WELCOME to new members!!!

Welcome new members!

Have a good day!

Hello to all!!!!   Looks like we are all a little shy.  So brave me......hahahaha......thought I would take a moment to introduce myself. 

Crazy, mature lady living in rural Northeastern Utah, USA.  I love weaving, but still consider myself a newbie, or a very inexperienced weaver.  I have successfully completed 3 hand woven projects.  Don't laugh now, I said I was a newbie.  I am intrigued by patterns and would love more time to experiment, but I have to work for a living to support this habit.  Speaking of which......don't you think that the cost of a loom can be counter productive to the art of weaving?  That's why I wanted to learn backstrap weaving.  I am fortune and have 2 looms, but I can't afford to purchase, nor store a 3rd loom.....unless of course you can put it away in a nice neat little package, like you can the materials for a backstrap loom.

I'm browsing around the house and work to find all the materials I need to create my first loom and make a backstrap for my loom.  

Ok.....I'm done.....your turn.

Peggy in Utah 

 Hi Peggy,

   It sounds like you will fit right in with the rest of us here.  It is an international group.  We have been enjoying this forum very much.  Welcome!  Hope you find all your weaving stuff in your browsing.  I'm on weaving break till after Christmas.  Then I have plans for more backstrap fun.

See you on the Back Strap forum.

Aunt Janet

Hello Everyone,

I'm another extreeme newbie to the weaving scene.  I had just made the PVC inkle loom from Handwoven's March/April issue to make a few bookmarks for holiday gifts, but I had no frame of reference as to what I was supposed to do.  Then I found this group, and got a much better idea of what I needed to do.  Of course then I decided to go back to the Hardware store and got myself set up.  The last week has been a blast figuring out how to tackle the lessons already set out.  I've been making some progress. 

Essentially the pieces on the right side were the first and second then from the top to the bottom.  I can't wait to play some more.  And I really wish I had learned years ago...

Thanks to Laverne for convincing me to come out of hiding.

 Hi Kitsune, what an awesome set up and start you have!  Welcome to the forum.  It looks like you are off and running with the best of them already:>. Virag

Hi Peggy, welcome to the group!  I love the fact that you can create truely intricate weavings using only a few low cost materials.  I've let a lot of looms come into the house and now that I have my backstrap loom I've been sending the others to stay with friends.  It's really awesomely mediative to me to sit and weave this way.  Good luck to you, Virag 

Thank you, I still have a few modifications I want to do once the Holidays are over and I have a bit more room to breath.  I love to learn new skills and this one feels natural to me.  I do have a tendency to jump in the deep end when learning something new.  I figure the more challenges I set myself from the get go the better, get all the questions and frustrations out while my enthusiasm is high.

I can't tell you how happy I am to have found this group.  It gave me a few steps to follow, and made learning easy and fun.

HI Kitsune, Those are great! What a long way you have come in such a short time! the one wound around your sticks looks impressive, is that your latest work in progress?

Its a great way to learn to weave, and there is soooo much you can do on a backstrap - I hope you will be joining in when we get back into the Weave-Alongs after Christmas. We have a lovely international group here, many of us self taught like you, and all happy to push the our craft and skills a bit further out of our comfort zones each time. Because I live in Australia  I'm usually up and about while those in Europe and the States are in bed, so there is generally one of us ready to have a chat 24/7, and to try and help out if you have a problem. I can't guarantee that  the rest of us are as wise as Laverne, but most of us have weaving experience on several different types of looms.

hi Peggy, didn't someone tell you that bits of dowel breed in the dark, like clothes hangers, hehe? ask me how I know.............

I make most of my looms, because its very hard to get them here in South Australia, and the backstrap is far and away the most versatile of them all. I have experimented with 4 shaft patterns, and while its a bit slower than using a regular 4 shaft loom, its not hard to do, and what I really enjoy is being so close to what I am doing. I also spin, so I am starting to spin my own weaving yarns, which is a complete new spinning experience as I usually spin for knitting, which is a soft lightly twisted yarn, not the hard, highly twisted yarns needed for a backstrap warp.

