Backstrap Weaving – Outside the Andean Box

I came back from Santa Fe with a different mind set…time to CREATE!

I told myself….Enough of the endless sampling and experimenting and getting distracted with new structures and designs from here, there and everywhere.

Use all the things you have been studying all these years and create some large pieces to hang. Perhaps it was because I was still so thrilled by how well my wall hangings had been received at the ANWG conference or perhaps I had soaked up some of that special sort of arty atmosphere in Santa Fe….

In any case, it seems that I just can’t help myself. I am back to sampling, sampling and playing with structures. Meanwhile, the ideas for those large pieces that I am talking about stack up in my head. I’ll get there.

I spent the whole week playng with the three-color reversible pebble weave. Slow going but fun….LOTS of fun. And that is why I keep coming back to experimenting like this.

And so, another band takes its place in the sample basket, mistakes and all…many lessons learned.

And yet another gets under way…

This one is in tencel and was a lesson in the selection and placement of three colors  that would work well together in this structure on both sides of the fabric. I didn’t manage it. The reverse of this piece has a yellow background with the design outline in light blue and the design gets rather lost due to the lack of contrast between those two colors. This motif has a small element of a two-color  pebble weave piece from the Colonial period that I had seen in a book.  I added several of my own ideas to it, expanded it and inserted a third color.

I am really happy with this motif as I want to try to start thinking more outside what I call the “Andean box”. I would like to create designs using the structures that I have studied here in South America that are more and more my own and which do not necessarily have anything to do with traditional Andean patterns. The second motif that I have just started will be an original – a butterfly. Let’s see how that turns out. And then I have a few leaf motifs and some flower ones that I need to sample.

The plan is to weave something using the three-color technique in this color scheme…

The base color will be navy blue and then I will need to choose two of those three tencel colors which will interact on the two faces.

And, speaking of thinking outside the Andean box, here is Julia’s latest pebble weave creation…

Julia calls this River with Eddies. She used four shades of blue for the river and I love the various browns that border it…pebbles along the shore.

Of course, Julia has been venturing outside the Andean box for some time now. Once she got the hang of the Andean pebble weave technique, there was no stopping her.

From an adaptation of a tablet weaving pattern on the left and back to a traditional Andean one on the right…all her work is beautiful.

I am happy to see that Jennifer is back at the loom. We have missed her in the backstrap group. Summer tends to take people away.

Her latest warp is lovely. She says that it is going to be plain weave but I don’t know what the final product will be yet. Perhaps she is like me and doesn’t decide that until the piece is finished!

And, for something completely different, Bethan in France sent me a picture of the twill tartan piece that she made on a backstrap loom using her own handspun wool. She will weave another identical piece and sew them together for a shawl. Spinning for the second panel is underway.

Janet handed her young granddaughter a pencil and had her “connect the dots” on the pebble weave charting paper that I use in my second book to create her own design. She chose the colors and  Janet wove the piece which Celia will have for a bag.

Thinking outside the Andean box…this idea first requires a definition of what exactly I mean by “Andean” . That may become harder and harder to define as Andean weavers these days look at their surroundings and often weave “non-traditional” patterns for themselves. Take a look at this Bolivian hatband…

It has three colors in play  and I SO want to see what’s on the other side! Don’t you?

PS….This showed up in my Facebook newsfeed the morning after writing this post. Just had to throw it in here!