Backstrap weaving using the minimum required while making fabric, and can be improvised anywhere you can acquire stick like objects.
I’ve been diving into youtube looking for helpful videos on how to set up and weave, and this is an unordered collection of links to videos and sites that intrigued me:
- Backstrap Weaving with Sra Claudia Vega of Panchimalco, El Salvador – does not explicitly list what things you need, but explains what Sra Claudia Vega does to set up her loom. Includes setting up heddles; one shed uses two sticks and string wrapped in figure eights.
- Rhade Warping – Brief video from Laverne Waddington showing how rhade weavers add their string heddles as they are winding the warp. (No voice over, visual only.)
- Pictorial tutorial on how to knit heddles – From Laverne Waddington’s excellent site.
I am intrigued by the variety of heddles and how tightly they are attached to the heddle stick, because these three offer three separate options. If you want to weave using more than 2 sheds, you can add additional heddle sticks to accomplish that. The biggest challenge seems to be keeping the length of the heddles consistent: this is less of a problem with the first two methods, where the loops aren’t tied in place.