Posted by Patrick Weiler on 05-16-2003 11:33 PM:

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