![]() Habele began with a thorough analysis of the limited number of references to the design and use of Caroline Island backstrap looms in published academic studies, books, and online museum and archive collections. It was anticipated this might further entail development of ready-to-assemble kits for those with limited access to tools needed to fabricate looms. In September of 2020, Habele was awarded a grant by Office of Insular Affairs, to implement the project. Habele further intended to develop, publish, and distribute detailed guides for assembly of looms from the published specifications for FAS citizens in the US. Once simple, actionable, and accurate guides were created, Habele intended to use these guides to create looms as a proof of concept, and provide them to mentors in the United States who can teach weaving skills to younger FAS migrants and their daughters. These instructions were intended to assist FAS migrants in utilizing accessible materials found within the US as substitutes for traditional ones. In partnership with women’s and community-based organizations within the FAS, as well as with support of US-based anthropologists, Habele planned with weavers and craftsmen in both the US and the FAS to create and distribute simple instructions for the fabrication of traditional back-strap looms among migrants in the United States. Additionally, because weaving and wearing these skirts is necessary within the local customs and inter-island relationships of the Caroline Islands, women who do not learn these skills are disadvantaged when they return to the FAS. This severs the centuries-long tradition of passing cultural skills from mother to daughter and aunt to niece. Though loom weaving of skirts is central to daily life in the Caroline Islands, few FAS women who come to United States can bring or obtain, a working backstrap loom appropriate to this weaving style. Next time: Dry yarn.This is the first in a series of posts dealing with Weaving Connections, a project of Habele to sustain and preserve Micronesian backstrap weaving traditions among Island populations who’ve migrated to the United States mainland. I also found the gelatin sized yarn less stiff than with the earlier gelatin experiments when I had immersed dry yarn into the solution. I'm a big fan of gluten (my husband and son are bakers), so don't have much call for such things to hold my bread together. Or perhaps it would be possible to warm up the xanthan gum slightly and make it more liquid which might make it go more easily into the yarn? I don't really know what it is though, so maybe heat will make it do something else entirely. Perhaps I needed to spend more time working it into the yarn? This stiffness is something I'd liked with earlier gelatin experiments as it made the yarn easy to manage, especially when threading heddles, so I was a little disappointed by the lack of stiffness in the xanthan gum skeins. Indeed, the yarn seemed less stiff and 'lineny' than the strands sized with gelatin. Given the consistency of the xanthan gum, I expected that once they were dry the strands would be glued to one another and hard to wind into balls. It also meant that it didn't pool in the yarn as much as as the gelatin, which is a plus (I had to turn the gelatin skeins more often.) This meant that it needed to be worked into the yarn with more vigor than the gelatin and, once hung, that it took forever to dry. ![]() I finally pushed it through a sieve which got rid of some of the lumps, but the consistency (which Sarah had described), continued to be, well, gloppy. Not having a blender, I tried a whisk and ended up with a gloppy, lumpy solution a bit like egg drop soup. It probably would have been easier if I had followed Sarah's recommendation to use a blender to mix the Xanthan gum with the water though. The Xanthan gum (I used the recipe in Sarah Anderson's wonderful book, A Spinner's Guide to Yarn Design was not so straightforward. Note: I'd used gelatin before, immersing dry rather than damp yarn this time i found, unsurprisingly, that the yarn absorbed less gelatin solution. ![]() I immersed the skeins, squeezed the solution through, then hung them to drip. It dissolved easily in a small amount of cool water, then became nicely liquid when further diluted with hot. In this phase, I much preferred the gelatin. The comic above shows the basic procedure: total immersion of clean damp yarn in one solution or the other, followed by weighed hanging until dry.
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