language acquisition

This pattern of 6 warp yarns, or 3 pairs, called tanka ch’oro, is the most common beginner project in the Andes. It’s a starter piece for young girls in textile producing communities, and they weave dozens of these as a way to learn the basics. A narrow band like this enables the weaver to get accustomed to controlling warp tension with her body, passing the weft consistently, and appreciating the importance of the yarn quality needed for the handspun warp.

My stash of spindle-spun two-ply weaving yarns, wound in balls and stored together as an accumulated palette for backstrap weaving projects. Chak chak spindle in progress, empty plain spindle from Peru, and finished tanka ch’oro band in the lid (thi… — My stash of spindle-spun two-ply weaving yarns, wound in balls and stored together as an accumulated palette for backstrap weaving projects. Chak chak spindle in progress, empty plain spindle from Peru, and finished tanka ch’oro band in the lid (this is an old wicker picnic basket that my parents used when I was little.)

I knew that people started learning with this pattern, and I more or less started with it, just over 10 years ago, but I did not weave dozens of tanka ch’oro bands, just one or two. Only recently, having seen a live online demonstration of the weaving of this band, from warp-winding to finished piece, did I suddenly realize that I needed to weave a whole bunch more if I wanted to really learn what’s what.

Sonia, who demonstrated her method for making what she considers an easy baby weaving (she had to be convinced we were really interested in seeing such a fundamental, unexciting thing), had a number of tricks I wanted to try. First of all, she wound the heddle string (illawa) while the warp was still on the pegs, which I tried and hey that’s convenient! Then, she took the end in her hand and just started weaving, without a sword beater (kaulla), just using her fingers to tension the warp, open sheds, and beat.

Weaving the first few rows with my fingers. Handspun wool warp with 6 light and dark pattern warp yarns, and two red border yarns each side. Tensioned on my warping peg at the other end.

Sonia did at least one motif before attaching the band to her belt, and I wanted to attempt pickup patterning using just my hands as well. A note, these photos are from the fifth band - the first one may have not looked as skillful.

With the white shed open, I select the warps I want, from left to right. The next two light warps will be dropped, one by one, in order to pick up the dark ones.

Now the dark shed is open, and I’m selecting left to right. This is my habit, but Andean weavers work from either side, depending on the pattern and the circumstances.

Weaving a narrow band with a backstrap is a minimalist practice regardless, but there is something extra satisfying about weaving with only my yarn and my hands. After a couple of inches, I attached the band to my belt, and kept weaving without a sword beater.

One tanka section complete, all woven using hands only.

At some point during Sonia’s demo, Abby was trying to answer a question about “memorizing all those patterns” (for the more complex, large weavings,) what that means in the context of Andean weaving and how that differs from how those of us viewing might think and learn, and she finally said: “This is language, she’s writing ABC, ABC, over and over again.” The weavers begin with this vocabulary, this three-pair pattern that only uses one simple sequence, giving the fundamentals of what they need to build upon.

I think this was the second band in the current series. Yellow targhee, gray alpaca, heathered green wool blend. I’m learning about the subtle differences in my various handspun yarns with these bands.

The other main trick that Sonia showed us is the four-selvege finishing, which is used on many of the textiles in her region. When you get close to the end of the warp, the weaving is flipped, the shed loop moved behind the heddles, and you weave from the other end, in the same pattern. There’s no big mystery to that part, but it gets tricky as your unwoven warp region shrinks. Eventually you have to remove the illawa (heddles) and work the weft through with a darning needle. Sonia wrangled two darning needles, and as she slowly worked the terminal area into woven cloth, in pattern, this mysterious process that I’d known about but never seen done became suddenly accessible. I had to try it on my tanka ch’oro.

First band after the demo, my warp has been flipped, about 3 inches remains between woven sections. I can still work the illawa (heddles) and sonqopa (shed loop) at this point.

