Weaving in Beauty

Laramie Blake with her Christmas Club Burntwater

Tempe, AZ    If you’re a regular reader, you may remember that 20 year old fourth generation weaver Laramie Blake  has been attending college in the Phoenix valley and has just completed her first semester.  Laramie has been weaving to finance her educational expenses and thought that she had the piece she’s holding in the picture above sold.  Well, it just didn’t work out, so she’s offering it here at $150.   Weaving in Beauty isn’t getting any part of the money and we’re absorbing the credit card fees for this item.   We’ll also make sure that Laramie gets the money the same day that the rug is purchased.   Update:  Laramie’s rug has been sold, but she is happy to take orders for small weavings.   Please contact me for details. 

Laramie’s weaving is 12″x14.5″ and would look great on a wall or a table.   The Burntwater design is one that’s often woven by Laramie’s family and consists of geometric patterns woven with yarns that were traditionally vegetally dyed.  Laramie’s little piece is woven with commercially dyed Brown Sheep yarns and she wove it in between her classes and homework along with several other small pieces.   As is traditional for a young weaver, Laramie’s mother Emily Malone still does her warps for her and sends them down to Laramie.  

You can see more pictures  on this page.   

Yá’át’ééh Késhmish!  (Merry Christmas)

Mary Walker

Tempe, AZ   Teec Nos Pos (T’iis Nasbas or Cottonwoods in a Circle) is in northeastern Arizona near the Four Corners Monument and many people drive through on their way to Monument Valley, Mesa Verde or Canyon de Chelly.  Teec Nos Pos is one of the 110 chapters that comprise the Navajo Nation, and the current chapter president is master weaver and Navajo-Churro shepherd Roy Kady.  The regional pattern that bears the area name goes back to 1905 when Hambleton Noel came into the area and convinced the residents that he would be just the person to serve the community in the role of trader.  Noel’s brothers had established the trading post at Two Grey Hills in 1897 and Hambleton looked to the rug designs that his brothers were marketing to provide the area weavers with a sense of what he wanted to buy from them.  At the time, Oriental rugs competed with Navajo textiles for the consumer’s dollar and so it was natural for traders to encourage the production of something familiar to the rug buying public.  It was just natural for the weavers to adapt that new geometry to their own culture.  A close look at a Teec Nos Pos rug will show you what I’m talking about.  

People will often comment that Teec rugs “look different” from other Navajo rugs without being able to put their finger on exactly why.  A Teec is different from other regional styles.  In fact, those closest relative to a modern Teec Nos Pos rug is a Two Grey Hills rug woven before 1940.  Teec weavings are known for their very complex multiple borders and their dense and dazzling single panel designs.  In most Teec weavings, no one design element has more visual weight that any of the others.  With a Teec, your eye is drawn into the central panel rather than into a central design element.  When you look closely at those design elements, you’ll begin to understand that this design is tied as closely to the Navajo culture as many Ye’i rugs. Weavers may have been told “Weave this”, but they took the rough geometry of the design and made it their own by using objects and motifs that reflected their world and their vision.   This is easiest to see in the feathers that are frequently part of the pattern.  More difficult to see are rainbows, arrows, bows and even Ye’i faces.  In fact, there is what many Teec weavers call a Ye’i face in the beautiful Eileen Littleben Teec that you see above.   Can’t see it?  I’ll help you out.  Do you see the two maroon triangular elements?  Good.  Now turn one of  them vertical and you may begin to see two stylized eyes and a mouth.  Can’t make it out?  Look at the detail below.  Let me know if you see it.  The trader might have wanted and gotten a Teec Nos Pos to sell, but he also got a design that had a lot of what the weaver wanted to weave.   

Hagoshíí (so long for now)

Mary Walker

This large and complex weaving by Mae Clark represents the progress of her weaving career.

Tempe, AZ  Sometimes I see a weaving that just stays with me.  The rug above, by Mae Clark of the New Lands area, near Sanders, Arizona has been an inspiration to me ever since I first saw it in 2005.  Mae is a true artist, carefully composing her work, always pushing her design skills and trusting that the work will find a market.  She does the kind of weaving that most people don’t think of as a Navajo rug and that is a risky proposition.  It doesn’t hurt that one of the most ardent admirers of her work is trader Bruce Burnham, to the extent that I’ve never known Mae to sell her work to anyone else.   She works with Germantown reproduction yarns, a brightly colored three-ply worsted and Burnham’s Trading Post Yarn, which is a tightly spun woolen process yarn that resembles Navajo hand-spun.  If she can’t get the color she wants from Burnham’s, Mae dyes it herself. 

Mae told Bruce that this rug is a window that represents all of the stages her weaving career, culminating with pictorial elements.   The bird and butterfly panel is at the top of the vignettes into the other weaving patterns that brought Mae to this point in her life.  There are about 60 birds and butterflies on this rug and they are in every stage of flight and repose that you can imagine.  The more you look at them, the more you’ll see.  I’ve tried to pull out some of the most interesting areas, but the five megapixel camera that I was using limits the enlargements that I can pull out of the pictures.  I was kind of afraid that Bruce would start charging me $1 a picture!    I hope you’ll enjoy getting better acquainted with Mae and her bevy of birds and butterflies. Although Mae usually does several versions of a design, to my knowledge this is the only one of its kind.  She’s done rugs with other birds and even people, but she hasn’t woven another life story.  So far.  

