Part 1 (2/2)

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIGURE 6.--OLD CHILKAT BLANKET.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIGURE 7.--SQUAW WEAVING CHILKAT BLANKET.]

Lieut. G. T. EMMONS tells us that the goat of this region abounds in the rugged coast mountains from Puget Sound to Cook's Inlet, but is unknown on the outlying islands. Its preference is the glacial belt and snow-fields of the most broken country and the terraced sides of the precipitous cliffs. It is gregarious in habit being found in bands of from ten to fifty or more. From September until April the skin is in prime condition with an abundance of soft wool under a heavy covering of long coa.r.s.e hair; but the hunting is only done in the autumn. To prepare for the plucking, the skin must be kept wet on the underside so it is moistened and rolled up for several days, thus loosening the hold of the fleece. With thumb and fingers of both hands the squaw, seated upon the ground, pushes the fleece from her, procuring by this process great patches of wool and hair. Then the hairs are plucked out and thrown away and the wool is ready to be spun. During the spinning the woman also sits upon the ground with legs outstretched, with the crude wool by her left side within easy reach. This she draws out with her left hand and feeds to her right, in the amount necessary to form the required size of thread. As it is received between the palm of the right hand and the right thigh, it is rolled from the body and falls to the side in loose, connected thread.

This soft thread is next spun between the palm of the hand and the thigh to form a single tightly twisted strand; and by the same process two of these strands are rolled together to form the weft thread for the blanket. In technic the blanket is related to the last one described for it is a twine weaving, but a twilled twine as the two strand weft encloses two warps at a move and with each succeeding line of weft advances one warp giving the surface a twilled effect. It is interesting that the small blocks of design are woven separately something as a tapestry, and later the blocks are sewed together with a thread of sinew from the caribou or whale.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIGURE 8.--A THIRD TYPE OF LOOM.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIGURE 9.--NAVAJO LOOM.]

The weaving from this region which most nearly approaches machine work in process of making is the dog-hair and goat's wool blanket. It is woven upon a loom of two revolving cylindrical beams, supported by upright posts at either end (Figure 8). The end of the warp thread is attached to a staying cord stretched from post to post about midway between the revolving beams. The warp then encircles the loom, catches under the staying cord, then turns and travels back to its starting point, there to catch under the staying cord and repeat the operation.

The weft moves across the warps as in twilled cloth, over two, under two, with an advance of one warp at each line of weft. Dog's hair, duck down and goat's wool are the materials used, especially the latter. These materials are spun in two-ply thread twisted partly upon the thigh of the weaver and finished on a spindle.

Leaving this weaving area in western British Columbia we pa.s.s to the other locality of note in North America where primitive weaving is practised,--in southwestern United States and northern Mexico. Here the loom work is at a more advanced stage of development than that of the northern area, the weavers making use of a loom frame, sheds, healds, batten and an improvised shuttle. The Navajo Indians are the most skilled weavers north of Mexico and a description of their weaving is fairly typical of this area. As the warps are of soft pliable threads they must of necessity be stretched between two beams.

These are suspended vertically if the weaving is to be of any great size, the distance between them being that of the proposed length of the blanket (Figure 9). The warp threads are not stretched across the beams with an oval movement but are laced over them, forming two sheds, the upper of which is held intact by means of the shed-rod, and the lower by a set of healds pa.s.sing over a heald-rod. A wooden fork serves as a reed and a slender twig as a shuttle. Upon this twig is loosely wound from end to end the weft thread. The shuttle at one move crosses less than half of the warps as the batten--a flat stick of hard oak--is too short to open more than that length of the shed for the pa.s.sage of the shuttle.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIGURE 10.--HOPI BLANKET.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIGURE 11.--HOPI WEAVING.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIGURE 12.--MEXICAN SERAPE.]

In Figure 10 only a portion of a blanket from the Hopi Indians is shown, that the delicate design may be better seen. A number of Hopi patterns have this fine white line of tracery upon the dark background and it is this play of the fine line pattern on the fabric which is one of the chief beauties of Hopi weavings. The sparkle of white is even more brilliant in Figure 11, another smaller weaving from the same people. They make constant use of the diagonal or twilled technic, a weave which requires that the warps be divided into four sheds, the upper supplied with a shed stick, the three lower with healds. The sheds are s.h.i.+fted in a variety of orders for the construction of different patterns.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIGURE 13.--HUICHOL WEAVING.]

One of the most beautiful weavings the writer has ever seen from the southwest is that pictured in Figure 12, which is, however, only a small center portion of the beautiful sirape from Mexico. The pattern in two colors of indigo upon a tan colored ground is especially effective, while the tiny blue dots sprinkled upon the tan surface and the tan dots over the blue design add a subtle and delightful charm not frequently met with.

The last two examples, Figures 13 and 14, are also from Mexico, the first a bit of weaving with animal designs from the Huichol Indians, and the last a belt loom from the same people. In making belts and other narrow fabrics the loom is either horizontal or oblique in position, stretching from some post or tree to the weaver and there attached to a loop which pa.s.ses either about the waist or under the thighs and rendered tense by the weight of the weaver. These belts may be woven with two or four sheds according to the style of weaving desired, while another method of pattern work on two shed weaving has the addition of a round stick run into the warps so as to raise certain threads while the weft pa.s.ses two or three times underneath producing a variety of damask weaving.

The stretch between these simple methods of primitive peoples and machine methods of modern life is great indeed and we will long continue to wonder that with such crude devices these people could produce results which compare favorably with our modern weavings.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIGURE 14.--MEXICAN BELT LOOM.]

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