It is hard to convey how much fiddling, grunting, frustrated sighing and backtracking can go into the terminal area, even for a very small band like this. After six times, it’s a bit easier, but the last couple of rows still feel like brain surgery. I can’t fathom doing this on a larger piece…. but it’s exciting to know how it’s done, and to have just the tiniest glimpse into the skill involved with textiles I’ve been admiring for years.

Heddle string (illawa) is removed, the needle works as beater and shuttle to clear the shed and pull the weft through. A second needle can help with pickup.

The terminal area is finished, and I was lucky -the pattern lines up! (This only happened on half of my bands so far)

Why repeat this one, simple thing that I seem to already ‘know” how to do? Because it’s how the whole of Andean weaving is learned, it’s an entry point of understanding, from the perspective of the people who practice this as part of their heritage, going back centuries. It’s a way of attempting to enter through the ground floor, not by zip-lining in on some artificially elevated level. Walking in, at a level with or below the people who know how to do this, letting their method guide my learning. More than anything, I see this as a way of listening.

I will continue to use charts to figure out patterns, and I was thinking that if weaving basic patterns is like learning alphabet and language, then charts may be like the wide-ruled elementary school paper with pre-traced letters, on which children practice writing. After a certain amount of practice with the chart, the pattern starts to make sense and I can carry on with just my weaving and the language I have learned in my head.

One thing I know for sure - when I have a small, handspun wool band in progress, I feel like I have something important, grounding, and real going on.

taking it slow

Striped warp-faced weaving showing fell line, rosewood beater, string heddles, bamboo shed rod.

Of course, all my weaving is pretty slow. But sometimes I’m more receptive to it.

I had the day to myself, and thought I might get back into this Katu style piece and add some beads, in the traditional manner (threading them onto a weft and placing them, painstakingly, between the warps after the weft is thrown - it is VERY slow, for me.) I threaded the weft onto a suitable needle, after many tries, and loaded 50 + beads on, one by one, enjoying the deliberate pace and quiet concentration. But when I started weaving, after letting this sit for weeks, there was a big bloop in the weft, a tension flaw that came from that long pause. With this circular warp, every time you advance, you are essentially winding the warp on again, because you unroll the whole thing, rotate it on the bars, and roll it up again. The placement of the warps on one another as you roll affects the tension, and I’d not done a good job. I didn’t think I could correct it, so just kept weaving, but I did not want to add beads near that big flaw, thereby adding attention to the spot. Not to mention that I had loaded all my beads onto a really short length of weft yarn, just wound around the stick shuttle on top (because normally it doesn’t matter if the weft is broken into short bits, right?) I had a brief moment of wanting to power through and put in beads no matter what - but then I told myself hey, just weaving decent, plain cloth on this foot-tensioned loom is an accomplishment, so get on with it.

Feet tensioning the warp, against two bamboo bars.

So I did, and gradually the weaving became even again, and I was able to appreciate the deep intimacy, the completeness, of doing this quiet, repetitive, cumulative thing. The only sounds were the clink of bamboo, the gentle prickling as the shed opened and warp yarns separated, and the birds’ voices outside.

Side view of open shed with afternoon sunlight.

Detail of warp-faced woven stripes (color is more accurate in first photo.)

The detail image may help clarify some of what I was trying to figure out with the warp-faced tape designs. The warps that go for a full “round”, as we say, meaning they appear in both sheds, make the line that hops side to side, like the pale green in the black stripe. If the color only goes a half-round, its line then alternates with another color, so it appears as a dot in every other row, like the yellow between the olive greens in the pink field. This effect is part of the play of warp-faced designs everywhere. My mind has trouble with it, as noted in my post (and comments) on handwoven tape. Winding a circular warp is even more confusing, because a full “round” on the warping frame - from one end to the other and back, is actually just one warp length, that is, a “half-round” in the terms I just described, such as for the yellow on the right. I’m not used to this yet, and thus the designs here were not even deliberate, they just happened.

