Posted by Yon Bard on April 02, 1999 at 18:28:52:
While we are talking about bags, maybe somebody can shed light on a question that has bothered me for a while: It's widely believed that Turkoman bagfaces were usually woven in pairs: On one set of warps the weaver would create the first bagface (necessarily woven from the top), then the kilim backs, then the second bagface - mirror image of the first, woven from the bottom (indeed, some matched pairs of bagfaces have survived). However, if this were generally true, you would expect about half the extant bagfaces to be woven from the top, and half from the bottom In fact, a large majority of bagfaces (72% in my collection for example) are woven from the bottom. This suggests that either in roughly half the cases only one face (back-first) was woven, or that in many cases the first-woven bag would be used immediately, while the second-woven one was saved for later and therefore had a better chance to survive.
Any thoughts on this matter?
Regards, Yon