Backstrap Weaving – I Have a Cunning Plan….

I was actually originally going to simply call this blog post “Oops!” and leave it at that. I made a mistake in my latest ikat. Oops! Of course to me, the maker, it’s a glaring one. However, I’ve since come up with an idea which just might turn the blip into “beauty”…if not beauty, at least something acceptable. The lesson learned is to be extra careful when my first dye color very closely resembles the color of the ikat tape.

Anyway, more about that a little later.

Since I last wrote I have had and recovered from Covid…almost exactly two years since the last time I had it. For me it’s not a question of whether I have a just a regular flu or Covid….the symptoms are different enough for me to be quite sure it’s Covid. Nevertheless, I did get tested just in case it turned out be something else altogether that needed antibiotics.. We still have to do PCR tests here as the home RAT test kits are not available. I have no idea from whom I might have picked it up and I’m pretty sure that I gave it to a friend before my symptoms showed the day after our lunch together and I think that two days earlier my dentist might have been exposed to it from me as well. This is just awful and unavoidable unless we all go back to routinely wearing masks again.

I really felt the need to sleep a lot and rest this time. The problem is that I really don’t do well with not being productive. Fortunately, I had a little unfinished object which allowed me to sit and do some quiet work.

You may remember that I had gathered all these left-over scraps from old projects in order to test my idea for my wallet project. This was meant to be the prototype but I abandoned it because I had become convinced that my plan would work and that a sample wasn’t necessary.

At the point of abandonment I had sewn my stitched shibori cloth as lining for some left-over pebble weave fabric which formed the main body of the wallet and created the storage pocket for bills. I’d also just started to construct card slots with the shibori fabric. There’s some left-over blue ikat fabric woven with my own handspun cotton singles as well as plain black cloth that was at the end of another ikat warp, again in my handspun cotton. It’s hard to throw handspun scraps away!

So, I picked it all up again to finish. The part I enjoy the most is adding the tubular edging. This enables me to cut the closure flap of the wallet into a curved shape knowing that the tubular band will enclose and protect it.

I used multiple tones of blue for the tubular edging band rather than making it just one solid color. I love the way it came out.

The tubular band gave me the chance to use even more leftovers. I had dyed cotton thread various tones of blue to use in a complementary-weft project and there were just odd short lengths left over. They were perfect for this project.

The project that had combined both complementary-warp and weft structures had required only small quantities of each dyed weft color.

If you think that two wallets is one too many…..well, how about three? Yep, my latest ikat cloth is also destined to be a wallet.

The ”scraps” wallet also as a coin purse with expandable sides on the back. I used the black handspun cotton cloth for the sides. I took a deep breath and threw all remaining scraps away but only when I was completely convinced that they weren’t going to be useful in any way for any thing.

I was really delighted recently to see this picture of scissor bags made by Shahsavan nomads of northern Iran (courtesy of one of Sue Richardson’s wonderful posts on textile events on the Oxford Asian Textile Group blog).

The image is from a recently published book, Scissor Bags and Sheep Scissors in the Nomadic Tradition, by Peter Umney-Gray.

I have to wonder if the fabric for these bags was specifically woven for this purpose or if the nomads are using off-cuts or leftovers from larger projects in much the same way I have. I love that so much care has been taken to house these important implements in such a beautiful way.

I’m currently working on a three-color ikat piece (two dye colors plus original warp color) with my handspun cotton singles for wallet number three. The design is one that I have used before. I just added more threads to each ikat bundle this time in order to make it a bit wider.

The warp is double the width you see here. It’s been folded in half so that I can tie the repeating pattern on both halves at the same time.

While looking around online, I’ve seen various ways that ikat artists measure out and mark the pattern on the warp which is then tied with tape. Here’s a photo that my friend Pam shared with me of a gentleman in Uzbekistan just eyeballing it while marking the pattern lines with a charcoal stick.

I’ve seen weavers in the islands of Indonesia mark out an entire grid of lines on the warp which helps the artist tie sections of equal length and consistent spacing. And I’ve seen an artist working with the warp suspended over a grid of lines as a guide rather than having the grid marked on the warp itself. I haven’t come up with a good way yet. I just measure and mark with charcoal pencil as I go. If I get out of alignment by a millimeter or so here and there, it all adds up and then things end up noticeably misaligned. I tend to find it much easier in my larger pieces, like this one…..

Larger patterns with wider ikat bundles seem to be easier for me to measure and mark. This one is 60/2 silk.

