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