I store my looms by hanging them from hooks off the curtain rails.

Thank you,  and yes the one wound around the sticks was my latest WIP but I finished it a few hours ago.  That's been the one bittersweet thing about learning how to weave, at this time of the year, it's all been on a deadline. 

I hope to be apart of the weave alongs after Christmas, though I already have a number of things I want to make myself after all the giftables are done.  I love groups like this because you get to meet people from around the world, and get different perspectives on things, as well as being able to find someone awake at all hours.  I tend to be an insomniac, especially if I have a project that I'm really excited about. 

Oh and considering that the backstrap is the one and only loom I have any experience with I'm sure y'all know a lot more technique and theory than I do.  Just call me a sponge, I'm willing to learn/absorb anything y'all want to share. 

Have you read any weaving books? Your local library should have a couple of the good ones on its shelves. You would probably enjoy Rachel Brown's "Weaving Spinning and Dyeing Book". its the one that got me going, and she gives good instructions for making your own looms, and covers inkle looms as well as Backstrap, Navajo, Hopi, tablet weaving and 4 shaft weaving - and it can all be done on the backstrap loom! We have also been using one or the other of the Adele Cahlander books: Bolivian Highland Weaving, or Dpuble Woven Treasures of Old Peru. They were written for the 4 shaft loom, but the techniques are much simpler on the backstrap than on one of the big looms, and she has some excellent patterns drafted out for band weaving.

There are lots of free books here:

www.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/weavedocs.html

at the online digital archives.

some of the files can also be found at:

www.handweaving.net/DAHome.aspx

and they have a better search engine.

There are a lot of articles by Mary Meigs Atwater and Harriet Tidball who visited South America and tried to faithfully record all the different weaves they came across.

These articles and books are all free for downloading, so happy, happy browsing!

I have gotten a copy of Rachael Brown's book for a few weeks, and I have a few on "wish lists" as well as trolling the net for information, not to mention a few random magazines I've bought.  But I'm a big fan of refence material and by the looks of it you've pointed me in the right direction for tons more.  Thank you, thank you. 

Arizona will keep you reading for months, hehe! If I keep disappearing, its because I'm trying to work on a bag I'm making out of sari silk. This is not backstrap, but I do have a couple of backstrap projects I must get get back to once I've worked the sari silk out of my system. Or else weave the sari silk on a backstrap.

I keep a wish-list on Amazon. Apart from its being very handy, amazon have a lot of second-hand books as well, so it gives a basic idea of how much a pre-loved book will cost, while you hunt it up else-where.

I think its great that that the  handwoven article on the PVC inkle loom is getting used!

I wrote it so that new weavers could weave without going into debt, buying a large loom they have no place for , and find out that they don't need.

There are other versions around, and you can adjust sizes and shapes as you switch between different kinds of projects. (I have been know to string my sprang on it)

Sharon

YOU wrote that article!-that is amazing because when Kitsune mentioned that article above I thought-now that sounds really cool and immediately thought of you. I haven't been getting  Handwoven lately.

Does Franco know you do sprang? I have Collingwood;'s book on it but got quite put off by the long explanation about having exactly the right kind of yarn because, if not, the piece just ends up curling up on itself.  i got interested after seeing pictures of sprang bags being made in Colombia.

Why don't you start a sprang group Sharon? You know that Franco and I would join.

Laverne

What kind of PVC do you use? Is it furniture grade? If so, what is the difference between furniture grade and plumbing PVC? I can get any amount of plumbing pipe, but I don't think it would stand up to very much stress. I've seen upright tapestry style looms made from PVC as well and it looks like the ideal thing to take along for demonstrations etc. I notice that in some of the videos on Youtube of South East Asian backstrap weavers, PVC agricultural pipe often gets used for back beams and for running repairs on other beams and uprights etc. They slip it over the damaged part.

