What is a Chinle rug?
Chinle Rugs are banded rugs and are usually woven without a border. Originally woven in Chinle, Arizona, the Chinle is said to be a revived pattern in the process of being reintroduced into rug weaving.
What do the Navajo patterns mean?
However, each textile individual and has personal or cultural symbolic meaning. Common symbols include crosses for Spider Woman, triangles or diamonds for mountains and the Navajo homeland, zigzags for lightning, Yei spirits, and a spirit line to release spiritual energy from bordered rugs.
What is a Navajo rug?
The Navajo rug is a cultural textile tradition in the American Southwest. This style of blanket or rug weaving is considered an art form by collectors, curators and the weavers themselves.
Do all Navajo rugs have lazy lines?
During the weaving process, the rug maker would move to work on adjacent sections of the warp, resulting in the subtle diagonal lines referred to as lazy lines. Note: not every Navajo weaving has visible lazy lines.
What is a Germantown rug?
Nearly 150 years ago, traders provided the Navajo with brightly-colored, factory-made yarns for their weaving. These generic, yet colorful yarns eventually became known as Germantown rugs because of where the yarns originated from.
What is the main type of weaving pattern that the Navajo use?
They are a flat tapestry-woven textile produced in a fashion similar to kilims of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, but with some notable differences. In Navajo weaving, the slit weave technique common in kilims is not used, and the warp is one continuous length of yarn, not extending beyond the weaving as fringe.
Do any Navajo rugs have fringe?
Navajo weavers use vertical looms, where the waft thread is a long, unbroken piece of yarn that is attached to the loom in a continuous figure-eight pattern. With very few exceptions, Navajo rugs do not have fringe.
What is a Yei rug?
Navajo Yei Be Chai rugs are a pictorial showing the masked dancers that impersonate the Yei gods on the last day of many ceremonies. These figures are traditionally depicted in profile with blue masks with the Talking God at the head and the water sprinkler or clown Yei in the rear.
What is an eye dazzler rug?
Brillant color and bold overall patterns with serrated diamonds, chevrons, and interlocking lines are hallmarks of the “Eye Dazzler” style of Navajo (Diné) textiles produced from the late-19th to the early-20th century.
What are the 4 sacred colors?
The four colors (black, white, yellow, and red) embody concepts such as the Four Directions, four seasons, and sacred path of both the sun and human beings. Arrangement of colors vary among the different customs of the Tribes.
What colors are Navajo rugs?
The main colors are browns, olives, maroons, and mustards accented with a color such as white, red, or black. This rug originates from the Wide Ruins, Pine Springs, Burntwater, and Standing Rock region of the Navajo Nation.
What is a Navajo rug pattern?
It is generally defined as a central rectangle connected by zig-zag lines to smaller rectangles in each corner. The storm pattern often is said to have symbolic meaning: the zig-zags are lighting, the corner rectangles are the four sacred mountains of the Navajo or the four directions or the four winds, etc.
What does the Yei symbol mean to the Navajo?
The Yei symbol is a frequently used pattern in Navajo rugs. In Navajo mythology, the Yei spirits mediated between the Great Spirit and humans (the name Yei derives from Yeibicheii, meaning the Holy People. Yeibichai rugs depict the ceremony in which dancers attempt to call the spirits).
What are Navajo rugs made of?
Mid-19th century Navajo rugs often used a three-ply yarn called Saxony, which refers to high-quality, naturally dyed, silky yarns. Red tones in Navajo rugs of this period come either from Saxony or from a raveled cloth known in Spanish as bayeta, which was a woolen manufactured in England.
What direction do Native Americans sleep?
So to prevent this, you simply lie with your head toward the East. This is the reason when we bury loved ones we lay them with their heads to the West. There is more, but this is all I will say today. Sho-naa-bish.