Or with smaller scattered patterns….

Using 20/2 cotton with a scattering of small individual motifs.

Here’s the warp after the first dye color….so far so good.

The pink tape is reserving all the parts of the warp that I want to have remain the original white. Before I dye the second color, I need to add more tape to reserve the areas that I want to remain red. The final dye color, black, will cover all the remaining unprotected red areas.

And there’s the blip…can you see it? At this point the warp is stretched out on my backstrap loom and I’ve removed the second application of tape which reveals all the red areas. However, one bit that was supposed remain red is now black. I’d neglected to wrap it….after having checked three times!

I could just leave it as a reminder to be careful in future or I could find a way to “make it work”. Hopefully my plan will work. I decided to do what is called “spot dyeing”. Black dye is added (outside the dye pot) to other red areas in order to balance the mistake and add symmetry…..in other words, make it look like it was meant to be!

I’ve seen videos online of ikat artists in India routinely dong this spot dyeing, not to mask a mistake as I am doing but rather to add additional colors to their ikat warp. They carefully dip a small section of warp that is flanked by resist ties into a dish of dye and vigorously work the dye into the fibers with their fingers. I don’t know how wash resistant this kind of spot dyeing can be but it seems to be a normal part of the process for adding small sections of fourth and perhaps fifth colors to an ikat piece in certain parts of India.

I’ve also seen additional colors being painted onto ikat warps in some parts of Indonesia. My wallet won’t be getting washed at any stage and so I think that my spot dyeing will be safe. I am however very curious about the dye solution that is used by the artists in India and Indonesia for this kind of spot work because I’m quite sure that the fabric they are creating will be laundered many times. If I were making an item to be worn and washed, I’d just throw the warp back into a black dye bath and overdye all the red areas black. That would cover the mistake and give me a simple black-and-white pattern that I know would be safe to wash.

I had some experience with spot dyeing many years ago when I created this ikat fabric for a book cover. It’s a piece that has never been laundered.

I was using Dylon cold water dyes for cotton for the book cover project. Terracotta was the first color which was then overdyed with blue to give the darker chocolate-like color. These were three separate warps which I later combined on the loom. The easiest way for me to overdye the terracotta cross in the center block with blue was to spot dye. However, this was back in the days when I was using cassette tape as my resist material. For some reason, I made up a dye solution for the spot dyeing with very hot water. The cassette tape didn’t like that water temperature at all and the blue color seeped under the tape into the white. So then I had to rescue it by also spot dyeing a section of white with the blue to even out the bleeding. It added something totally unexpected to the project.

You’ll find out in my next post if my not-all-that-cunning spot dyeing plan worked. I’m still at it. If I remember, I’ll also wrap and spot dye a small sample so that I can see how it goes in the wash.

I’m going to leave you with something that I think is really spectacular. As some of you know, every now and then I do some reversible three-color Andean Pebble Weave and I get a lot of requests for instructions. I will be publishing on it but I can’t say exactly when. Life is a little topsy-turvy at the moment. The instructions that I have published on Andean Pebble Weave so far have been on the much more common two-color version which in itself is an awesome technique. For those who are hankering after the additional color and complexity of the three-color technique, I hope you find it interesting and inspiring to see what can be done with the basic two-color structure and a little imagination….

Julie Beers sent me this photo of her work with one of the double dragon patterns that I have published.

The richly-colored Lunatic Fringe cotton that she’s using really makes this piece glow and I also think that it makes it look deceivingly complex. It’s still just the two-color structure that we all know and love. Thank you, Julie, for allowing me to share this here. It’s so inspiring.

I gathered together a handful of these historic double dragon patterns that I’d seen on tablet-woven bands and transposed them into the Andean Pebble Weave structure. They’re published in my More Andean Pebble Weave Patterns book. I’d originally been asked to transpose one of the dragon patterns by a weaving acquaintance on Ravelry so that it could be woven with string heddles rather than with tablets. I shared the chart and this is what Penelope Hemingway did with it, adding it to a hat that she’d made with nalbinding.

I don’t have the stash to be able to get into the kind of colorful work that Julie is doing right now. Or do I? I just remembered this…..

My 30/2 silk cochineal stash. I’ve yet to come up with a project for it.

This might be next on the drawing board. I have more white 30/2 silk left as well as a new supply of cochineal. Maybe I’ll be able to add some more colors to this collection.

See you next time.