Plumbing pipe, in my limited experience, is somewhat brittle and shatters easily. This is the one major drawback to using it - does the furniture-grade pipe suffer from the same problem?

You wrote it?  Awesome.  My DH has co-opted the loom we built off of that article and he's loving it.  I did get to use it once before it became his new toy.  I think before too long I'll get to play with it again, but it did help me get a feel for how things work. After finding this group I can honestly say I'm completely addicted.  Thanks for writing the article, it propted the purchase of that issue, and of our learning to weave.

In my experience, the best PVC to use for looms is CPVC, it is the cream stuff, sold next to 10' lengths of copper pipes in the big box home improvement stores. Typically the CPVC comes in only 2 sizes, 1/2 inch and 3/4" , and is about 2 times the price of the similar sized  white pvc that comes in all sizes from 1/2" to 6". (the Cream CPVC has thicker walls, and I have not had it shatter yet, after about 3 years of using it, and leaving it in a hot Florida sunny car.

If your loom is going to be used for a few expericments, the smaller diamenter (1/2 inch) is fine. My 'most used' PVC looms I have use the larger size 3/4" CPVC.

The trick to using the CPVC is to think small, as lengths greater than 12" bow. It is fine to have bowing in the long (warp wise) demention of you loom, but if you are going to set up a wide (greater than 10")  tapestry loom, don't even consider CPVC.

I don't have any acess to Funrature- grade PVC... other than I stoped at a outlet store where they make furnaure from it. A "weaving bench" looking like a footstool, just a little bit higher, was priced between $30 and $40, cheap enough to consder if I were not handy with tools.

If you are going to make a lot of the little looms, for demo purposes, the best tool is a pipe cutter, its a little tool with a roller that cuts like a canopener that you wind around the pipe. For 1 loom, use a saw, the decent pipecutters are in the $6 to $20 price range.

As for the You tube demos, the PVC agricultral pipe in larger diameters, 2 to 3 inches,, I admire the women for using it. It is lightweight, easlily avalible, and makes a wonderfull shedrod.

A very warm welcome to four more new members...........

tapestry interest

prbevins

jesse

dognapper2

We hope to hear from you when you are ready. Just drop by and say hi.

Laverne

Hey.....There's an idea.  Hang them from hooks.  Thanks, I'll have to remember that.  What's this about breeding dowel rods.  I wasn't aware of that and hope I can find same sex rods that don't multiply, at least not too quickly.  Thanks for the heads up.

Thanks,

Peggy in Utah 

Wait until you have three and four projects going at once, Peggy!-you will wanting those rods. I can'never have too many!

Laverne

As long as you have dowel, you have the makings of a loom!

WELCOME NEW MEMBERS!!

Tobytottle

Orlythe

Rosemary

klcostle

lindaspins

franee

Dearbiz

btcustis

kfminervino

When you are settled and have had a chance to look around, we hope you will drop by to introduce yourselves. All questions welcome!

Thanks for the welcome :)

My name is Fran and I live near Sydney in Australia.  I'm an avid sewer, stitcher, knitter and this year learnt to spin which I also love.  A lot of magazines aimed at spinners are also aimed at weavers and it has been sucking me in, but it was going to be a while before I could afford a loom.  I was thrilled when I found out about the back strap loom and am off to start 'building' mine today - wish me luck :)

hi Fran, I'm melting in Adelaide; its not nice this morning because i have to whiz out, grrrrr, but with a bit of luck the change will be through tonight. If you need any help putting your loom together, you can PM me - I will be around later on this morning

Hi Franee and welcome. Nice to see another Aussie here. Caroline will have some company on Aussie time! I hope you have found the info you need here in the forum. Give us a yell if you need anything.

Laverne

Thank you Caroline and Laverne,

My 11 yr old son was a good help today with cutting and sanding bits of dowel.  I even managed to weave about 12" of 4ply cotton at about 2"wide (46 total wraps).  I'm really thrilled with the whole process and am going to work on smoothness and even edges.

