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.