Description:
Four pieces of a drawloom-woven silk. The silk is known as a tissue (or lampas), with a ground warp and a binding warp. The binding warp interacts with both a brown and cream ground warp to form the main ground design. Additional, supplemtary (brocading) wefts in different colors were added with the drawloom's figure harness to create additional pattern interest. The selvage width is about 20 1/8". The ground color is very faded, and was probably black when it was first woven. Two warps - a brown and a cream, with the brown anchoring the cream ground, and the cream warp anchoring the brocaded motifs? There are six colors used in the brocaded colors, including green, two shades of blue, a bright pink, and two shades of peach. The design is repeated two times across the fabric width in a straight (or comber) repeat. The vertical repeat is about 231/4" - 231/2". The ground weave is a plain weave, and uses both a cream and brown warp across the entire selvage width. Another name for this type of drawloom-woven silk is a ras de sicile. Patterned silks such as this example were some of the costly fabrics availabe for dress and furnishings in the 18th century. It could take many months to design, prepare the loom, and weave them. English and European centers of 18th-century silk weaving included Spitalfields (East London), Lyon (298 miles from Paris), and Amsterdam and Haarlem in Holland. There is evidence that these costly fabrics were imported and worn in New England, but in far fewer numbers.
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+F.608 |
