cloth, flipping back and forth, so that the finished piece has completely different patterns on both faces…or perhaps the same motifs but in completely different color schemes. It would need to become a finished product that would  allow both faces to be visible. This, of course, will be the sampler for a “real” project later.

In between sewing and embellishing, I got something else started on a loom. I am preparing demonstration warps for the display at the Spin-In Day at the Mannings on June 8th. Are you coming? I will be setting up with my warps and samples and  weaving away. Come and say hello!

Here is one of the demo warps I have prepared so far. This one is two-heddle intermesh which will have a large Bhutanese labyrinth design taken from David Barker’s first book (see the RESOURCES page for information on this free download).

And if you are tired of seeing red and black today, here is a bit of relief.

I have been recycling some of the many sample warps that I take on the road which end up being a chaotic mix of odds and ends of sample motifs.

I unwove some of them and have several more to go. I am  re-weaving them using the same Andean pebble weave motifs along the length of each.

I can also finish this week’s post with some nice pieces in other color combinations too that were sent to me from online friends.

Larisa patterned her piece that is destined to become her backstrap with pebble weave patterns from my first book.

Gmpicket also sent me a picture of a great pouch that she made  using a design influenced by a belt of the Tarahumara people of Mexico that she saw on my blog. I have two Tarahumara patterns charted in my second book but this is not one of them. I love that brown, yellow and green combination.

So, I will be on the road again as from Wednesday next week. First stop, the Mannings for the Spin-In…hoping for nice weather and lots of people to chat to about backstrap weaving. If you have backstrap weavings to show me, please bring them along! I probably won’t blog next Thursday but will as soon as I can. I hope to meet lots of online friends at ANWG too and reunite with backstrap weaving friends in Humboldt County California. And then there’s a New Mexico adventure in mind… See you soon!

I was on the lookout for a simple pattern to continue my sampler of supplementary-weft patterns and the positive/negative space studies that I have been writing about these past two weeks.

After weaving some patterns based on Bolivian hatbands where the weft is used to fill the space surrounding the motif rather than the motif itself, as seen below, I wanted to weave a motif where the same shape appeared as both motif and background

Several of the classic warp-float designs found in the Peruvian and Bolivian highlands have this very characteristic. In the hook motif pictured at left, it makes no sense to talk about “motif” and “background” as the same hook shape flips and turns and dances along the band changing from red to white and back again. Is it a  series of white hooks on a red background or vice versa or none of the aforementioned?

This was the kind of thing that I wanted to weave with supplementary wefts. So, I set about trying to adapt it to the structure with which I have been working.

As it turns out, it wasn’t that straightforward.

So, I spent a lot of time with paper and pencil and eraser (I still like the old fashioned way). The only way I could get the shapes to interlink well was to make several changes to the basic shape and, even then, the black version of the hook is not exactly the same as the gold one. The gold has an extra warp or two in a couple of places. There was a fair bit of weaving and unweaving involved too. But that’s what “sampling” is all about, right? I had to remind myself about that as I was starting to regret having set myself this challenge as I seemed to be spending more time planning out the design than actually sitting at my loom.

So, there it is. Two sets of gold hooks surround and expose black hooks in the ground weave. I am pretty happy with the way it turned out and hope to play a lot more with this hooky shape.

 Where to go from there and how to best use all the work I put into figuring out those hooks? Chris Buckley writes about pattern building in traditional textiles in his article on warp-ikat weaving of SE Asia:

A further important feature of ikat, and indeed of most traditional textiles, is that weavers tend to use a narrow repertoire of simple shapes such as dashes, hooks and curls, in a ‘building block’ fashion to create their designs. This approach makes understanding and copying complex designs manageable for the weaver, and aids their transmission from generation to generation. Recognition of this repertoire of basic shapes (which I call primitives) is also of considerable help to the researcher with analyzing and comparing motifs between traditions,…..

So, I took one of my many discarded charts of the hook motif and used it as a “building block” for a new design, joining hooks together, reflecting them and flipping them upside down in the same way that many Andean weavers do with their warp-float motifs. The result is the band of red pattern above the gold in which there are four red hooks with just the hint of a black hook outline around them.

What had brought me, yet again, to Chris Buckley’s interesting article was a romp across the internet in search of hook patterns when my initial attempts at charting something suitable for supplementary-weft patterning were not working out. It is so interesting to see how the hooks show up in all sorts of woven structures and cultures. Of course, certain structures only allow a fairly limited repertoire of shapes to be produced and so, regardless of the culture, it is inevitable that a hook motif will appear if those particular structures are in use. Techniques like ikat,  on the other hand, can be used to produce a limitless variety of shapes and patterns.

These pictures by Chris Buckley show hook motifs in various SE Asian warp-ikat textiles.

I have woven the hook motifs used in yurt bands of Central Asia…

I wove the  pieces above and below using the same single-faced warp float structure as the yurt bands. You can see how the basic hook motif can be placed in different ways to create patterns and how dark and light hooks interlink so beautifully…

I have also woven patterns in pebble weave that are loosely based on Central Asian hook motifs…

as well as in supplementary-weft, double weave and supplementary-warp structures…

I enjoy the challenge of adapting a motif woven in one structure to others.

Chris Buckley writes that Indonesian ikat weavers sometimes copy designs, for example, from imported luxury textiles, particularly those from India…

When copying a design from a foreign source, weavers are likely to re-interpret the copied motif in terms of their own vocabulary of basic shapes rather than produce an exact copy. This is analogous to linguistic borrowing, where the pronunciation of a borrowed word may change from one language to another according to the repertoire of sounds available.

My own particular “weaving vocabulary” comprises the various structures that I am able to produce rather than a group of shapes. I have not dedicated myself completely to a study of the patterns of any one weaving region and so have not developed a vocabulary that is limited to certain shapes.

I love it when I see the Bolivian highland design that I call “rolling river” woven by indigenous weavers in both complementary-warp-float and double weave structures. Perhaps a weaver saw and admired this pattern when she traveled to another region and returned home to interpret it in her own weaving vocabulary which, in this case, happened to be a completely different structure. I can only speculate.

I taught Juan to do pebble weave when I was studying in Salasaca, Ecuador. No one in the area was using this structure. It was part of the deal…I teach pebble weave and they teach me to weave their supplementary-warp patterned traditional belts. Eighteen months later when I returned, Juan showed me his finished pebble weave band. Until then, he had not known how to weave at all. His final motif is a rooster which he took from one of the traditional supplementary-warp belts of Salasaca and interpreted in the only weaving “language” he knew…pebble weave. I thought that was brilliant!

Back to the hooks…I like to think of the following  motifs, that I copied from a belt of the Tarahumara people of Mexico, as a “swirling” hooks…

I had not become completely familiar with that swirly hook and made it a part of my vocabulary, as skilled Tarahumara weavers surely would have, before attempting this piece and, as a result, it was very tricky to weave! Just as I got a grip on the swirls going in one direction, they changed to the other direction. It was much easier to weave it using another structure in my weaving vocabulary…double weave…in which it is generally much easier to “read” the cloth. However, I don’t think the pattern is as pretty in double weave….maybe slightly more so in my handspun llama fiber on the right (spearmint leaf and cochineal dye).

And so I go playing with structures and shapes. Even as I sit and look at the last red supplementary-weft hook pattern that I wove on my most recent sampler, I see the motif on the very right hand edge and think…hmmm….wouldn’t that look good on a narrow double-weave band?

By the way, many of the patterns I have shown in this post are charted in my second book.

Here’s one final bit of lovely hookiness before I go. Julia has been using the tutorials in my second book on creating and charting one’s own or adapted patterns in pebble weave.

Here is one of her bands in which she has adapted a tablet weaving pattern to pebble weave and…yes…there are hooks!

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 weaving session.

It was a chance to practice things learned in my workshop 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….

Internet fail yesterday kept me from blogging. All kinds of crazy specials and offers by the phone company here have the whole system on the point of complete saturation. Goodness knows how long it will all keep running before everything comes crashing down. Of course, the phone company tells me that everything is just “fine”.  So, I couldn’t write my blog but, never mind, there is always plenty to do. I got down to doing some more workshop prep for the ANWG  conference in June.

Once again I was immersed in the warm woolly smells and happy colors of the highlands as I took out the beautiful bands made by the weavers in Independencia, Bolivia  from their handspun yarn colored with natural dyes.

I am making samples for a tubular band and embellishments class at ANWG. You know how much I love to dress up little bags and pouches. I am cutting up the bands just as the weavers themselves are doing in Independencia to make cell phone pouches and other such things to sell. So, I have been weaving and sewing tubular bands, braiding and embellishing away and having fun.

Here is one partly dressed-up pouch with a brown and red tubular band, braids and tassels. These projects give me the perfect opportunity to put into practice the many little finishing techniques that my weaving teachers and sling braiding instructor have shown me over the years.

The two-color edging stitch that my sling teacher in Peru taught me for decorating the cradle section of the sling looks lovely along the edge of fabric. I have used it to edge a table runner.

Now that it is not so hot here, it is really nice to feel the wool in my hands. It is also nice to have something off-loom to play with.

On the loom, I have the black demo warp that I took on my last spring tour. I am using the fine Guatemalan cotton which I recently wove into black and purple scarves decorated with supplementary-weft patterns.

