![]() ![]() This system can be used to make beautiful, though narrow, textiles - only as wide as the weaver's body. As she leaned back, the threads were put under tension. "The most ancient forms of weaving had been done on standing frames or so-called 'backstrap looms,' in which the warp threads were anchored by the weaver's body. So many good moments and thoughts! But when you reached weaving, you dropped the ball. This surprised me, given that I'd been reading about the value of ‘material intelligence’, the interactive relationship between person and materials as a two-way street of skills acquisition, the emphasis on using our bodies the way they were meant to be used in learning to work and make within this world. But Glenn Adamson, you lost me at page forty, when you took the same old, well-worn trail of Western hegemonic educators everywhere and implied that backstrap weaving was some antiquated form, estimable but sadly handicapped by its too-human parameters. Focusing on craft skill is right up my alley, the banner under which I march, and so forth. ![]() ![]() I was counseled to read the book by The Craftsmanship Initiative, whose quarterly newsletter is full of good things. I saved the review from the paper, my interest piqued. In hopes that this is more entertaining than pedantic, I’ve written this in order to elucidate some of the specifics of the weaver’s medium, and where my own work falls within the vast spectrum of weaving possibilities. Most of the cloth woven for my show earlier this year was plain weave, hung as ground behind lines of handspun yarn. When I learned to make a bamboo reed from Bryan Whitehead in 2017 (two links because there were two posts about it,) this became a possibility for me, and I’ve been honing it ever since. In order to really get warp and weft equally visible and ‘balanced’, I need to use a reed to hold the warp yarns in place. I’ve written about this often, and have probably shared more images of work in progress than anyone needs to see, but there’s something enthralling about this view, the weaver’s perspective on the warp as it becomes cloth. It has been a goal for some time to be able to weave balanced plain weave cloth, aka tabby, the basic over-under pattern that underlies what weaving fundamentally is, and create usable fabric, with my backstrap loom. ![]() That’s essentially the purpose of this website, to elucidate a few things about textiles. This is not often expected of other artists, and I think we do it because our love makes us want to help people appreciate what’s going on with this stuff. Textile artists tend to expend some effort (as I’m doing now) to explain how their work is made. But the techniques are in every case noted alongside the textiles, so that you are never being misled by the artist. Contemporary artists of course muddy the waters for the layperson - for example Sarah Swett also indulges in backstrap-woven balanced plain weave, and Mary Zicafoose’s website offers hand-knotted carpets based on her tapestry weavings, produced in a workshop in Nepal. Traditional Navajo rugs are also woven in this way, each row of weft yarn packed down tightly against the previous row, to form a smooth field of color. Tapestry weaving is weft-faced, meaning the yarns you see are the weft yarns, covering the tensioned warp completely. Tapestry as a technique is exemplified by historical European wall coverings like the famous unicorn tapestries, by ‘flat-weave’ rugs such as Turkish kilim, and by artists such as Sarah Swett, Rebecca Mezoff, and Mary Zicafoose. ![]()
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