But I think I’m beginning to see them with a bit more understanding, and I may have realized how weaving with a rigid heddle helps to make design decisions independent of warp winding. If one is warping for backstrap, and putting the warp directly onto loom bars, everything has to be in place at the time of winding the warp. If you are cutting the ends and threading them into a rigid heddle, the warp yarns can go wherever you choose, so the design is only dependent on the number of warps of each color, not their position when wound. I will stop there, since it may just be a jumble of my own mental shenanigans.

Fun to contemplate the combinations of warped-in design and pickup used in different warp-faced pieces, though - such as this tape, part of a garment I saw in Laos (possibly Hmong?)

Detail of warp-faced tape with red, black and white design of stripes, central squares, and dots.

Or the weaving from Banaue, Philippines, at the bottom of this lovely stack, which I bought many years before I began weaving. The indigo piece just above it is also backstrap woven cloth, from a Thai bag I took apart recently. I will leave you with this soothing vignette, a chance meeting of fabrics old and new in my studio.

Stack of folded fabrics: two vintage Indonesian batiks on top of two backstrap-woven, warp-faced pieces, all sitting on Japanese cotton shirting, in a palette of indigo, pale pink, and brown.

of yurt band admiration and technical struggles

Look familiar? The project was introduced in the second half of this post.

Devising a chart from a photo of a real yurt band. My sample at right.

I’ve been fascinated by Central Asian yurt band patterns for several years, and wanted to learn how to chart and weave with this method. Warps are floated on top, but the opposing warp is not dropped, so that the regular alternation of warps continues underneath the pattern made on the surface. This is visible on the back of the weaving, where you see stripes rather than a mirror image of the pattern. (See the far right of the photo below, which shows the inside of the bag I’m sewing together.)

Stitching a vintage Japanese kasuri band to my weaving to make a bag strap. — Stitching a vintage Japanese *kasuri* band to my weaving to make a bag strap.

It’s a relatively simple technique if one is creating patterns and leaving a background of stripes, as seen in Andean weaving and explained on Laverne’s website as “simple warp floats.” But as Laverne notes in a follow up tutorial called “Warp floats galore!”, once you incorporate patterning in the background as well, the charting becomes way more complicated. The first image in that post danced in my imagination ever since I saw it, and I couldn’t rest until I eventually got it charted for myself.

Simple warp floats sample, my weaving, 2015.

Warp float technique shown in The Andean Science of Weaving book.

As mentioned in the previous post, I finally managed to chart the pattern in the yurt band from the photo, and wove a half-size sample in cotton yarn to test it out.

Bamboo knife is the perfect pickup stick for this size of band and this technique!

Onward to the wider piece, with handspun yarn, which I warped with Laverne’s help at a gathering last April - well documented here. (You can see nice image of the yarn I’m about to discuss, second large photo.)

One of the issues was this old yarn. I’ve been handspinning yarn for weaving warp since I started weaving in 2010, and my yarn has gradually improved. For this project, I pulled out some yarns that were from somewhere around 2012-13. They are more irregular than I spin now, and so created a stickier warp. The more little slubs and bits of extruding fluff the yarn has, the more the warp will stick to the string heddles and itself. I know this, and still I chose this yarn, not realizing it would cause me difficulty with a technique that was new and challenging.

The variegations in width of the yarn made it just that much more difficult to see and count for picking up, compared to the cotton I’d sampled. It went slowly and I made lots of mistakes. But I love the colors, and even as a work-in-progress it was beautiful and inviting to have spread out on my floor. This was my living room, for months. (Sometimes it got rolled up out of the way.)

Watching this pattern take shape was more gratifying than I can say, so even though a single row took ten minutes to pick up, on average, I pressed on. You may notice the warp is considerably longer than the finished weaving - it became clear that two repeats of this would be all I could manage, although I’d originally wanted the bag to be longer.

For similar practical reasons of Actually Finishing Something, I opted to use Japanese fabrics for the bag strap and binding, rather than weaving them myself. I love the look of the kasuri against my handspun. As always, if my own handmade textiles can blend harmoniously with those from around the world, it brings me joy.

epic weaving

(apologies for overcast morning light phone photo quality)

I wove this whole big thing!