Hagoshíí (so long for now)

Mary Walker

Bah Yazzie Ashley with a small (for her) Burntwater weaving. This photo was taken in May of 2006

Tempe, AZ   I think it’s been a little too long since we had some Rug of the Day fun and today’s rug picture isn’t the best rug photograph out there but it’s the best one I have of this rug.   When I saw the picture I remembered the rug with a big smile.  It was the first rug that I bought from Bah Yazzie Ashley and it has long since been sold to an appreciative collector  who may have in turn sold it or given it  to someone else.  It’s a Double Diamond Burntwater woven with vegetally dyed yarns from R.B. Burnham and Co. It wasn’t woven to win a prize, it wasn’t woven to be featured on a web site, it was woven so that Bah Yazzie could provide for herself and her family by producing something beautiful and marketable.   In the Navajo sense, it’s a good way to make a living.

It is one of  thousands and thousands of rugs that weavers have produced to pay the bills, send children to school and to provide the extras that all of us like to have the ability to buy.   You’ll also probably notice that Bah Yazzie is in a wheelchair.  She’s had trouble with her legs since she was young and that’s been exacerbated by arthritis as she’s gotten older.  She does all of her weaving in her wheelchair or on a wheeled stool.  If she stands up, she’s about 4’9″ of weaving mastery and matriarchal grandeur. 

Her name, Bah Yazzie, translates to “Little Warrior”, but the translation does not really convey the meaning of the term  in the Navajo sense.   Being a warrior in the Navajo culture means that you’re the person who gets the job done, who is depended on, who will make the tough calls and live with the fallout.  It is not a male or female trait, but rather a standard that everyone aspires to.   To gain a better understanding  of this concept, you might want to read Noel Bennett and Tiana Bighorse’s superb tribute to Tiana’s father, Gus Bighorse.  It’s called Bighorse the Warrior and it’s a short book with a profound message. 

There’s a more recent picture of Bah Yazzie below.  It was taken in September with our weaving class.   Bah Yazzie’s step-daughter Jennie Slick is on her left.   Bah Yazzie is in her mid 80′s and is still weaving to support herself and her family.  Her son, Peter, sometimes helps and is a weaver in his own right.  

Bah Yazzie Ashley with Jennie Slick and the September 2011 Weaving in Beauty class. We're at R.Burnham and Co. in Sanders, AZ

Hagoshsíí (so long for now)

Mary Walker

Hover your mouse over the picture see the details close up.

Chinle, AZ  Sometimes when I talk to my serious collector friends, we’ll lament that some of the best weavers are not innovators in design, that they don’t “push the envelope” or “think outside the box” or any of a number of cliched terms that say that we want to see something fresh and new but we don’t know what.  It’s quite human on our part, but it’s asking a  great deal of the weavers whose work we so admire, but whose living circumstances we may not always comprehend.  What we are  asking when we encourage a weaver to get out on the cutting edge and hang all ten toes over it is to quite literally bet the groceries on something new and untried.  Most of my weaver friends derive a major part or all of their income from their weaving and market forces are a major influence for them.  That income combines with various jobs to pay the light bill, buy the groceries and put children through school and if a weaver puts time in on a design that ultimately does not find a buyer, the lights, quite literally, can go out. 

 Some weavers develop enough stature and financial stability to take a chance but sometimes a weaver sees a design idea and is brave enough to try.  That’s what happened with the weaving above that I picked yesterday from Lula Brown.  The design idea is not original, but Lula’s translation of it into a finely woven 90 wefts per inch tapestry sure is and it is the second piece of this type that Lula’s done.  It’s based on a 1981 painting by the late Helen Hardin called Original Robes.  That painting inspired a rug by Pauline Yellowhair that I saw at Richardson Trading last year and included in this year’s calendar along with a picture of Lula, her husband Herman and their daughter Janelle.  I gave Lula a copy of the calendar and she couldn’t resist giving the challenging design a try.  She didn’t tell me, she didn’t ask, she just put it in my hand and said “Here’s something different”.  It was so different that it took a second for the design to sink in but once I realized what she’d done, I went to Hastiin Beeso (the ATM, Mr. Money in Navajo) and made sure that Lula knew that she’d made a good bet as far as I was concerned.  Then she said that she wanted to do a larger one and I said “I’ll take it” and one of my friends said, “I’ll take the one after that”.  

That second one is the weaving that you see above and that Lula is holding in the picture below.  It measures 7.5″ by 9″.  If you would like to add it your collection, it’s in the Mercantile for $750 (Lula got 70% of that).  I dropped Lula and Herman off at the grocery store on my way out of town. 

Lula Brown holds her Anasazi Ye'i

Hagoshíí (so long for now)

Mary Walker