glorious

This afternoon I saw some fabulous pre-columbian gauzes. A gauze is a woven cloth in which the warp threads cross each other and return to their places (they do not twist around each other as in warp twining). Ancient Peruvians were masters of gauze weaving. Most of the gauzes I’ve seen are made of cotton singles in both warp and weft, very finely spun, often with so much energy that the yarn corkscrews. Because of the energy of the yarn and the crossed structure of the warps, a gauze when left to itself will collapse. It has amazing elasticity for a woven fabric, and you have to stretch it out to see the patterns. Patterns were most often created by varying the density of the gauze structure—some crossing patterns pull in more, others less, so essentially you are playing with varying opacity in the fabric. You can see a typical example here. Here are a few ideas that might be useful for new textiles:

--One very simple gauze crossing, say 4 over 4, with 6-8 picks of plain weave in between, can give a surprisingly complex look to the fabric, almost like round medallions linked loosely together.
--Try shibori over gauze.
--Sometimes gauze cloths begin and end with a complementary weft-faced band in bright camelid colors. The weight of the band, very different than the delicacy of the gauze, gives some heft to the edge and also keeps the warps spread to the proper width, at least near the beginning.
--One fabric I saw today used 1 over 1 leno, the simplest possible gauze, as a basis for weft-faced color work. It is described as tapestry, but the more I think about it the more I wonder if it could be embroidered… at any rate, the ground cloth is leno, and woven or embroidered into that are cross shapes in different colors of camelid. Again, the weft-faced areas add brilliancy and weight to what might otherwise be a flyaway fabric.
--Spinning for gauze… wow I wish I could replicate those yarns. Some of them are astoundingly fine.