Flatwoven Bags and Torbas

Greetings

Follow this link to a discussion of Bags and Torbas here on Turkotek.



Dave

Brocaded Okbash

Greetings Again

Follow this link to a discussion of the Brocaded Okbash here on Turkotek.



Dave

Hi David,

I am adding pictures of a Turkmen bag I've had for some time.



The bag is in mint condition, probably never used. All colours seem natural to me and after years of exposure under different conditions on different walls , I have not yet observed any fading.
It is pobably from the Yomud from Iran. It has a clear and dark blue and a very dark green that is not much readable from the pictures.



The border design is taking half of your palas and is worked in different arrangement horizontally and vertically. The back is also with a similar design only at the top of the bag.



The side finish and the elem brocading is shown in detail.



I found a similar example in the museum in Stuttgart , Germany.

I can not tell the age of the piece except that it was still made in good tradition and nice materials. We lack of comparative examples but many I have seen had synthetic dyes.

The design of the bag seems to have been repeated on a few piled bags also. We find them in the literature.

In reference to your Salon, I do not yet see any relationship between the gul designs and the flatweave designs, except for the work style. This means several symmetries and opposition of diagonal colours , arrangement of designs in offset rows etc..
At the current knowledge it would be a major stretch to generate the known gul designs from these flatweaves. (Obviously one can generate a lot with mathematical transformations of symmetry etc. ) but the designs do not seem to be having an ascendant-descendant relationship.

The flatwoven /embroidered designs of the palas seem to be more dictated by the weaving techniques, designs refining over years.
On the other side , given the variety of the Turkment guls and designs we see in piled media for the last two hundred years seems to indicate that besides the "Turkmen character" indicated above , the piled media could freely develop and adopt designs from anywhere.
Regards

Ali

Hi Dave and Ali,

Again.
Why do you think Dave, the Turkman knotted designs must have had Turkman flatwoven models?
Some think that piled work in general comes from flatwoven models. Maybe, maybe not.
The older the Turkman pieces are, the more rounded the designs are. A rounded design needs a technical freedom in texture and a 1:1 knot density: Thick or more wefts if the warps are level, or warp depression. So, flatwoven pieces aren't the first examples I would think of.
Maybe the flattening of the design in Turkman work opend the door to flatwoven pieces.

Best regards,
Vincent

A little less provocative...

Ali, vincent, All

Maybe I should been less interested in playing
agent provocateur, and gone ahead and made
that key stroke which would have punctuated the
title with a question mark
.

The pronouncement in question, from the Salon, states as follows:

This relationship of design in itself lends to the proposition that the piled gul weavings proceed from flatwoven. Consider the following examples of what I believe to be artifacts of the relationship between flat and pile woven Turkmen designs and their derivatives.

I confess that it has been some time, and that my semantic
skills are perhaps not what they once were (if indeed they ever were )
but it appears that I can/should further discribed
what I believe constitutes this relationship between
pile and flat weave. Let me start with Ali's bag.

Nice bag Ali. But please do tell, is this Ikat derived field
design executed in plain flat weave, or the brocading
utilized in my palas? Could this be a mixed medium, bracade and flatweave, instread of just brocade.

Interesting that this Ikat pattern is (I believe) a broadloom pattern here transcribed into both a brocade/flatweave
pattern, and as I am sure most of us are familiar,
also found in pile weave medium. As such might be the
palas and flatweave relationship, for the eminence of
pileweaving is, it is my understanding, a recent
phenomonon.

Ali states that:

I do not yet see any relationship between the gul designs and the flatweave designs, except for the work style. This means several symmetries and opposition of diagonal colours , arrangement of designs in offset rows etc..

But this is precisely where I believe the relationship lies. I will come back with further elaboration soon.

Dave

Hi David,
The bag's field is worked in kilim technique. The borders and the elems are in a technique I would qualify of "zili".
I will look into some definitions from books and provide more analysis once I get back home.
Regards.
Ali

Just another example

Greetings everyone

As stated above.



Dave

haç gul

It is very difficult, due to the lack of ancient items, to know, in the case of Haç gul design, if the prototype is the flatwoven one or the piled. We know old piled examples (the Crivelli star, for ex) but we don't know very old flatwoven items (older than mid XIX°). For the Crivelli example we have to note that the haç gul is used as a single element on the field of the rug and not as a tesselized motif that covers the all field of the rug, as in Yomud items.
For the Yomud production, during the same period (mid XIX° to early XX°) we know several examples of flatwoven chuvals that seem to be archetypal models (tesselized or stripped haç guls). We know piled bags with the tesselized haç gul but those bags ar generally small bags or kordjins (more personnal and more "prestige" items), but never with the chuval format. Yomud use to make piled chuvals but with another design than haç gul. We don't know piled bags with stripped design. Piled rugs with the tesselized haç gul motif (see Bogolyubov example) seem to be "inspired" from the piled bags that could be inspired from flatwoven chuvals.
This hypothesis is based on the fact that there is not very old examples of piled rugs with tesselized haç gul known, and that flatwoven items seem to be older than piled ones (but flatwoven bags wear faster than piled items due to their fragility and to their harder use).
As often the lack of old material is always the limit of our reasoning.


Amicalement

Louis Dubreuil