I wanted to make a wedding gift, the idea was a snuggle blanket for two. I measured one of my voluminous Indian shawls (which, being the ideal size for a piece of cloth, has long been my weaving goal,) and wound a warp that stretched across most of my deck. Yikes, it was huge. A good couple of yards longer than necessary, actually. We won’t go into details of the pre-weaving fracas - just use your imagination.

Tying on the epic warp, which will be rolled at the far end (see “fracas,” above.)

The warp is commercial yarn, dyed by Scarlet Tang of Huckleberry Knits, and the weft is a smorgasbord of handspun stash, including some that I did not spin. I remembered my bouclé samples and other interesting bits, and just threw it all in there. The reed is a made-by-me wonky thing, bamboo skewers lashes together and bound imperfectly. It gave me a nice, irregular dent of roughly 6 epi. Some of my more regular handspun two-ply was making a weft-faced cloth, so I needed to break that up with thicker yarns. The variation was forced at first, but became part of the character of the cloth eventually.

And it ended in the same spot it began - this is during the last hour of weaving.

Luckily I caught some wonderful weather, which made the weaving go faster.

I needed to weave 8 inches a day to get this done in time for the wedding, and that was not hard, since I was weaving about 8” in an hour. But it was a very focused task, compared to my usual meandering, and as a result, my largest weaving so far was also my quickest to make!

Finishing this piece successfully felt like a transition to a new place of ability. I’ve been aiming to weave large with the backstrap for a while now, and this proved to me that I can do it. And the feel of that big shawl - roomy, textured, rich and warm, made me ready to warp for another.

katu weaving for real

After my first trip to Luang Prabang in 2013, the main thing I hoped to follow up on was Katu backstrap weaving. It had been amazing to connect with backstrap weavers as a weaver, and I wished for more time with these young masters, Keo and Mone. Their skill level is astounding, the techniques and tools mesmerizing.

As I wrote before, I tried my hand at warping and weaving in this way on my own, based on video documentation of Keo, and the results were less than impressive. I never posted the "finished" object here, because I had simply cut it off the loom when it got too messy: too many broken warps and tension issues. But when I knew I was returning to Luang Prabang, and that Mone was teaching weaving and I would very well have the chance to learn with her, I knew I had to show her my solo attempt. I packed the sad little sample (about 10 inches, woven off a 4 yard warp) along with gifts of merino bamboo yarn for Mone to experiment with, and couldn't wait to meet her again and learn to weave officially.

When I met Keo and Mone and presented my sample, they exclaimed in disbelief: "You did this by yourself??" They were thrilled, happy, and proud, and wouldn't stop exclaiming and admiring my funny little piece. Mone said, "This looks like my first weaving!" It felt wonderful to finally share with them, because no one else in the world could appreciate the work that went into that sample. They honestly seemed to think it was good, and Mone was convinced I could try weaving a wider piece in her "advanced" class format. The good student in me swelled with pride - but more than that, I was basking in the fellowship of weavers, traditional master backstrap weavers who were acknowledging me as someone on a similar path of effort and skill.

For what it's worth: this is my sample in its "finished" state.

Mone now teaches half-day classes for beginners, preparing a narrow warp so her students can weave a cuff/headband/bookmark sized band with border stripes and beading (for information see The Weaving Sisters on Facebook. and their two Instagram accounts, Keo and Mone.) Katu weaving traditionally incorporates seed beads, which are threaded onto the weft and worked into place as each pick is thrown. Traditional weaving also has a variety of supplementary warp patterns, which I had tried and failed to make in my own warp. I had hoped that Mone would introduce me to those, but she said it was too advanced for me: "Next time," she told me with a smile. As a concession to my skill level, she allowed me to work on a wide piece, and to participate from the beginning, in winding the warp.