As I am still in my supplementary-weft phase, I have been thinking about what to do with this black demo warp. I created it with nothing in particular in mind…just something to show one of the ways in which a warp can be put together for backstrap weaving.

Now I am thinking that since I used patterns based on Bhutanese motifs on the black scarf and Guatemalan inspired patterns on the purple one, I should base the designs on this new project on supplementary-weft patterns from another weaving culture….either Bolivian hatband motifs or the designs used by the Montagnard weavers with whom I studied in the US.

I have a few hatbands that I have gathered over the years. The problem with studying the motifs on these supplementary-weft patterned bands is that the thread that Bolivian weavers use for these is so incredibly FINE!!

What I like about some of the Bolivian hatbands that I have seen is that the supplementary weft is used to fill the negative spaces.

Look at the flower pattern at bottom left on the hatband from Calcha, Bolivia. The ground weave is white and the colored supplementary wefts fill the negative spaces so that the ground weave below is exposed in the shape of a flower. The thread used in that flower band is unbelievably fine….almost like strands of hair! I can’t count the threads and will need to get a magnifying glass to do so. The fineness of the thread means that the weaver has been able to get away with making some very long floats of supplementary weft. As the piece was designed to be worn around a hat, long floats  are not really a problem as it is unlikely that they will catch on things and get pulled.

For my sample piece I have had to modify the pattern to eliminate some of the long floats as my Guatemalan cotton, as fine as it is, is nowhere near as fine as the Bolivian thread.

You can just see the top half of the flower head in my sample as I weave to check the proportions. Look at the difference in size between my sample with my “fine” cotton and the Bolivian band. I think that I will have to re-define “fine”!

The Bolivian weaver has used a colored stripe to border the pattern so that the colored wefts don’t just end “in space”. Besides looking good, this also saves her the trouble of having to count threads to see where the wefts need to dip back down within the shed. I was trying to just eyeball it when I was doing it and found myself one warp thread off the mark many times. So, to weave this, I really need to make a new warp with stripes included or….maybe I can come up with another plan by doing some more sampling.

Hopefully the  sampling will become something acceptable and I will be able to make this little black piece into a pouch with lots of embellishments.

In the Ravelry group, Cindy has been doing pebble weave on a Gilmore Wave loom making what might become a backstrap. The pattern is one that my teacher Maxima taught me and is charted in my second book.

Betsy is making guitar straps on her backstrap loom with her own handspun. Janet is her spinning teacher and Betsy works hard at her spinning every day, so you can imagine that her handspun is really lovely and works beautifully for backstrap weaving.

Jennifer demonstrated how using a coil rod eliminated the annoying corrugated look in her cotton warp and gave a new life to this abandoned project. She then used the warp to create a really interesting solid-color warp-float pattern using a pattern stick and heddles to raise the warps for the floats.

Well, it’s back to sampling on the cotton warp, embellishing the wool pouches and playing some more on the inklette project for the article. My internet is running again and all is “fine”.

Thanks to everyone who wrote with suggestions about the embroidery stitch on the pillow cover from Peru. I think that it would make a nice cover stitch for joins and hope to experiment with it soon.

In the meantime I have also found out that the word used by Spanish speakers for tatting is frivolité….love that word!…and that a few of my online friends do it. I follow the Textile Museum of Oaxaca on Facebook and they are even giving a workshop on it. Let’s see how I can add a bit of frivolité to my weaving!

Reproductions of Wayuu si’ira belts woven by Mirja Wark

I had my heart in my mouth last Sunday night watching the CNN program “Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown”. He was in Colombia! That’s a place where I would dearly like to go although I have to admit it has gotten such bad press that it scares me somewhat. I was hoping to be told what a safe and wonderful place it is and the host did a good job of projecting that. In fact he said that it was the “most welcoming” of all South American countries he had visited.

The part that had me on the edge of my seat was when he went to the Guajira Peninsula, home of the Wayuu people. If you follow my blog you will know that through Mirja Wark’s book, I have been using Wayuu si’ira belt patterns to inspire some of my weaving.

Mr Bourdain wandered through the markets  and I recognized versions of the typical embroidered dress that the Wayuu women wear. Mirja had modeled one for me when I visted her in the Netherlands last year. It was nice to be able to catch these glimpses of life in the market and learn a little about local food.

But, sadly, he didn’t go looking for weavers or for the craftswomen who make the beautiful crocheted susu, or “mochilas”. He and his guide swung in hammocks after a day of ripping along the coastline on noisy four-wheel bikes. Yes, we got to see all that as well as the host falling off his bike on his head but didn’t get to hear anything about the woven hammocks. Too bad.

Fortunately, I found a gentlemen online, Jose Jaime Araujo, who has visited the Venezuelan side of the Guajira Peninsula and who is willing to allow me to share pictures that he took of the textiles and craftspeople there. He visited a market that looked very similar to the one that Mr Bourdain showed on the CNN program. Here you can see Mr Araujo’s guide using one of the susu, the typical crocheted bag, used by both men and women.

Photo by Jose Jaime Araujo

This could easily be a street market in Bolivia except for the beautiful flowing dresses that the women are wearing . I expect the music they are playing (all markets here  in Bolivia jump to the rhythm of various pieces of music clashing merrily together!) is different and you would be hearing the sounds of the Wayuu language. Mr Araujo’s guide acted as his interpreter.

Photo by Jose Jaime Araujo

Imagine….a stick with a hook on the end and talented hands are the only “tools” needed to create such a beautiful piece! I got to see one of these susu, or “mochilas” when I visited Dorothy on my recent US trip. Mirja, in Holland aslo had a fine collection.

I will leave it up to the crochet experts to look at this and understand how it is done!

And below is something for the ply-split braiders…

Mirja told me that the art of weaving the si’ira belts is on the verge of dying out and that she found it almost impossible to find someone who could show here how to do it. The belts are woven on simple vertical looms. Mr Araujo was lucky to find this elderly lady working on the ends of a belt after it it had come off the loom. This is eighty-five-year old Maria Úrsula Ipuana and Mr Araujo describes her as a living legend. She is one of the best Wayuu artisans that knows all the techniques of weaving. Right now she is passing her knowledge to other young Wayuu women.

Photo by Jose Jaime Araujo

You can just make out the “like the nose of a cow”  pattern at the end of the belt, a version of which I used in my wall hanging.

In this next picture Maria Úrsula Ipuana is holding two single loops in her hands and is most likely adding some countered twining to unwoven warp ends.

Photo by Jose Jaime Araujo

You know how I love weft twining! You can see the simple twining in blue and green  at the bottom of Mirja’s belts…

I added a very small and simple version of the twining to the bottom of my Wayuu inspired wall hanging…

You can see how the threads in the first row of white twining are diverted to swap places with the threads in the second row of black twining and then vice versa as the twining proceeds across the warp ends.

Included in Jose Jaime Araujo’s collection of photos are ones of Wayuu women twining across large groups of warp ends which Mr Araujo says will be a hammock.

Photo by Jose Jaime Araujo

How spectacular is that?! This is something I wouldn’t mind trying. Here is another one with white on white…gasp!

Photo by Jose Jaime Araujo

Photo by Jose Jaime Araujo

Photo by Jose Jaime Araujo.

Above, Maria Úrsula Ipuana shows a man’s ceremonial belt, a si’ira that she wove. You can see another stunning example at left and get another look at the weft twining at the end of the belt.

Jose Jaime Araujo’s flickr page has more pictures of the Wayuu people, their environment and crafts which include hat-making.

Thanks to Jose Jaime Araujo, we get to see a little of what Mr Bourdain neglected to show us. In the meantime I will look with a little more confidence at Colombia and maybe Venezuela on that long list of places I would like to visit.

Back here in Bolivia, I am still breaking down that seven weeks of accumulated dust and evacuating some unwelcome spiders. Fortunately, I saw this poem on Facebook, by an anonymous poet, only after my work was mostly done. Otherwise, I may never have done anything at all!

Lots of excuses there!

But, I found that dust I must as I had a visitor last weekend from Australia. Wendy Garrity stopped off in Santa Cruz on her way to the highlands. Wendy spent some time in Bhutan teaching music and learned to weave at a weaving center there.

When I was trying to figure out the Bhutanese supplementary-weft chain-stitch technique by studying textiles from Bhutan in friends’ collections and online, I was able to find a piece of missing information about the spacing of the pattern warps from Wendy’s blog. That enabled me to make the scarf, at left, using traditional and adapted Bhutanese patterns

When I found that last piece of crucial information on her blog, I told Wendy that I had wanted to jump through the computer and hug her. That saved me a lot of trial-and-error.

Well, who knew that she would turn up in my home and get that hug for real?!

We spent two days chatting in “Australian”. I always like feeding backpackers who have either been living off cheap greasy cafe and bus terminal food or noodles that they cook up on camping stoves by the side of the road. It makes my simple cooking seem like something wonderful!

We poured over the Bhutanese patterns in David Barker’s books and Wendy told me the names and meanings of many of them. We talked about our travels through Asia…mine having taken place mostly in the mid eighties to early nineties and involved mostly trekking up and down mountains. Wendy’s travels in Asia have been about working and looking at textiles.

We shared what being away from Australia for extended periods of time is like. I have been living outside Australia for 20 years now!

I taught her a simple Andean pattern on a narrow band so that she could take it along with her on her travels. It is a complementary-warp pick-up technique which will give her a little insight into some of the textiles that she will see on her way through  Bolivia and Peru.

