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.

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.

pickup

In addition to the Katu style foot-tensioned weaving, I have recently started another Andean pickup piece.

This is a technique I first tried exactly two years ago, in January of 2011 (right).

The first pickup weaving was an exercise from Laverne Waddington's Andean Pebble Weave book, and I had used her excellent tutorials to learn how to set up a backstrap loom in the first place. Improvising with spools of thread to hold the cross, I made several narrow bands which became bookmarks or keyfobs.

When I became bold enough to go wider, I could weave phone covers, still using charts from Laverne's book.

So far, I was using cotton commercial yarn and following charts, not knowing the names of the designs. But my original introduction to this kind of weaving was still hovering in my mind and in a small unfinished bundle.

In 2010 at the Golden Gate Fiber Institute (GGFI) Summer Intensive Retreat, Abby Franquemont had warped up a spontaneous, late-night warp with 6 pairs of pattern threads, and had begun to teach a traditional weave pattern. It was late and I had to thread a loom for Judith's class the next morning, so I could not spend much time at the moment, but I took home the warp and worked on it once in a while.

Being very small-scale and silk, it was fussy, but I eventually learned that this is a crucial design, with which young Andean weavers begin. It gives them the basic concepts and principles on which their weaving will build. For this reason, I decided I'd better work one that I could finish. The pattern is tanka ch'oro.

On the left is the silk warp Abby made, with my attempts at weaving. On the right is an actual tanka ch'oro jakima (the quechua name for the narrow woven bands) from Chinchero village, Peru, made with handspun yarn. The Chinchero jakima was given to me by Laverne, and is one of my most prized textile possessions.

Over an embarrassingly long period of time, I worked on my own handspun tanka ch'oro, finally completing it in Laos last May.

But meanwhile, I had been working on other pickup bands, expanding my knowledge of the patterns and how they are learned and created. I wove a long strip of maya q'enko, a winding river design, in cotton.

I also learned and practiced the S curve, or kutij, which is in Laverne's lessons. When Abby noticed that I was trying to master designs, she suggested warping 16 pairs of pattern threads and doubling the mayo q'enko or kutij. This set me on a path of exploration that led to understanding what Ed Franquemont meant when he wrote about Andean weaving design as jazz.

So the current weaving is a return to this experiment and ongoing tutorial after a hiatus, this time with handspun yarn.