Cheers

Fran

Hello All!

Thanks for your PM Laverne, and for all your help over on the Backstrappers Yahoo Group!

I'm finding some time every day to make some more progress reading through all the material online that relates to backstrapping; mostly here on Weavolution, on Weavezine and on the Yahoo Group! I am separated from my loom for another few days, but as soon as I'm back on the house boat, weaving begins again in earnest! I'm excited to try some of Laverne's tutorial pieces on here, I can't express enough thanks for making all these tutorials with photos, Laverne - amazing!

Welcome to the very latest new members.............!!

Deborah_from_Sumter

nctxweaver

fibertwist

katheuk

Hope to see you here soon in the forum after you have had a chance to look around.

Here are seven new members to welcome to the group! Thanks for joining. :-)

snarling badger

hrist

jvc63

eggplantlady

ArcoIris

scottishlamb

TinaBe

 Welcome new members.  It is great to see this forum continuing to grow!  

Aunt Janet

Welcome................

aussielyn

roseabc

historicstitcher

Marlana,

Cleo

Maria

djwright

MeliXar

Fiber Lady from Vermont

lovey

Karren

Dawn Stone

who joined the group this weekend. We hope to meet you here in the forum when you have settled in and had a look around.

Thanks to all for the warm welcome!

I'll be mostly lurking and learning. I'm not ready to set up a backstrap at this point but I use floor looms and a bit of rigid heddle and I'm loving the way bits and pieces of all these techniques work together.

I really want to learn more about using heddle sticks and shed sticks and pick-up...things that I can use to enhance my skills on my other looms as well. It's all about having a broader understanding of the world as a weaver...the more I can learn, the more I can express when I set to creating cloth.

Gotta love it!

Linda Z., in NE OH

Hi Linda,

 Lurk away:-) We hope you find something useful here. Let us know if you put anythig to use on your looms.

Laverne

A mid-week welcome for our latest new members............

brushley

Woven Spun

cynthia76

aubeweave

KathieP

We hope you will visit the forum and tell us a little about yourselves.

Welcome to our newest members...........

prehistoricpa

deepend

sharons

rzaz

tracyjayn

goran

Diane Corso

kelly

PJS

peigi

I hope you are finding your way around okay. If or when you are up and weaving, I hope you will show us your stuff :-)

Hello from Texas! I don't weave yet, but I do want to learn. I will probably spend most my time lurking and soaking in all the knowledge passed around. I am looking forward to my first project. Have a great day everyone!

Cindy Jo

Welcome Cindy Jo. Feel free to lurk-there is a lot to take in! Please don't hesitate to ask questions. 

Thank you for the welcome.

Cindy Jo

Hi Cindy Jo,

Welcome!

Have a good day!

Franco Rios, Sacramento, Cal.

Thank you, Franco.

Cindy Jo

Woo hoo! We just got our 300th member...welcome Folledecouleur!!

Happy birthday Rose Goldilocks! Hope you are having a great day. :-)

thanks a lot bolivian warmi. Do I win something ? lol

I just want to present myself : I'm the craziest person I know on collecting ufos (unfinieshed objects) !!! Ans also on trying knew technique. At the moment, I am gathering stuff to fabric a nice backstrap loom. The last two pieces I found, at the riverbank, are the loom bars (as shown in weavezine). I want to recycle and reuse part, as a goal not to spent any money on my loom.... I will probably spent enough for the threads ! I will show a picture later on... When a warp will be on it. For the moment I have to finish a strap on my inkle for my son's guitar.....

Aha! So you DO finish some of your projects---your son's guitar strap, for example! We are looking forward to seeing that and your new backstrap loom especially the parts you got at the river bank. Welcome!

The backstrap has always intrigued me so here I am to learn more about weaving using small devices.

I have been aweaver for over 30 years, but never explored this type of weaving much.  I have a band in progress on an inkle loom with a pick-up pattern.