While Wendy wove her tanka ch’oro pattern, I set up to weave with my friend Janet’s gorgeous handspun wool.

 This yarn came from a basketful which Janet invited me to dive into and sample. So, I made up a short warp for the intermesh technique. I weave it as a two-heddle method and teach it in my second book.

I have to tell you that Janet’s yarn is just wonderful to weave with. I have spun llama fiber that I bought here in Bolivia (very dry and coarse stuff it was!) and some beautiful alpaca fiber that Janet gave me. I carded the fiber to prepare it for spinning on my drop spindle. I spun the llama fiber very tightly but tried not to overspin the alpaca. While I was happy with the results, I knew that on a very long warp my handspun would probably start to break quite frequently.

Above you can see my handspun llama in pebble weave and double weave projects.

My handspun alpaca lay happily flat when not under tension but this is just a teeny tiny warp…just enough for a cell phone pouch… so, who knows if the yarn would have stood up to a longer project.

Janet combs her wool rather than cards it and the yarn she offered me had been spun on a wheel. I don’t believe that her yarn is anywhere near as prone to breakage as my llama yarn was. Janet’s yarn is wonderfully smooth and resilient without being overtwisted and kinking back on itself. It is perfect for warp-faced weaving and produces fabric that almost lies perfectly flat.

It tilts ever so slightly at opposite corners but I have to tell you that sometimes the bands that I weave with Tahki Cotton Classic twist more than this band I made with Janet’s wool! I used a very simple intermesh pattern just to test the wool. The weft is a light gray fine commercial wool. You can see my teacher Maxima’s bands corkscrewing nearby. Those band were woven using Maxima’s handspun as both warp and weft.

You can see a little twist in the unwoven brown warps below but there is certainly none of the furious kinking back that one often sees in yarn spun for warp-faced weaving.

I love the neat third selvedge that working with wool produces.

And that is all I have done with my backstrap loom since getting home ….that darned dusting!)  But, I have been busy with my inkle loom. Why? Because I am writing an article. My wee inklette is one of the dust-covered items that needed taking down from the shelf. Now it is warped up and is being posed all around the place for photographs. I have to admit that sometimes I wish I had a bigger heavier inkle loom. If the article ends up on a printed page, I will tell you all about it!

There was sudden flurry of activity in the Ravelry group right at the end of a pretty quiet month and I have a bunch of things to show but will save most of it for next week.

Let me show just a couple of things for now…

Bobbie posted a tiny image of the ergonomic bench for backstrap weaving that she built following the instructions that Synergoarts has put online. It looks like she has done a perfect job and we hope to see a large picture of her using it soon.

Bethan, in Scotland, sent me a pretty spring picture of the warping board she built following pictures of Guatemalan warping boards that I have posted here. The warping boards that I saw in Guatemala all looked like this in various sizes. To keep the set-up compact for long warps, the warp is extended to one end and then turns a corner and comes back to the starting point.

There I was thinking that this system is  unique to Guatemalan weavers when I remembered that Sasha, who took a class wth me in Portland last year, learned to weave with cotton in the Piura region of Peru. She shared pictures with me of the warping set-up her teacher used in her home.

I am sure that those stakes are very firmly beaten into the ground so that they won’t lean as warping progresses. They look like they may be permanently positioned there. This weaver  sets up two crosses as she warps as the Guatemalan weavers do.

Here is Sasha’s friend settling down to work on her cotton warp. Sasha brought her unfinished weaving to my class to get some tips. She had set it aside and had forgotten how to operate it and her string heddles had gotten really messy. She found a moment during my class to play on her Piura warp.

Amy sent me a picture of her home-made rigid heddle which she is using to weave a band. She wants to teach her children to weave with this as well as give Guatemalan children, who are residents on the US and who participate in a Latin American Cultural group,  a simple hands-on weaving experience.

And adventures with the famous coil rod continue in the Raverly group. Julia is using one on her single plane warp and loving it. (I have only seen it used so far on circular warps). I had been waiting to question Wendy about Bhutanese circular warps and how the coil rod is applied. After having watched a video of Leki Wangmo warping and weaving, I had some questions and now have them answered. Yes, the story of the “curious coil rod” continues to unfold! I will tell you more next time.

I am jumping between winding warps for the next teaching trip, cutting and hand sewing bands for the next teaching trip, playing with my inkle loom, photographing the inkle loom and drawing charts, writing an article, braiding , braiding and braiding warp ends and backstrap weaving. Oh, and yes, a little bit of dusting and armchair travel.

Let me leave you with Marge’s beautiful belt…woven on an inkle loom but it serves as great inspiration for a backstrap project and the buckle she has used solves all those problems of cutting a slit in the the band and making holes that a regular belt buckle requires.

Back home in Bolivia! My cat seems to have enjoyed her stay away in my absence in a home of Death Metal music fans… a noisy and action-packed home which also includes two kids and two parrots. She appears to need to sleep off all that excitement and has spent much of the last two days flat on her back with legs in the air, dead to the world.

Picture by Annie MacHale

As for me…I need a rest after all the excitement too! Was it really a whole seven weeks ago that I arrived in California and wove with my Santa Cruz group? We had a very productive three days weaving supplementary-weft patterns and learning the intermesh technique and spent one relaxing afternoon studying images and videos of South American backstrap weavers.

My trip ended in the same area with a three-day Basics workshop with a group from the Black Sheep Weavers Guild (at left) A three rather than two-day class gave us a chance to spend almost a whole day learning some of the basics of Andean pebble weave. It was great to meet up with my Ravelry friend, Cookie, once again. She had taken a class with me in Humboldt County two years ago and brought along the pebble weave backstrap that she had woven for herself in the meantime.

This is a great example of taking one of the simple 4-revolution patterns from my first book and expanding it by weaving it side by side as a reflection of itself. Cookie also added some other small elements which made the pattern unique. It was almost impossible to recognize the orignal 4-revolution motif. I love it when people create their own pebble weave designs. This is a great way to approach it – with baby steps – first adapt and enhance an existing design and from there go on to create a motif that is entrely your own.

On the first day, we used sticks to help pick up threads and pass the supplementary wefts with which we had been working. Cookie saw my Guatemalan pick-up stick and went home on the first night to create her own from chopsticks! See the original chopsticks on the right and then several versions of the pick-up stick that Cookie made.

Days were spent weaving in Barbie’s home and I enjoyed my evenings staying with my host, Kathleen. I got to stay in her cottage weaving studio in the garden and listen to the soothing sound of  the waterfall in the forest below. Kathleen’s home is decorated with textiles from Hungary, her husband’s homeland. Here are just a few of them.

The felt piece at top left comprises layers of wafer-thin pieces of felt using applique and reverse applique techniques. A Google search result tells me that this particular design falls into the category of Great Plain motifs, the Great Plain being the central plain of the Carpathian Basin. The motif dates back to the 18th century where it was first seen on the wool cloaks of the Hungarian shepherds.

I then uncovered a website which is a gold mine of information on embroidery techniques when I googled about Hungarian embroidery. This site is amazing! I will leave you to explore it. I will certainly be returning to it to learn more.

I can see myself doing embroidery one day should there come a time when I can’t weave with a backstrap loom anymore. As long as my eyesight is up to it!

I spent a fun afternoon with my weaving friend Dorothy before I met with the Black Sheep folk. We went to an exhibit of Indian textiles at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. It was a hands-on afternoon where we got to learn a little about Kantha embroidery. It was  an introductory session that any embroidery novice could handle just to get a taste as it is based on a simple running stitch. I attempted to embroider a classic paisley motif which is a mango shape. if I ever get it finished I shall show it to you.

We also got to play a little with hand-cut Indian wood blocks which are used to print designs on cloth. You can see the paisley pattern above. I think the wood blocks are a work of art in themselves. I also learned that you need to put some thought into the layout of the deisgn before stamping away like mad. I made a chaotic horrid mess!

I would love to know what embroidery stitch was used to create this piece that Dorothy bought from a Peruvian handcraft website.

The yarn was so fluffy that it was very difficult to isolate the path of the threads. The stitch had a braided look to it. I would love to know how to do it. Can anyone help?

At Gloria and Terese’s home, on my last night in the US, I saw this piece of Palestinian cross stitch embroidery that they had collected. I would love to know about the motif in the center. One pattern has been repeated from top to bottom while being rotated 90 degrees. Does anyone know about this motif and what it might represent? For more about these embroideries and the women who create them, take a look at this beautifully made site which has been put together with the support of the Red Cross of Iceland.

And, as always happens, when I learn a little about a new craft, examples of it seem to just fall out of the sky into my hands where ever I go! Not embroidery….tatting! One of the participants in the Indian texiles workshop was a tatter and showed me her work in progress. The larger of the two pieces will be a baby’s cap. I am in awe! Thank you, Vonnie, for teaching me to tatt.

And then I was chatting with Rachel, the barber, in an old barber shop in downtown Santa Cruz California while staying with my weaving friend Annie (I had created a bangs emergency when I got over enthusiastic while cutting my own). The result of that encounter is this…

Rachel had recently got these as part of a big purchase of sewing supplies at an estate sale and was happy to pass them on to me. I think I had better get a-tatting! I like the metal one the best with the wee hook on its ponited end. Now the challenge is to see how simple tatting can be applied to my weaving. My online weaving friend Carol, who lives in Nicaragua, told me that this same idea also recently occurred to her. I would probably use wool instead of the super fine thread that is usually used for tatting.

