Varamin Shahsavan?
I have owned a small flatweave bagface for a couple of years. The source has
eluded me because of the unusual construction. It has widely spaced extra-weft
wrapping. I suspected it might be Shahsavan, but the construction did not seem
right. It was too "loose" for a Shahsavan weaving. But what else to call it? The
major border is familiar from Baluch weavings, but this is clearly not Baluch.
Mr. Tanavoli has thankfully provided us with a plethora of pile and
flatweave examples from the Varamin weaving milieu. One of these sterling
examples is this photograph of plate 55 from his book Rustic & Tribal Weaves
from Varamin:
He calls this a nim-khorjin, ca 1900, all wool. with spaced
extra weft wrapping. 1'2" x 1' 4".
Do you think that this example could
be contemporaneous and Shahsavan-Varamin too?
This close-up shows the spaced
wefts:
It has the
same field borders, but theTanavoli piece has a completely different main
border, and the complete back too.
You may notice that there is a subtle
change in the background color. This is noticeable at the bottom, where the
background of the lower border shifts from a reddish to a darker color. The
bottom inch has red wefts and the next couple of inches uses a GREEN weft! In
the thread about Red Wefts, Richard Tomlinson asked if anyone had ever seen a
weaving with green wefts, so here you go!The weft is then red for most of the
field, then maroon, then red.
Patrick Weiler