|
Dealers’ lore has it that woven containers
like this piece were made to cover single blades of sheep shears,
which were unbolted at their pivot points for storage. (This implies
two covers per pair of shears for those of you who are counting.)
There are very few such covers, most finely woven plain sumakh, often with
unusual designs, outside the normal sumakh vocabulary. A few
apparently later examples are pile, and a very
rare unpublished piece in an Ohio private collection was woven in
the overlay-underlay technique. This latter cover, with a back of
broad red and yellow weft-faced plain weave stripes, is probably
from Qarabagh, as it looks very much like other overlay-underlay
bags and covers identified as being Qarabaghi.
Since this particular cover is woven much
like #17 in this exhibition, one can imagine that it was the product of the same
wealthy tribal group. Which one? How long were they resident in the Sabalan/Moghan area? Were they refugees from Qarabagh in the 19th
century, as were many nomads in Azarbayjan after the Russian
conquest in the first decades of the 19th century? Did other weavers
make heavy, undecorated plainwoven, probably weft-faced, covers for
disassembled shears? None have come
to light as far as I know. Or is it possible there were some leather
or heavy felt shears blade covers that have not been identified?
This example is slightly bowed, a
characteristic that is seen in other shears blade covers. They must
have been woven in series, as it would make little sense to set up a
loom for, say, two covers, using 12” of warps.
As part of the design in this piece, there is
an apparent dog (see detail image below), identified by his forward bending tail, ears rather
than horns, and his short legs. Dogs are so important to pastoral
nomads, that, although “unclean”, they turn up in nomad weavings all
the time. At least, that’s how it seems.
Few of these shears blade covers are
published: Parviz Tanavoli wrote an article on them in Hali 40 with
three illustrations, Wertime in Sumak shows one (plate 72,
with a bit of insect blue red), and Patrick and Rie Ampe illustrate
two as plate 27 in Textilkunst, Antwerp, 1994
RET
|