From embroidery to tatting and now back to a wee bit of backstrap weaving.

You may remember the discontinuous-warp piece that I got to play on. I wrote about it in my last post and have written several posts, like this one, about the technique.

I need to point out that this warp is not mine to keep. I was simply put in charge of transporting it from Yonat to Dorothy, its new owner, and my fee for the service was being allowed to play on it a bit! In any case, Dorothy needed a hand getting it going and I was happy to be of help.

This warp was used in a workshop on the ticlla technique that was given by Nilda Callañaupa in the US in 1997 and the project was never finished. Dorothy and I both had a lot of fun playing with it.

I wove from the end that had been started in the workshop and got the weaving on the other end established so that Dorothy could continue. Of course all the sticks are really too long for this project but this was the way it had been set up in the workshop and we didn’t see any reason to change things.

You can see that the warp has been turned around and there is Dorothy with the llama bone tool in hand beating in the weft.

Dorothy was kind enough to give me a home for a few days between workshops and there was precious little time to weave this together as Dorothy teaches art during the day. Coming home from a tiring day teaching art to children is not really a good way to face a tricky piece of weaving. So, while Dorothy was at work, I removed the dovetail stick in the center that holds everything together. A thick piece of thread remained behind in place of the stick. Then the join had to be stabilized by weaving on each side of it as you can see above. It is now up to Dorothy to finish the piece.

She will continue to weave until it is impossible to open the sheds any more using the shed rod and heddles. Before she gets to that point she will be able to make things a little easier by using a thinner shed rod and passing the weft on a needle. The final stage will have her needle-weaving, picking up every other thread on the blunt end of the needle so that she can create a shed and pass the final wefts shots. She will have to do this on both sides of the center as each panel is a separate four-selvedge piece connected by the central dovetail join.

I enjoyed the chance to weave with the beautiful, beautiful handspun yarn that Nilda brought with her from Peru. It was so lovely to be able to bring this weaving back to life again sixteen years after it had been started. Yonat, who has been holding this warp since the workshop, wrote to me to tell me about its owner who has since passed away…

I thought I would tell you about the loom:

The name of the previous owner was Jean Davidson.  She was an amazing artist, curious to no end with an amazing sense of color and structure.

Her unique talent was her chenille-style quilts. She was an awesome lady, and I just feel like her energy is bubbling in that project that you guys are playing with.

 

Yonat also gave me a link to a site which shows the quilts that were part of an exhibit held in Santa Cruz in 2008 called Dreaming the Earth in which Jean participated.

The pieces in the show were inspired by creation stories from 

the indigenous peoples of Australia to honor the Arboretum’s Australian 

garden.  Most of the stories upon which they based their quilts were drawn

from a collection of Australian Aborigonal folklore by K. Langloh Parker 

(Australian Legentary Tales, 1997) available online (http://www.sacred-

texts/aus/alt/index.htm)  Abbreviated versions of these stories may be found next to the photographs of each of the quilts.

 

The quilts are beautiful and the stories delightful. It is really worth taking a look at the site. How nice to be able to weave on this piece that Jean started.

 

If you are wondering about Dorothy’s set-up for weaving that I showed earlier, let me tell you more.

 

She had that built following instructions by my online friend Sharon on her blog. Sharon is really talented when it comes to DIY and improvisation and she told me about a cool seat, foot rest and warp hitching post that she made so that she could sit on the floor with her back against the sofa and weave. I posted the link here, Dorothy saw it and had it made. I got to try it and it is very cool. I like being able to brace my feet against something although I am wondering about the strength of the foot brace. There it is again above with one of my demo warps in place and a cushion on the seat for extra comfort.

Meanwhile, Bobbie from the Ravelry Backstrap Weaving Group reports that she has bought, for around $30, all the parts necessary for making the ergonomic bench  for backstrap weavers according to the plans put online by Synergo Arts.

 

We all looking forward to seeing how that turns out.

You can find plans for the bench with instructions on how to use which include a video here.

 

Other interesting textiles that I saw on this trip…

Mark from the Black Sheep guild brought a woven cotton saddlebag to show me. It is from the Piura region of Peru and I had never seen anything like it before…the jaw-dropping diversity of Peruvian weaving!

 

The red and black designs are warp patterns. The other colors that fill in parts of the main motifs are supplementary wefts. I love it when warp float patterns and supplementary wefts are combined this way and have only seen that once in an old Mexican belt. The tails of the supplementary wefts were left hanging out on the inside of the saddlebag pockets. There is a similar piece on this site which is dated at 1930-39.

 And, this is a four-selvedge piece!

If you look very closely a little way above the paper label you will see where the very last weft shot would have been needle woven into place. Thinking about doing a four-selvedge piece with cotton makes my hair stand on end! I tried it once….maybe one day I will try again!

 

I have more to show but will leave it here for this week. Let me end with Jennifer taking up the love of the curious coil rod. She placed one on a band which had started its life on her inkle loom. After transferring it to her backstrap loom she was disappointed to see that it had developed a serious ridging problem…that old corrugated cardboard thing that I have discussed here many times and have finally managed to conquer.
 
Coil rod to the rescue! More about that next week…

This is going to be a beautiful guitar strap!

 

Well, it’s back to cleaning seven weeks of accumulated dust and getting things in order. Hopefully, I will be back at my loom soon.

What do I like about my teaching tours?   One of the best things about teaching for me is how much I manage to learn myself from my interaction with my students. And, there are many other things about teaching that I love, both tangible and intangible. Let me try to list at least some of the things that make teaching such a wonderful  experience…..

1.Receiving a picture like this via email shortly after a class:

Karen, who took my Andean Pebble Weave class in Austin Texas last month, sent this picture to show me what she has been up to since then. She completed the bands that we started in class and wove more bands as she continues to work her way through my book. Not that many people rush home and weave and get to this point so quickly but it is just the simple fact that she wanted to show me what she has been doing and keep in touch that makes me really happy.

2.Getting a picture from an onlooker who captures the interest and delight on students’ faces while I am busy presenting samples and explaining:

This picture of (from left to right) Karen, Nan, Laura and Stephanie in Sacramento was taken by Franco. I miss some of these little moments while I have my eyes on the textiles.

3.Getting to spend “fiberholic” evenings with my hosts, while chatting and cluttering up the place with WEAVING STUFF:

My Sacramento host, Vonnie, sits back at home with a very interested onlooker to weave a little on the band that we started in class.

Vonnie showed me how she makes her tablet weaving a “weave anywhere any time” craft. As always, I am happiest on the floor.

I have a stretchy hair band around my neck to which the band is attached (this is just in case you are not wearing a belt to which you can attach) and the other end is hooked to my shoe lace. It was very comfortable!

4.Reconnecting with old students who have now become dear friends:

That’s Annie and Barbara tackling a skein of hemp (next to Ginna) at the meeting of the Santa Cruz Handweavers Guild. Annie and Barbara and other Santa Cruz ladies take a class with me every year. They were my first group on this trip and here I am back with them to just hang out for a few days between gigs. We will probably see that beautiful rusty red hemp woven into one of Annie’s gorgeous one-of-a-kind inkle woven guitar straps soon.

5.Meeting lots of fun and enthusiastic people who are interested in something about which I am passionate – backstrap weaving and South American textiles – and helping them to perhaps realize a dream or simply enjoy spending a weekend trying something completely different:

Stephanie, Betsy and Vonnie have just made their first set of string heddles and are putting their newly acquired skills to work  on a narrow band.

6.Having the opportunity to spend time with long-time online friends who have been so helpful, supportive and fun for years. If you are part of any fiber-related online weaving group, you are bound to know Franco Rios!:

7.Putting faces to my more recent online acquaintances:

Laura is a fairly new member of the Ravelry Backstrap Weaving Group and we look forward to seeing more of her. She and her mother, Nan signed up to take the class in Sacramento.

8.Exchanging ideas and learning new skills:

Vonnie knows tatting and now…., so do I! The picture above is, of course, of Vonnie’s fine work. However, I am rather proud of the way mine is coming along in both fine cotton and wool.

Vonnie gave me a shuttle to take away and showed me how pospsicle sticks can do the trick nicely as well. When practicing with the heavier wool yarn, it is very easy to use the yarn straight off the ball rather than place it on any kind of shuttle. However, you can’t help enjoying looking elegant holding the wee shuttle daintily between thumb and forefinger.

Vonnie taught me to make cord using a lucet (the wooden instruments seen on the left) and I taught her to make a braid using a piece of cardboard and the fill-the-gap technique, something I learned thanks to the ladies of the Braid Society that I met while in the UK. Here is a close-up of my cord and Vonnie’s braid:

And, there are also surprising connections to other Ravelry group members. Vonnie showed me the sweetest homemade rigid heddle that group member Janet had made for her using a sushi mat. It is touching to see how many firm behind-the-scenes friendships form between members of the Ravelry groups.

And that is the pretty lucet that Vonnie gave me!

9.Coming to class on Day Two and finding that people did homework! I don’t ask them to. (knowing that I haven’t sent everyone home completely exhausted is always good):

Laura, Caroline, Vonnie and Betsy admire bands on the morning of Day Two that had grown in length overnight. Some of the patterns the ladies wove were of their own invention without the use of charts. Seeing that skill develop makes me exceedingly happy!

