Abacus
Antique Dealers: From Tassels to Tabby to Tapestry
Tassels
were used to decorate the feminine form — to
make a statement with clothing — as long as 20,000
years ago. Then a kind of simple weaving developed
from these twisted string fringes until the fantastically
sophisticated jacquard loom made the French tapestries
of modern times possible.
Thus
the development of weaving for warm, comfortable and
stylish garments and household furnishings began a
long time ago. The oldest twisted fibers (strings
or cords) ever discovered are dated to about 15,000
years before the present. But we have evidence of
their existence before that in the form of a statue
of a “mother goddess” wearing a fringed
apron around her hips from a period around 5,000 years
before the date of the cord remnant.
At
least we can say that the first form of clothing that
was fabricated from something besides animal hides,
leaves and such were essentially decorations in the
form of fringed aprons. These aprons were apparently
worn by married or marriageable women in Central European
communities as a symbol of their candidacy for motherhood,
a kind of fertility badge.
The
fringed aprons did not hide any part of the human
body; in fact they seemed to be worn in such a way
to accentuate the feminine parts of the body. In antiquity,
they were worn hanging very low from a cord which
was tied around the pelvis area. The tassel strings
were looped over the cord forming a fringe. On the
end of the strings there were sometimes placed metal
weights or knots of fibers.
By
the time of the Trojan war, we can read in The Iliad
how Hera, the wife of Zeus, the god of Olympus, borrowed
just such a tasseled costume from Aphrodite, the goddess
of sexual love, to turn Zeus’ attention away
from the Trojan war and onto herself. Aphrodite’s
apron was made of the same cord and fringe, but in
that era, the cord secured the fringes by being tied
around the rib cage just under the bosom of the woman
wearing the garment — “empire style.”
The symbol of availability worked its magic even on
the preoccupied god of Olympus, and Hera had her husband’s
attention for a while.
But
for a moment, imagine this garment unwound from the
pelvis or the bosom of a fair and fertile woman. Imagine
it hung flat from a small pole supported by other
poles, standing just about head-high. See it as it
hangs there with knots or clay whorls or metal weights
holding these heavy “warp threads” in place
while a weaver pushes a shuttle in and out among the
strings. Occasionally the weaver would use a combing
device to push the weft threads closer together. In
a working day, with one person weaving and another
person beating the weft, you could have a rug or a
shawl. In fact , that is exactly how weaving was done
in ancient Egypt.
The
plainest of weaves — called “tabby”
— is a pattern of one warp, one weft, in every
direction throughout the woven piece. The best-known
among beautifully-woven tabby pieces must be the Tartan
plaids.
From
there, the spinning of fiber into threads became ever
more mechanized to the point that even the collector’s
antique textiles are seldom wholly handmade. In fact,
some of the most beautiful of collectable tapestries
are made with the jacquard loom, a highly sophisticated
almost computerized machine of the industrial age.
Such machines produced the heirloom tapestries, the
fancy old bedspreads of the 19th century, and many
of the beautiful overshot silks for stylish garments.
It
is most often not the fabrication of the background
textiles that puts the value into vintage or antique
pieces. It is instead the wonderful hand-and-needlecraft
that creates textile art. Embroidery, quilting, crocheting,
tatting, hand-painting, those are the textile artist’s
way of adding art and value to even the plainest of
cotton backgrounds. In rugs, it is the fantastic patterns
and colors of the hand tied carpets of bygone eras
that make us wonder.
For
my part, a Bokhara carpet is more pleasing to behold
than Hera’s tassels.
By
Ann Garner, webmistress and trader at Traditional
Textiles
