When I'm at home, I surround myself with handmade textiles. I also seek out any opportunity to see exhibitions or other showings of textiles. But it's especially fun to come across them unexpectedly, as when I wandered into The Artful Ewe, a yarn shop in Port Gamble, and found this vignette next to a comfy knitting chair:
The strip of supplementary warp is a long band, wound into a roll, and Heidi, the shop owner, informed me "It's a yurt band - not for sale." She has her own textile collection interspersed among the fibers and yarns throughout the shop, and I had to spend a long time just taking it all in. Anyway, the yurt band (sitting on top of a beautiful Bolivian weaving.... sigh!), was fascinating to me because it is so similar to the Bedouin sh'jarah method of warp substitution. The floats are loose on the back, in the same way.
I kept trying to get my mind around it: this kind of weaving, done in Central Asia?? Most of the yurt bands I've seen, and I've only seen pictures, are woven using what Laverne calls simple warp floats, where the colors of the warp alternate in plainweave, and warps are lifted on the front to make the design. There was one of those in The Artful Ewe, as well:
This is the technique I was working on earlier in the year, with aspirations of weaving a more complex design someday.
The bands were given to Heidi by a friend, and she had no information on their origin. So I'm left to wonder, and keep looking at my photos of the beautiful weaving.
Meanwhile, I now have my own shipment from Qatar to contend with, so there are plenty of textiles to ponder at home. Need to figure out where all these are going to live.