10.Having a new student come to class and show me what she has managed to learn at home, either by using the free tutorials on this blog, or by following my books:

That’s Caroline with a pebble weave band she has been weaving at home.

11.The trust and support that develops among the class participants as a workshop progresses. Folks applaud and encourage each other and, with this support, are able to accept little mistakes and mishaps with good humor: 

Team warping: that’s Janet on the left with Caroline in the center warping under the watchful eye of her warping partner, Stephanie. This is where I get a chance to stand right back and enjoy watching how people work and solve problems together.

12.Seeing a first-time-ever weaver being nurtured by the rest of the group, taking to it and having fun and seeing the movements used by everyone…experienced weavers and beginners alike… to open the sheds and operate the loom become increasingly automatic and relaxed:

There’s new weaver Karen working at opening the sheds. She soon learned that a sweater on her lap made a great tool tray.

Here’s “Team Backstrap Sacramento” enjoying the sun during lunchbreak. California really put on some spectacular spring weather for us. Many thanks to the guild and Betsy and Franco for all their help in putting this together. Franco kept us entertained with various bird-spottings during class. We were working right by a large open door and could enjoy the outdoors without being out in the harsh sunlight.

13.Understanding a little more about people’s different learning styles with each and every class that I teach.

14.All the cool stuff I get to do and see and the cool people I get to hang out with between gigs. Like…

…a) roaming around the redwoods….

…b) admiring and exploring local sites such as the only building left of the mission in Santa Cruz established in 1791. That building would look very much at home in downtown Santa Cruz, Bolivia with its white adobe walls, wooden pillars and red tile roof. Many buildings where I live resemble this one although most are in a state of advanced decay with tropical greenery threatening to take them over….

…c) seeing other kinds of weaving and sometimes meeting their makers. I had the wonderful luck of being able to examine a tapestry in progress by Zapotec weaver Sergio Martinez. He weaves and shows his work in Old Folsom just down the road from Vonnie’s place. Unfortunately, Sergio had just left for the day when we arrived but I wrote to him to ask permission to show his weaving here and we have been corresponding. The piece in progress is an image from the Aztec codices. Sergio’s woven themes, as far as I could see, are very different to those used by Zenon and Jaime Hipolito whom I visited earlier in this trip. It was very interesting to see how widely the work of  Zapotec weaving artists can vary.

…d) learning about other textile arts such as the art of stitched shibori at a workshop give by Rachelle Weiss at the Santa Cruz Handweavers Guild. Dyeing expert Kris Nardello assisted. It is a technique that historically was largely practiced in Japan and is a way to decorate cloth using dye-resist techniques.

The workshop was very well attended. Rachelle’s instruction and inspiring samples created a lot of excitement and chatter which made it a really fun morning. Participants learned three kinds of stitching techniques, some of which also involved folds, for creating wood grain, undulating lines and circular patterns. Everyone will return in June to complete their projects by pulling the stitiches to ruffle and pucker the cloth and then placing the pieces of fabric in the dye bath. I will have to take my kit home and play with it there….

It was fun to go on from there and find shibori-like fabric (at least to me eye!)  used for a dress in one of the trendy clothing stores along the main street of downtown Santa Cruz (pictured above).

A couple of days later, I visited with Barbara from the Santa Cruz group and she showed me a gorgeous piece of shibori cloth that she had created and sewn into a garment.

She had used techniques that we had not seen in the workshop. Rather than creating areas of resist and then dyeing the fabric, she applied bleach instead. You can see how leaves were placed on the black fabric and then bleach was sprayed around creating the reddish background. Pieces were clamped to the cloth to create the bar-like patterns which I think look like sticks of bamboo.

The fabric has been used to create a jacket with simple twisted yarn ties for closures. That was in Barbara’s pre-braiding days. Now she will be able to replace those simple ties with some kind of fabulous braided tie using her takadai or marudai skills. Here are some of her examples created on the marudai and takadai…

My day spent at Barbara’s was her regular twining get-together with Yonat. Both Yonat and Barbara are regulars in my Santa Cruz backstrap weaving classes and it was nice to see what they had learned when Ravenstail twining expert Cheryl Samuel visited the area to give a workshop. You know how much I love twining! A Google search tells me that Ravenstail is a type of twining and surface braiding that was used by native Americans along the Pacific Northwest coast to create dance aprons, blankets and robes.

Barbara had obviously been very much absorbed with this since the workshop last fall as she has already made these three adorable pouches since then…

I learned a few tricks while Yonat and Barbara worked for making the ending of the twining neater. The basic technique of twisting the “wefts” and changing colors is the same as the technique I use to create the twined patterns that I use on my backstrap weavings. However, there are many specialised moves involved with creating the patterns that you see above with their outlines and embellishments.

Yonat and Barbara are each working on a project to make traditional leggings. This is Yonat’s piece. The working frame alone is a thing of beauty. Barbara’s husband made hers and Peggy’s husband made a few for various members of the group.

Look at the  inlay work created by Peggy’s husband! What you are seeing there is the lid of a tool box that he cleverly incorporated into the basic framework. The frame comes apart easily so that Yonat can pick up her work and take it home at the end of her study day with Barbara.

And, while the ladies were twining, I got to weave on a discontinuous-warp project that was part of a workshop given to members of the Santa Cruz guild by Nilda Callañaupa way back in 1997! This particular piece was not touched after the workshop and its owner has since passed away. Yonat has been keeping it and is now passing on to another of our backstrap group members, Dorothy. On its way to Dorothy, it fell into my lap and I just had to weave on it! I will be spending this weekend with Dorothy and we will get to play with this together.

I hadn’t taken a backstrap to Barbara’s place and so just used a piece of cord. It was pretty comfortable, believe it or not! The wool yarn was quite friendly and I got quite a bit woven before lunch. What was unusual for me to see was that this had been warped to include complementary-warp pick-up patterning. All the discontinuous-warp pieces that I have had the luck to examine so far have been either plain warp-faced weaving or patterned with supplementary warps.

The horizontal bars that you see above tell us that the piece was warped for complementary-warp pick-up. Yonat, who also took the workshop back in 1997 remembers having woven a double-faced hooked “s” pattern on her piece. Barbara was also in that workshop and neither of them have worked on their pieces since. I am happy to report that they now feel those unfinished pieces calling to them and, hopefully, they will get motivated to get back to work on them with confidence sixteen years after the original workshop. (By the way, the piece is posed on top of Yonat’s latest clasped weft project in which she used the technique to create a beautiful landscape.)

It was interesting to see how the two colored warp threads in the pattern area were carried while warping. You can see that they were wound together as one thread. They were then separated into two sheds when the heddles were installed.

So….on one short visit with a couple of my students (now, very dear friends) I learned about SO much!…shibori techniques, ravenstail techniques and a bit more about warping for discontinuous-warp projects.

…e) getting ideas from weaving friends and the fun stuff they have lying around.

I saw a bunch of very long wool tablet-woven bands overflowing from a basket in Annie’s living room. Annie acquired these after a deceased guild member’s belonging were given away at a meeting. Each band is ten feet long. Who knows what the weaver’s intention was for these but I am seeing some kind of interlaced project along the lines of the fabulous weaving bench cover I showed here some weeks ago.

The colors are so rich and appealing. What if these were laid out vertically and interlaced with sandy colored bands running horizontally….oh, yes!

Let me show you what Jennifer Williams, aka inkledpink, made by interlacng some inkle-woven bands…

So, what do I love about my teaching tours? What’s NOT to love?!

I have one more teaching gig to go in sunny California before heading home. Thanks to all who ordered the print version of my second book during this visit. I may be able to squeeze in a couple more mailings if you order now. If not, I will be back in June.

Oh give me a home,

Where the sheep roam,

And the yarn grows on trees…

There have been two stops on my tour since I last wrote…one in Austin, Texas and another in Humboldt County in California. Above you can see luscious skeins of Janet’s handspun at her home in Humboldt that I strung up in a tree after a day of dyeing. Janet used these natural substances…

…as well as indigo in an old vat.

And then there is Lydia’s sculpture wich spans branches in her yarny yard in Texas. It is a patio and garden space that whispers serenity and begs for exploration with plenty of benches and seats tucked in shady spots around every corner on which to sit and simply ponder.

Here’s her garden loom dressed up to greet the spring…

And she brings the colors of spring, the desert and the garden into her home covering her walls and banisters with her own woven art.

That’s Lydia in the center with my Austin host Eileen. Eileen hosted me in Austin last year too and we met again in Manchester UK at Braids 2012.

Driving up to Lydia’s home, you get a hint of what is to come within the home and beyond when you see the weaving that stretches between the front porch posts. Lydia would love to host a backstrap weaving workshop in her home and I think that weaving in her garden would be heavenly!

Speaking of heavenly spots, here is the pebble weave workshop from last weekend in northern California…

Ace and Pam of Ace ‘n the Hole Romneys offered their home for our class. You can see that neither the weavers nor the weaving are  the feature of this particular shot…instead, it’s that amazing view through the glass of the redwood forests and mountains!!

And, while wee resin sheep figures roam in Lydia’s Texan garden…

Ace’s romney’s, whose fleeces have won many ribbons at fairs on both the east and west coasts, roamed the hillsides. Meanwhile,  indoors, we wove pebble weave on backstrap looms.

