Evening All!

My tiny local library finally managed to get a copy of Ann Hecht's 'The Art of the Loom' ordered in - which I've been glued to for about 24 hours now! One thing I keep noticing in photographs of accomplished backstrap weavers at work appears to be the use of multiple heddles.

I've been trying to get my head around how and why one might need to use them. It seems logical to me that one could attach a particular colour of warp to one heddle, and another colour to another heddle rod, but the mechanics of using more than one heddle rod are testing the limits of my poor imagination!

Anyone know whether it's a technique worth learning, how you might go ahead warping up with multiple heddles for decorative/coloured warps, how the weaving technique differs from the standard technique with one heddle rod etc??

The book is fantastic by the way, highly recommended reading! Though I'm sure I'm not the first on here to come across it :)

Comments

Fri, 02/11/2011 - 00:20

bolivian warmi

Hi Toby,

Big question requiring long answer. Short answer, simple answer... one heddle stick and a shed rod give you two sheds. Think about all those big floor and table looms with their multiple shafts raising different arrangements of warp threads at a time and creating all manner of structures and designs.

I am doing finnweave at the moment and using three heddle rods and a shed stick and so I have four sheds. This enables me to create a double weave using two sheds for each layer.

As another example, if I wanted to use a supplementary weft and do an inlay design with a short repeating pattern, I could put the threads that need lifting on several heddle sticks so that I wouldn't have to pick them out one by one for every weft pass. I could just lift the sticks.

My weaving teachers in coastal Ecuador wove warp float patterns that had nine different pattern rows to the half way point of the design. The design then mirrored itself. So, they used nine heddle sticks to lift the threads for the first nine rows of the pattern and then reversed the order of raising the sticks so they could weave the other half. 

You can see a video of my teacher Trinidad making the heddles and then using them here. She is using a simple vertical loom rather than a backstrap loom.

See if you can get a book from the library on basic weaving structures and that might help you understand how being able to lift a certain arrangement of warps on several heddle sticks can create different structures and textures. Look at twills for example.

What are you doing now on your backstrap loom?