Hi Evelyn and welcome,

You are used to weaving warp faced bands with pick up so i am sure that once you have gotten used to how to make sheds on your backstrap loom you will take to it quickly!

Laverne

not quite used to!  This is my first pick-up band and first band for a long time.  I  think I am understanding the technique, it is practice I need and especially the reading and writing of the drafts. 

Hi and thank you for the Welcome.   I have gotten started, and woven a book marker.... now I am warping a placemat.  I really enjoyed the book marker once I got the hang of it.  I can't wait to master the beautiful design work.... Have a awesome day.

Got any photos to share Tracyjayn?

Upload instructions are here.

Laverne

This is going to be fun!!  I've been weaving bands for quite some time, using my own little semi-rigid heddles, larger rigid heddles, tablet weaving, inkle loom... and it seems like everywhere I've gone in the past ten years, people have said, "That's nice, it's a lot like backstrap weaving, isn't it?" or, "Have you ever tried doing that with a backstrap loom?", or even, "You could probably do nice patterning with that, the way you could with a backstrap loom."

My past experiences with backstrap weaving were uncomfortable.  Everything seems different now, though -- following these excellent instructions, I've re-mounted some of my UFOs onto rods and started working on them... and it's great!  I think the backstraps in my past were too narrow, and I wore them too high -- or maybe I was just too new to weaving then and unable to sort out the problems on my own.

In any case -- I haven't yet wound my first backstrap warp, but the backstrap and rods have already become my good friends!  They're helping clear my weaving area of weavings-in-progress to make space for the new stuff, and it's working so well that I expect that first backstrap warp to happen before mid-week.

Happy to be here!

Ruth

Thats fantastic! I also found it clicked once I had Lavernes excellent instructions. I learned using the Rachel Brown book, and tablets. I did not get on with pickup then, but it may have been because I was trying to run before I had understood the basics. Now its far more interesting and do-able, and I can appreciate how all the different techniques overlap and interlace. (Pun intended.)

By the way, I love your semi rigid heddles!

Thanks for the nice words about my heddles -- they're a lot of fun. :-)

I'm really looking forward to learning these weaving techniques.  I love having my hands right there in the yarns while weaving (tactile addiction), so little heddles, rigid heddles, and weaving tablets grab me in ways that bigger looms don't.  Plus... those gorgeous pickup patterns are amazing.

This is going to be great!

Ruth, did you make your shaft/beater device with the texsolve?  Very cleaver device,  I'm slapping myself on the forehead saying, duhhhh, you could make your own heddle with plumber's pipe and the texsolve heddles!  love it! 

Hi Deb!

Yes, the little heddle is made with TexSolv.  I use it for shaft control, but not for beating (I don't use my "store-bought" rigid heddles for beating, either).  Because I demo these at shows, I have a number of them with weavings-in-progress scattered all over the house -- and I'm absolutely delighted to have the backstrap technique to weave them off quickly (long warps like these usually stretch all the way across the living room, which is fine with me, but less so for my DH!).

By the way, on one of the wider weavings-in-progress (on a prototype wide heddle), I'm weaving full-width instead of warp-faced, and to maintain an even width I'm using the Lao-inspired bamboo-and-pin temple you describe on your website.  Works like a charm!  Thanks for that.  (For anyone who hasn't seen it, here's the link:  homepage.mac.com/debmcclintock/PhotoAlbum27.html )  ...That wider weaving will soon be mounted on backstrap sticks so it can be woven off.  That seems very international (Lao-Bolivian-French-NorthAmerican). ;-)

Ruth

 ah, Ruth, I am glad you like the temple, yes, that makes your loom VERY international!  I think it is wonderful, to anyone else you is looking at my old website at the link above, the photos got blown away by me by accident.  I can't reload them to that old web site, I need to reload them to my new web page but I...have....to....find....the....old....photos.  Never blow away photos on an on-line site when you haven't had your coffee yet.  That site took years to load and it still hurts that the photos aren't up there now.