Ace is a prolific spinner and is finally fulfilling his dream to weave with his handspun having just bought a pre-loved Glimakra counter-balance loom which we put together with Janet at the helm.

Ace and  Janet playfully tease and compete with each other at local fiber fair speed spinning contests. I won’t tell you who wins.

There’s Janet seen through a curtain of heddles on the floor tying up “stuff” (you can tell that I know next to nothing about these kinds of looms!) to get Ace’s loom up and running.

Looking at these things I am  amazed at how people sigh and roll their eyes at the masses of string heddles on my backstrap loom when floor loom weavers have to contend with all those heddles and shafts and treadles!

Nine weavers got together at Ace’s place for a weekend of pebble weave. Two wooden pillars in the living room gave us the perfect places for attaching the looms. We had that beautiful view to enjoy while weaving and when we took breaks.

It was fun to see the  bevy of bands accumulating around the posts as the pick-up weaving skills developed and patterns started to take shape.

Betsy and Janet’s pebble weave bands alongside some other pick-up work that we had done during the week.

As our bands filled with motifs, the mist would eerily rise and fall over the trees and hills. The sheep would run and scatter at a sudden roll of thunder and the wild turkeys would come out to strut their stuff.

The previous weekend had been spent doing a backstrap basics workshop in Janet’s mill.

On the right you can see Priscilla and Rose whose families are from Ecuador and Peru. Both were excited about learning a skill which has its roots in their South American heritage. Some of these participants also joined us at Ace’s for pebble weave the following weekend.

That left a week between to have fun in Janet’s mill.

Janet showed me what she is currently processing in her mill. While the machinery does its stuff, Janet and Betsy can spin and weave. Betsy learned to spin and weave with Janet and you can see the band she is weaving on her backstrap loom using her handspun. This band will participate in our Year of the Snake Weave-Along.

Janet is just as much at home spinning fine and smooth yarn for backstrap bands, a different weight and quality for blankets and then something completely different yet again for rugs.

While working in the mill she can jump from a backstrap loom to her huge Glimakra floor loom, from her wheels to  drop spindles from wool to silk as the mood takes her. Pretty much every weaving project no matter what size or what loom, involves her own handspun.

Betsy also creates beautiful pieces of fabric with her handspun which she sews into lined shoulder bags. She weaves the straps on on backstrap loom.

I taught Betsy and Janet an Andean pick-up pattern during the week and then Connie came over for a private class with Janet on the intermesh technique.

Connie weaves all kinds of bands and braids and brought her band box over to show her takadai work as well as her inkle loom-woven bands.

There’s always something good and fibery going on in Janet’s mill and, with its heated floors, it is definitely the place to hang out on chilly mornings and evenings. Fleeces, handspun yarns, rolags and batts spill from the shelves. Half-woven backstrap bands dangle from shelves loaded with books on all kinds of fiber arts and crafts.

Every second Saturday night, the looms are pushed aside and chairs are pulled up all around for Honky Tonk evening. I was lucky to be there for one of those when eleven local musicians, including Janet and her husband Larry, gathered for an evening of jamming….two upright bass, a flute and clarinet, mandolins and guitars, an Irish drum, and spoons!

I got to help rescue a large handspun and naturally dyed ikat project that Janet had started on her backstrap loom. It had been left to languish on the UFO (unfinished object) pile when Janet got a little frustrated with trying to open the sheds.

You can see the gorgeous colors she obtained from madder, onion skins and onion skins overdyed with madder. She wrapped the yarn to create rectangular ikat patterns. The problem was that she had pulled the weaving in too much and that was making the sheds almost impossible to open as the warps were pushed together so tightly. I was itching to get into this project!

Once the width had been re-established and some broken warps repaired, I got out my wichuña, the llama bone tool which is used by weavers in Bolivia to strum the warps and separate them. This makes opening the shed-rod shed easier.

The wichuña is also used to push the weft into place. Janet will be able to use a deer antler that she has.

I found that standing to weave this piece made opening the sheds easier. I had seen weavers of wide warps in both wool and cotton standing to weave in Peru and thought that I would try it. I think that having the warp angled slightly upward as well as having one of the large butt-cradling backstraps that I saw the weavers using would have made things a little more comfortable. I am not saying the sheds now pop open magically. There is a technique to apply and you still have to work at getting the sheds cleared.

I was so happy to have had the opportunity to try this.

After all this wooliness, let’s go back to Austin Texas with its vastly different climate. It isn’t one that begs for wool much the same as Santa Cruz, Bolivia where I live. I often look with envy at the lovely socks that people knit and thick wool scarves that they weave. But, who can complain when there is so much beautiful cotton to be played with!

Here we are in Eileen’s home shopping for yarn during a break in the pebble weave class. We had Sue Ellen of Old Oaks Ranch Fiber Arts Center taking the class as an added bonus and I asked her to bring her skeins of Cascade Ultra Pima.

This cotton yarn comes from Peru and we called Cascade Yarns to check if it is mercerized. It has such a lovely sheen that we thought that it must be even though the label does not indicate so. It turns out that it is.

Eileen had used it to make her backstrap (pictured above) and it came out beautifully.

I am going back to Bolivia with three skeins to try out for myself.

Of course, it wasn’t all shopping. Here are some of the participants concentrating on using their new pebble weave skills.

It was nice to see some familiar faces in the group. Karen, at left, had taken my Backstrap Basics class at the Mannings and just happened to have a business trip to San Antonio planned which happily coincided with this class. Susan, in the green top, had taken my Basics class last year in Austin. Penny was also a returning student. Mary, pictured next to Susan, was new to this group and backstrap weaving and had been brought up to speed by Eileen, our host, who conducted a refresher/starter session for would-be participants prior to this one.

I teach pebble weave as an intermediate-level class which means that participants need to be already familiar with basic backstrap loom set-up and operation. This enables us all to get a lot more out of the class. Many thanks to Eileen for all the effort she made to make this class a great success.

I think I was lucky to have a full class considering that it took place during Austin’s famous SXSW Music and Film Festival. There was also a very good turn-out for my slide show at the guid meeting. I was astounded afterwards to look online and see all the big names that had been performing at the festival. Eileen and Guy took me out on Saturday evening to stroll through the downtown parks and soak up some of the festival atmosphere.

After visiting Lydia’s home and magical garden, Eileen took me to Old Oaks Ranch. The yarn store was lovely but it was the sculpture garden that really caught my eye.

An origami horse sculpture provides a spot of cool blue among the sandy ground and cactus.

I love this shade-dappled woman astride her giraffe drawing you to gaze up at the tree tops just as she is doing.

The sculpture garden is a soothing place to stroll or sit and chat as these chaps are doing while on a break from weaving class or yarn shopping at Old Oaks Ranch.

It’s almost time to leave Janet’s and head back to the cities. Next stop will be the state capital, Sacramento, where I will get to weave with long-time online weaving buddy Franco Rios in a Basics class. I will get to meet Laura, another Ravelry group member, there too.

Let’s look at some Ravelry group projects before I leave you….

That’s Hetty’s backstrap on the left decorated with pebble weave motifs from my Andean Pebble Weave book. Hetty took a Basics class with me when I visited the Netherlands last year and it is wonderful to see that she now has her own woven backstrap and is continuing to weave using a backstrap loom. On the right is Jennifer’s band on which she is weaving a pattern of Tinkipaya, Bolivia. This one is charted in my second book, More Adventures with Warp-faced Pick-up Patterns.

CindyQ wove a stunning band also using pebble weave patterns charted in my first book while Julia is clearly having a wonderful time adapting traditional Japanese textile patterns to the pebble weave structure. This piece was woven on a floor loom. The instructions for weaving pebble weave on a four-shaft loom are included in the first book. (Edit: Julia has since told me that this piece was, in fact, woven on a backstrap loom) My second book guides and encourages weavers to draw their own pebble weave patterns and Julia has certainly taken up the challenge! She has even include some weft twining. (See the tutorial for this here)

So, it’s back to the mill for one last day with Janet and Betsy. We will weave tubular bands this afternoon. I can see Janet making pretty edgings for her handspun handwoven pieces with those.

That’s Janet on the left learning a ñawi awapa while Betsy on the right tries to squeeze as much as she can out of one of the pebble weave sample bands from the class last weekend.

I was telling Janet about how weavers in Peru use a tanka, or forked stick, when they weave the ñawi awapa so, we decided to go out stick hunting in the late afternoon sun on this most gorgeous spring day.

Who knew how difficult it can be to find the perfect forked stick?! I wanted a large, strong one to use in my warp  for weaving bands like this weaver from Peru…

Janet was the best spotter.

The one below, that Mikey has his eye on, turned out to the best one for me. What a nice weaving souvenir to take home from my visit up here.

Hopefully I will squeeze in more posts before heading home. See you then!

PS…last chance to contact me here about buying a print copy of the second book while I am in the US. Everyone who has contacted me so far should already have their book.

It’s funny how some dangling threads in my weaving life can be unexpectedly connected by a wonderful coincidence.

I had just finished teaching a workshop on a structure that I call “two-heddle intermesh” to a group of backstrap weavers in Santa Cruz, California. If you have been following my blog for some time, you may even recognize some familiar faces from this group who were taking their fourth class with me. Certainly you will remember some of the names from projects I have shown here over the years.

