Red and White

 

latest tea towels cut off the loom, not wet finished

Cut these off the loom the other day, now begun the dark green.  The design is Snail's Trails and Cat's Paws, but woven star fashion rather than rose fashion.  

This is an example of the cross pollination between weavers.  Or maybe it is.  Because most weavers know this motif as an overshot pattern, where it was fairly commonly used in the weaving of coverlets.  As an overshot motif, all that is required is four shafts, while this twill block rendition needs 16.  Or 12 if you use a 1:2 twill instead of a 1:3 for the blocks.

The speculation is that overshot was developed as a way to get nice large designs with fewer shafts.  So far I've seen no actual documentation of this, but given this design appears to pre-date the overshot version, perhaps?

The design is found in a weaving manuscript that dates from around the early 1700s.  It isn't listed as being original to the author, and my best guess is that the designs in the manuscript pre-date the publication by quite some time.  The conclusion is that these designs were around for a while (100?  200? years) before the manuscript or pattern book was produced.  They may be much older.  I haven't done a deep dive into Keep Me Warm One Night by Harold and Dorothy Burnham, but they certainly have motifs of this type of design in their collection of coverlets.  One of these days I might sit down and see if I can find any evidence of how old the overshot versions are and see if the speculation is based on any kind of written documentation.

But that's the thing with textiles.  They are ephemeral.  They disintegrate (or did until synthetic fibres were produced) and not much of the textile record remains.

It was a great gift that Patricia Hilts gave the weaving record when she translated the books (there are two) and published the information in Ars Textrina.

With textiles such a scarce presence in archeological excavations, it has been hard to get much information.  And, dare I say it, respect from male practitioners since textiles are currently seen as 'women's work', therefore of little value?  Yes, even today among some.

There have been some books written about textiles throughout history.  Maybe one of these days I'll dig through the internet and see if I can find some of the ones I know about - and find some I don't.

In the meantime, I have Beverly Gordon's book that I really need/want to dig into, but just haven't have the mental wherewithal to sit down and begin.  What little energy I have gets spent on answering questions on the two websites I belong to, weaving, or thinking about weaving.  

Today we have a lovely sunny day (so far) but with warnings of colder temps to come.  We also have another crew coming on Friday to deal with the tub surround.  Another day I'll spend in the guild room with my hemming heap.  If I remember I may pull Elizabeth Wayland Barber's book Women's Work: the first 20,000 years and check her notes.  I seem to remember a rather long list of resources.  :)