Deb, Have you tried the Way Back machine at

www.archive.org/web/web.php

I tried just now but it was down. They archive sites. Its how I was able to go back and re-read the info on inkleweaving.com although its now been taken over by Asian spam. You can also access old sites that have closed down, as long as the Way Back Machine archived them.

It will require a lot of patience to find your photos, but if they have archived your hosting site, your info should be somewhere there.

Caroline, who hopes those photos are not lost forever, because they are great!

I hit the link that Ruth provided but I don't get the photos. Is that  apage where the images got 'blown away"? Sometimes I don't know if it is just my slow internet service.

And now I am curious about this stretcher as the Guatemalans use one which I would call "bamboo and nail", but it doesn'r sound the same as you talk about knotting being involved.

.

Shoot, I posted that link and figured I wasn't seeing the images here because my connection was slow this morning!  Sorry about that.

Here are a couple of photos of the temple I made following Deb's great instructions:

This first photo (above) shows the view looking straight down at the temple "in situ".  What you can't see very well in the picture is that this slender piece of bamboo is arched -- and that's what keeps the web stretched comfortably taut.

The second photo (below) shows a close-up of the "business" end of the temple.  You can see how the pin is held onto the piece of bamboo with tape (Deb, that's just brilliant!), and how big the arc is.

This is the only temple like this that I've made and tried -- I imagine that with different widths of bamboo you'd get a stronger or softer "stretch" (is that right, Deb?).

Pretty darned ingenious! :-)

Ruth

 Ruth, yes to your question.  I am so glad you posted a photo of yours.  you can spend hours in hobby lobby or some other place that sells balsa wood to train hobbyists or model builders testing the bending strength of the balsa wood.  The Lao showed me:

bamboo temples with points carved at the end

bamboo with straight pins twined with string onto the ends of the sticks

bamboo  sticks with carved plastic tubing shoved onto each end

there are all kinds of configerations.

What I do is tape my pin in place like you have done above and then twined around the pin to give it more stability, sorta like casting on for knitting (way tighter) and tying the knot.  I have a series of temples marked with the width of warp in reed and the web at the fell line.  I always try my premade temples before I make another one.  The key is to make it about an inch or two wider than the cloth to keep it taut across the cloth WITHOUT breaking the balsa wood.  I've had one favorite temple break and I just taped another stick across the break to keep it in play.  That worked well also.

I've seen this temple in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma so it is a regional thing.  The Cambodians do a type of silk ikat (hol) and they use the temple on top. The Lao do a very intricate silk inlay with lots of inlay butterflys so their temples go under the cloth to keep it out of the way of the inlay silk.

This temple isn't appropriate for everything but I've found it useful for light cloth.  You just have to advance it often.

I will repost when I reload my photos slowly, I'll make the temple post a priority on my new web page...

Thanks Ruth. What kind of loom are you weaving on in these pictures?

In those photos, three semi-rigid heddles (just out of the picture) are suspended on the warp and threaded in straightdraw twill.

It was an experiment -- these are wider than the heddles I usually make, and I wanted to see how they'd work "in series" to weave twill; plus, I wanted to see how they'd perform on a long(ish) warp (2.5 meters), suspended full-length.  The result:  they work just fine "in series", but I thoroughly don't enjoy having the warp stretched out full-length for a non-warp-faced weave.  It's like weaving while standing on a swaying rope -- uncomfortably variable.  (Enter the backstrap and sticks -- and I'll soon have my living room back!)

The little temple is a lifesaver.  This piece has a lofty-springy weft (3-ply merino and silk handspun), and maintaining the width without the temple was not much fun.

Ruth

 okay, I posted some closeups of my temple on my web page and put some short instructions on it...here ya go:

http://web.me.com/debmcclintock/Site/Temples.html

Thanks Deb!

Thank you for posting that. Am off to find some bamboo!