I have included this complementary-warp structure in my second book and chose to use designs that comprise only horizontal and vertical lines as a simple way to introduce the patterning technique. While looking through Joanne Hall’s book on Mexican Tapestry Weaving I saw that Mexican tablero and greca patterns were perfectly suited for this as were many of the motifs used by Bhutanese weavers on their tablet woven belts.

Joanne Hall writes that the tablero patterns represent  indigenous designs as well as those introduced by the Spanish. Many of the greca patterns appear in the structures and tombs at Mitla, Oaxaca and are used by tapestry weavers of that region.

Above left, you can see Yonat weaving one of the greca patterns while Ingrid, on the right, completes a second Bhutanese influenced motif. The patterns with their simple heavy lines are bold and beautiful in this structure. As we were using a complementary-warp structure, the bands are double faced with striking red designs on a light background on the other side.

Annie seemed to sense, knowing my love of red, black and white, that at least some of these colors would come into play during the workshop, and dressed to match! She is weaving one of the tablero influenced patterns and made a beautiful band by repeating the one motif along the entire length rather than creating a sampler of the various patterns I had provided. Maybe we will see something like this appear on one of the famed and fabulous woven guitar straps which Annie creates on her inkle looms. Yonat, too, is a fond of making bands on inkle looms and I expect to see her intermesh creations soon.

Annie has been so busy lately setting up her new sub-brand for hand woven guitar straps, I was lucky that she still had some energy left to host me and take the class!

In the evenings after class she would sit at her inkle loom and turn out yet another original piece. I saw her start a new one using hemp. It was lovely to touch.

Even if you don’t own a guitar, check out Annie’s weaverguitarstraps.com for lots of colorful inspiration for your next band project.

And if you would rather weave your own band, Annie makes the hardware that will enable you to turn your woven creation into a guitar strap.

Jennifer from Oregon, who didn’t take this class, had had some one-on-one time with me last spring when I visited her state and she showed on Ravelry, a couple of weeks ago, what she had made with the intermesh sampler we had started in our get-together.

You can see her finished greca pattern and other shapes she played with while learning about the characteristics of this structure. It is what I call a “partly loom-controlled structure”, that is, the weaver does not need to do pick-up for every weft pass. The loom does part of the work needed to create the motifs. This, along with some other little tips and tricks that I talk about in my book which help reduce the amount of time spent doing pick-up, allows the weaver to create patterns relatively quickly.

You may remember Bobbie’s guitar strap with names and a Mexican tablero motif made using the intermesh structure.

Now, what about that coincidence I mentioned? I am getting there. I have a couple of other things to tell.

Anne, who also took my class in Santa Cruz invited me to come and stay with her and her husband in their hilltop home near Saratoga, Califormia.

I now have a much better idea of the layout of the land with the spectacular views from Anne’s house and can understand why Santa Cruz people talk about distances from one place to another by mentioning the number of hills one must go over to get there.

Anne took me to one of her guild meetings where I got to tell people about weaving on simple looms in South America. I met the Bolivian owners from La Paz of her local Mexican restaurant who are planning to move back to Santa Cruz, Bolivia where I live and are excited about perhaps doing some weaving with me. That was one fun coincidence.

I enjoyed touring Anne’s cabin studio in the garden. This is one of many projects that caught my eye…

This is made up of two bands, woven on the inkle loom with patterns in supplementary warps, sewn together. You can’t tell that there are two bands, can you?! …the join is perfect. Another narrow band forms the sides and strap….so pretty.

The following day Anne took me to meet an eighth generation Zapotec weaver, Jaime and his  equally talented and skilled partner, Joey. Jaime’s father Zenon Hipolito, who taught him to weave, was not present but we got to see some of his work in progress on his hand-built looms. There was evidence of his craftsmanship to be seen everywhere…works created with his own hands but also pieces that have resulted from his having patiently and expertly passed his knowledge and skills to the next generation.

The looms themselves are absolutely beautiful…three in the living room on which Joey and Jaime work to fill custom orders, and another downstairs for Zenon. Zenon even made the bamboo reeds, combs and shuttles as well as the spinning wheel.

Joey seems to be the one who finds most time to spin and many of his pieces include some of his handspun yarn. He experiments with different fibers.

A lot of the yarn they use has been dyed by them with natural substances. They even raise their own cochineal bugs on the front porch.

They experiment with different kinds of warp, some are more successful than others. Joey described his struggles to finish a piece where he had used an unsuitable yarn for warp. It was a custom order and once he had cut his first full attempt off the loom he had to start all over. Of course, to Anne and myself, the piece looked faultless but, it wasn’t up to Joey’s standards of perfection.

Both Joey and Jaime’s love for weaving and the motifs and fibers was apparent in the way they  touched and talked about the rugs as they lay them out one by one on the floor for us to see. They have recently returned from a trip to Oaxaca (Joey’s first) where they had been invited to take part in an exhibit which included several other master tapestry weavers from the US as well as weavers from the Oaxaca valley, the home of the Zapotec people. Jaime spoke about the thrill of getting to visit the Mitla ruins which hold in their stonework many of the motifs which he was taught to weave by his father. Joey mentioned walking around the villages and recognizing the familiar sound of the beater hitting the edge of the fabric emanating from almost every house they passed.

While they talked about the fatigue that comes from weaving standing up all day, they also mentioned the difficulty to resist weaving at least a little almost every single day in their home/studio where they stand surrounded by rows and rows of colorful skeins and their own woven pieces covering the walls and floors.

Here are the pieces that were in progress on their looms during our visit…

And here is just a handful of the pieces that they lay out for us to see…

Older pieces that have been in the family for a few generations, and show evidence of the passage of time, adorn the walls and floors of their home…

When I was admiring the rich red and black piece, Joey mentioned his love of  red, grey, black and white combinations and so I had to share my own love for that and showed him online images of my wall hanging pieces in which I have used some of those colors. While they are aware of the use of the backstrap loom by many weavers in the Oaxaca Valley, they have not had any personal experience with one. I regretted not having taken one of mine to show and have them use. I then showed Jaime what we had woven in the workshop just two days earlier and he was happy to point out the designs from his culture which are woven by Zapotec weavers in their rugs.

You will recognize below a version of the greca pattern that we were using in my class in very similar colors! I found many wonderful motifs in the rugs that we were shown that will work beautifully in the intermesh technique. I only wish I had met Jaime and Joey before I finished my book so I could have included pictures of their work. The unexpected meeting with them was a wonderful way to tie everything together for me. From the pages of Joanne’s book to my own book to a workshop and, from there, on to an eighth generation weaver who continues to incorporate these traditional patterns in his work….I am grateful for all I learned from the book by Joanne Hall and her kind permission to use some of the designs she had charted in my own book and give many thanks to Anne,  Joey and Jaime who made this get-together possible.

From the home of the Zapotec weavers, Anne and I headed to Gilmore Looms. I was keen to see some of the looms that weavers in the Backstrap Weaving Group on Ravelry have been using to create warp-faced bands so successfully. Not everyone, after all, is going to love being strapped to their warp! It was fun meeting the lovely people at Gilmore who told us about having busier months so far this year than they have had for a long time. Lots of looms are finding homes…that’s good news for the weaving world.

Here are the Gilmore Wave looms in two sizes….

It was Marsha Knox who first brought these looms to my attention as she used one to make a lot of wonderful projects using the patterning techniques that I teach in my tutorials here.

Here is a beautiful lined bag that Marsha made by joining several bands together.

I am not sure which of the two looms she used. I like the larger as I prefer the larger amount of space it has between the front beam and the heddles. This would allow the placement of extra string heddles that are used for pebble weave and intermesh. The more space you have for those, the easier they are to use.

Now, that I am in Humboldt County, California with my friend Janet, I have seen the loom that she used in her tablet weaving class with John Mullarkey and I think that this is a little beauty too.

John has these made to his specifications. They are basically a frame with adjustable tension on which to support a long band for warp-faced weaving. John, of course, has designed it specifically for tablet-woven bands. I think this little loom, perhaps clamped to a table, would work nicely for the kinds of narrow projects that I often do on my backstrap loom. The loom does not have any shedding devices of its own so, you would be using a shed rod and set of string heddles just as you would on a backstrap loom. However,I haven’t used it myself for this purpose yet and am just guessing at this stage that it would work well used in this way.

Of course, I much prefer my backstrap loom as, among its many advanatges, it is good to be able to freely and rapidly adjust tension at will with simple body movements. However, I do like to look for possible alternatives for those who simply aren’t able to use a backstrap loom.

The loom is pictured above next to what I call Janet’s “grab-and-go’ basket…a bunch of prepared warps for backstrap weaving that she can pick up and  take along with her to weave any time.

Between my days with my Santa Cruz buddies, my visit with Anne and Joey and Jaime and my arrival in Humboldt County to sunny days and lots of fun in Janet’s mill, there is a whole story of my visit to Austin, Texas and the people I met and wove with there to tell. That will wait for another post.

In the meantime, let me tell you some great news about the ergonomic weaving bench that Synergo Arts has been introducing to backstrap weavers in Guatemala. I have posted about these before.

My friend Anne, who hosted me in Saratoga, has been involved in this project. Many backstrap weavers in the Ravelry group expressed interest in having one of these benches themselves but they were not available in the US.