My friend Sarah and I were learning simultaneously. Sarah had a pre-warped narrow band, and Mone got her started, then began making the warp with me. She explained that when two people warp together, they begin in the middle and work their way out, symmetrically. I'd chosen colors and we invented a stripe sequence as we went along, Mone telling me how many times to wind each color. She had to attend to Sarah's weaving intermittently, and introduce the beading process, so if I got ahead on my side of the warp, I would shift to her side and catch up. As a result, I can't say who warped which half of my piece. In addition, there was some confusion as to what she meant by her count - whether "3 times" meant three full rotations, or three lengths, for example - so there are some anomalies in the two sides that show not only that two people were warping but that they had different interpretations of the numbers (and I'm sure I miscounted at least once.) The whole process is recorded in the stripe pattern, a visual document of this teacher/student exchange.

Mone begins the warp, directly onto the loom bars which are supported on a frame. The string heddles are added as the warp is wound (whits strings wrapped around the sword beater in the middle of the photo.)

All of this happens in a small room, with the door open to neighboring chickens. Bowl of rambutan at left - our snack.

The first time I was in Luang Prabang, asking Mone questions about the weaving patterns, she told me, "You need to stay with me for a month." I completely agree. Although I had a lesson that spanned a couple of days this time, and I got to warp and weave a whole piece by myself, there is still so much I couldn't learn in that time. Leaving aside the more advanced techniques of supplementary warp, there are countless small habits, in the winding of the warp or the use of the loom, that she may not even think to mention because they're second nature to her now. Mone is an excellent teacher, and she conveys the basics very clearly, giving pointed guidance while reassuring students, "You're just learning! This is your first piece - you're doing great!" But on the subtle level, anyone who has honed a skill from childhood has trouble breaking it down into every step involved, and that's why I'd need at least a month to pick up on all the details. It was invaluable to weave with her for two days, and to hear tips that changed my whole approach. Having tried this myself, unsupervised, I'd of course developed my own habits, work-arounds that were not necessarily helpful, and being observed by Mone and Keo, it became obvious very quickly which habits were not acceptable to them.

In short, I wove with masters, and I'm very grateful.

I'm opening the heddle shed (the trickiest part) while Mone twists fringe on a finished piece. Her fringe twisting technique is another valuable lesson learned.

Working toe-to-toe. Mone is finishing up the beading section on Sarah's band.

One of the main bonuses of the advanced class is that you get to keep the loom. This was very exciting to me, since I'd experienced my own jerry-rigged version, and knew the importance of the particular shape of the sword beater and the smooth bamboo elements. The bamboo has been shaved by hand so that it's completely smooth, and the sword beater was hand-carved by Mone's brother from a Burmese type of mahogany.

I took the weaving back to my room, and worked on it whenever I got the chance. I wanted to be sure and learn some beading before I finished, although I knew I didn't want to bead the whole length - for a beginner, it takes way too long. Mone got me started on a diamond pattern, which I copied. Then Keo told me to try the filled diamond (more beads = more difficult), then for the last one I tried a more open diamond, skipping a row between beads.

Here's my finished piece, back home in the US. For some reason, it got very narrow at the beaded end.

Mone recommended that for my next solo attempt, with my new loom, I should weave a narrower piece, to practice and get used to the loom. I had purchased some of the fine cotton that is available in the Phusi Market in Luang Prabang, and that Mone uses double-stranded as warp and weft. Soon after I returned home, I set out to make a new warp while the process was fresh in my mind. I was thinking about acquiring 2x4's to make the warping frame, when my gaze fell on this wooden ladder.... for the current purpose, it worked just fine.

Making a warp using a ladder as frame, in my own studio.

I'm off and weaving again. The one mistake I made was to make the warp a bit too short. It fits my legs exactly, without rolling onto the bar at all. And the way these bars are made, a piece of bamboo split in half lengthwise, it's meant to be rolled on a bit. So the warp length on the frame should be longer than my hip-to-foot span. Since it's a circular warp, the actual woven length will be double that: the top half is woven, and the warp is advanced by rotating it on the bars.

The next step is to shop for beads to use in the middle of this band.