Now, Anne tells me that Synergo Arts has decided to make all the plans and instructions for these benches available to the public. So, if you are handy with wood and tools or know someone who is, there is nothing stopping you from making one of these benches yourself.

The Synergo Arts page that I linked above will only be available until the end of summer 2013. After that, you will still be able to access the files here. These pages contain the plans for making the bench, instructions for using it and video of the bench in use. I never got to see one in use when I was in Guatemala or use one myself. It certainly looks very good. I particularly like the opportunity it gives for the weaver to brace her feet.

If you build one, please let me know and send pictures!

To finish, let’s see what the Ravelry guys have been up to….

This is Julia’s Lavender Field pebble weave bag. Her weaving group challenged themselves to weave something inspired by a gorgeous painting of fields of lavender. I am not sure if I would have permission to show the painting itself, unfortunately. Julia used both her backstrap and Seidel band looms to weave the various parts of the bag project. It’s stunning!!

Carol took a liking to the Tinkipaya star design from the central highlands of Bolivia, which is charted in my second book, and added an Andean motif to the sides to create this piece.

Jennifer, who is a backstrapper all the way, also chose the star motif for her latest project…

Dawn is a relative new comer to our group and wove a band with horizontal bars while getting acquainted with the loom and fine tuning her skills…look at those beautiful edges!

If you have any interest at all in finger-loop braiding you most likely know of Ingrid Crickmore and her loopbraider blog. Ingrid is always part of  the Santa Cruz, California group with whom I weave. She stays the night in the studio in which we work and always delights me when I arrive in the morning with the progress she has made during the preceding evening. Ingrid brought some of her braids to show, some of which were particularly snakey, and she has written a great blog post about them.

I thought that I would show them here as we are doing snakey things in our Ravelry Year of the Snake weave-along.

You will be forgiven for taking a detour from backstrap weaving and wandering off and getting lost in Ingrid’s site! Those finger-looped braids make nice finishes for backstrap woven projects and are so much fun to make.

I made some progress on my own Year of the Snake project. This pattern comes from one of several bands that was sent to me by weavers in Cochabamba (see my last post for stories about these ladies). I was immediately struck by its snakiness and had to try it.

My on-the-road projects tend to have a hard life. They get hooked up and woven all over the place, anchored on toes, under heavy luggage, started and stopped and started again. This one is doing okay so far and is not showing signs of the ravages of the road yet!  There it is weaving its way through the grass alongside the Bolivian band with the original pattern.

I just got an email from Dorothy, another member of the Santa Cruz weaving group who just went to a lecture entitled Weavers’ Stories from Island Southeast Asia. She sent me a link to a webpage about the exhibit that has video interviews with various weavers and batik arists who talk about their creative process in times of changing social and economic situations. I have not even had time to see the videos myself so we can all watch them together here.

That’s all for this post. See you next time with tales from Texas and the Humboldt redwoods.

I am all packed and I  leave tomorrow which leaves me with a day to wander around in circles and wonder about what I have forgotten. So, before I drive myself crazy, I think I should sit down and write a blog post.

Late last week I picked up from the post office a box of ten fajas, belts, that I had ordered from Maxima and the weavers in the communities in and around Independencia in Cochabamba. (All photos of the weavers except for the first one, are taken from the PAZA webpage with the kind permission of Dorinda Dutcher).

These are the ladies with whom American Dorinda Dutcher has been working for years, helping them to recover and pass on their spinning, dyeing and weaving skills and market their woven goods. If you follow my blog, you will have seen pictures of and heard stories about Maxima Cortez, one of the women with whom Dorinda has most closely worked. She is the coordinator of the various Handicraft Group activities. Maxima is one of my weaving teachers and was my roommate at the Tinkuy in Peru.

Maxima, daughter Soraida and granddaughter Nilda were my weaving companions for my three-day stay in Cochabamba.

The flock belonging to Casimira, one of the spinners and weavers who made the bands in my order.

I opened the box of  fajas and saw the two colorful packages of neatly folded and stacked bands each with a label detailing the name of the weaver and her community.

It was such a happy sight but, what really hit me, was that wonderful aroma of wool mixed with the various smells of the natural dye substances that are used to create the colors.

It was such a strong fragrance that my cat immediately awoke and had to come over to roll in the bands.

And then there were the textures. Each weaver and spinner has their own style and beat and the bands varied from those that were smooth and taut to those which had more dimension and drape.

I counted eight different tones from cochineal dye and even more shades of green and then closer inspection helped me to see which ones were most likely made by the younger members of the communities…the ones where the weaver jumped a little erratically from pattern to pattern spoke of a youngster who was keen to try out her entire newly acquired repertoire in the one piece.

Perhaps the ones that have some little flaws are from the youngsters too or maybe they are from mothers who were distracted for a moment by one of their little ones.

Each one tells a story and it is strange sitting here in this tropical heat and imagining the sounds of the looms, the cool green slopes and valleys and music of the highland region in which they were made.

Dorinda shared some pictures and a little information about each and every weaver with me. Here are just a few…

Here is Casimira Calcina working on the leaning vertical loom which is typical of the region. She lives in the rural community of Huancarani. Being widowed and with her children having migrated, she works hard alone to run her farm and tend her flock.

Adviana Vargas is 18 and still considered a “chica”. However, she weaves with the  adult group as she lives with the father of her 16-month old son and is expecting another child. She is wearing the cardigan that she made after a visiting volunteer opened up the mystery of the patterns and instructions in magazines that had been in the group’s possession for years. Until then no one had had the skills to read and interpret them.

Gabriela Zenteno is 16 and has been part of the Handicraft Club since it began in 2010. She learned to weave from Maxima with additional help from her mother. Because the family lives in town, instead of on the farm, and Gaby goes to school, she did not learn to spin and weave at her mother’s side which is integrated into the ancient farmer subsistence lifestyle.

Some of the bands were finished with four selvedges and I regretted not having told Dorinda when I ordered that I didn’t need that fourth selvedge. I know the work that is involved in that but, as my teacher Yanet from Pitumarca told us, the four-selvedge finish is “normal” for them. Some of the bands had been cut and then hand sewn to protect the edge.

Most had pebble-weave designs and I was delighted to see that two had patterns made with supplementary warps.

What was very interesting for me was noting that the way the women set up their warps to weave pebble weave varies even among communities that are relatively close together. This information is contained in the “termination” area of the band…the part where, on a four-selvedge piece, the weaver no longer has room to do pick-up and simply uses her two basic sheds to finish. There you can see the order of the colored threads in the two sheds.

You can see the termination area of one of the bands which has been patterned with supplementary warps at left.

And, happily, among these bands I found my inspiration for the Year of the Snake Weave-along that Ghedrain proposed in the Ravelry Backstrap Weaving Group. The official start of the Weave-along (WAL) was last Friday March 1 but people are free to join in at any time. I expected to be a cheer leader and “Chief Sticky Beak” as I will be on the road as from tomorrow but, with this sudden source of  snaky inspiration, I warped up a narrow band to take with me which you can see on the left with its wooly backstrap.

The other project that I am taking is a band using left over Guatemalan cotton from my recent scarf project. I plan to weave in some patterns with supplementary weft and am happy that the collection of spools of silk weighs very little. To tell the truth, I will be surprised if I actually find time to work on these but I really would like to participate in the WAL.

You may remember the lovely pick-up sticks that I brought back from Guatemala which I use on these supplementary-weft projects. Fortunately, I bought two as I was careless with my packing and the very tip of one broke in my luggage on the way home. It’s still useable but not as nice to work with as the other one.

The good news is that Terri from MagicalMoons is now making  pick-up sticks that would work beautifully for supplementary-weft patterning and they look gorgeous. Below, you can see my Guatemalan ones. The one on the left is the slighty damaged one.

And here is one from Magical Moons made from Nicaraguan rosewood…

So, the Year of the Snake WAL is underway on Ravelry. Meanwhile, I have some  projects from Ravelry members to show you. This one is from Backstrap Group member CindyQ who has mounted her warp to weave a band with pebble-weave patterns on the frame of her rigid heddle loom. She is using the two-heddle method that I was taught by my Ayacucho weaving teachers which I explain in my first book Andean Pebble Weave….great-looking heddles and lovely weaving!

The second project is from Kara and was posted in the Warped Weavers group. You may remember that I posted a long time ago the following picture of some interlaced bands woven on an inkle loom by Yonat…

It was such an eye-catching display that I decided to put something similar together myself with the odds and ends of sample bands that I wove for my second book…

Now, back to Kara…she interlaced bands that she made especially for a project…a cover for the seat of her weaving bench. So, she has put together bands made on an inkle loom and with tablets to make not only a stunning display of her work, but also something wonderfully practical….

All those bright bands interlaced with black….WOW! Go gather up your bands now and start planning!! I can see pillow covers and other wonderful things using this idea!

Here is a picture of one of her bands in progress…

Enough inspiration?!

Here I shall leave you for this week with a last word about my second book More Adventure with Warp-faced Pick-up Patterns. This book is only available as a hard copy when I visit the US and can mail it out to people. If you would like a copy, please let me know by leaving a comment here on this blog so that I can get back to you with the details. I have limited copies and will send them in the order in which I receive the requests.

I travel tomorrow and the blog posts will start showing up on odd days…you know how it goes! See you soon from the US.