The textile after treatment, above.

PROVENANCE

Our client’s knew the textile’s history, though it was pieced together.  They do not know how the textile came to be, but believed that it came with the cabin.

I offered that it appeared to be a woven piece perhaps from the American Southwest, and perhaps Native American.  Yes, I believe it is valuable, but we do not do appraisals.

Known provenance: the wool textile hung in the same spot since 1900’s, in a “1-season cabin” in New Hampshire. Our client thought it had never been exposed to direct sunlight, though it has significant fading in areas, causing me to quietly disagree. The house is not insulated, and was heated with a wood burning fireplace, hence the sooty dirt.

GOALS AND BUDGET

With a degraded textile like this, there
are many different protocols to follow,
and these usually come down to
who owns the pieces and
what they can afford.

If this were a museum piece, or a
valued collectable with a private client
who had the interest and funding,
we would have built a frame for stability during reweaving.  As you will hear
about below, a side for presentation
would still have been chosen (the
most faded side as bottom).  Yarns
would have been found from all over the world to meet the size and color requirements.  The textile then would have been placed in a protected display case.

At the other end of the spectrum, our client had no relationship to the textile.  It came with the cabin their family bought a century before.  It had laid over a balcony railing, and was often used to wrap shoulders against the cold.   They had no plans for a protective casing, and in fact, despite my cautions, knew that it would be thrown over the same balcony and probably used as an occasional wrap, even though it will lead to a disintegration of the other degrading parts within 25 years.  They had a limited budget.  This budget dictated a hand-working of the weave doing the best job I could with limited time and monies.

The goal of the treatment, then, was to stop the disintegration as best I could with the funds available.  I planned on repairing or sturdying broken warps.  I intended to reweave the weft doing hand-work, using yarns that were a close match to one side of the textile.

MATERIALS and TERMS

Warp lines are the linen or cotton threaded lines place to weave into, and weft yarns are the colorful woven yarns which are visible.  Each stitch is about 1/64-inch in length. It was difficult to manage consistent stitches in areas where warp was missing, or I was saving original stitching.

The needles used are between 1-inch
(shown right) and 1.25 inches.

One difficulty with the project was finding the right color yarns to match the historic colors, made even more difficult by the deterioration of the textile (discussed below).  One solution, though it wasted yarn, was to snip pieces from variegated yarn, such as the red-orange yarn shown right.

Some parts of the textile had faded.  The “front” and “back” were sometimes two different shades, shown in images above.  I quickly realized this, and chose one side, the more evenly colored, brighter side, and consider that the “front”, shown top of the post after treatment.  I will refer to it as such moving forward.

Left, you can see the yarns used on the front matched the historic weft yarns well, but overpowered the same (faded) weft on the back.

NOTE: All the edges were reinforced in areas where the yarns were disintegrating, and this is shown throughout images, and in the image left.

I was able to find short bits of the
correct colors through variegated
yarns such as that shown above right,
in red-orange.

Sometimes I had to work with two
different yarns to create the illusion
of the right shade in the end, and the
white-to greys were a good example
of this, shown left.

When warp lines were missing or broken, they sometimes had to be rewoven so the weft yarns could be rewoven into new warp lines.  In over a dozen instances, holes were present, and these were rewoven using threads and yarns as indicated.  Occasionally I used weft yarns to fill a teeny hole through allowing the weft to span two stitches, which, while it look huge in images, is actually approximately 1/16-inch!

In many cases I am stitching blind
coming from the back, shown left.

Sometimes warp lines had broken but were still intact and embedded in the textile.  In these instances I did not remove them to reweave the area, which would have caused more damage, but instead wove new weft yarns over the top of the area.

NOTE:  Overall the historic weft yarns have thinned over time, likely from expansion and contraction in the unheated cabin.  All materials will suffered from losses after much expansion and contraction due to heat shifts, and in furniture, that means that stable joints will eventually come undone.  In textiles the various yarns slough bits, and in a century a LOT of sloughing has happened, making the warp yarns quite delicate.  What this means is that the textile is much more fragile than initially anticipated.

Our client uses the textile, and we have suggested that this should not happen going forward. In all cases the use of a historic piece should be balanced to assist in it’s condition being as stable as possible.  Usually clients opt to wear it gently, for special occasions, and in conditions where a piece is unlikely to be pulled on, torn, or have food dropped on it.

We also advised our client to remove the textile at the end of her families visiting season, and take the textile home to be stored in proper storage, discussed below.

Where broken weft caused issues, especially when the yarns could not be removed, the “back” sometimes looks extremely messy.  This was deliberate on my part, as i had chosen a side to be the front.

Also, in some flash images many bits of white warp may show through (see below right), but in reality the warp is not showing in normal light, and looks much more like the left image.  In a few instances the reparation could cause more damage than leaving the textile as is, especially as, moving forward, we hope the piece will be properly hanged and protected.

Without flash.

With flash.

STORAGE

Going forward, the textile should not be handled unless absolutely necessary.   We advised that it be framed or otherwise hung on a wall ( I am happy to discuss alternatives with the family), and brought down and stored when the cabin is deserted for the winter.  They declined this option.

We advising for one family member to take the textile home and store it indoors in a climate controlled area (a clothes closet is a good idea): a Talas Textile box using acid-free buffered tissue  would be an ideal solution, images shown above (stolen from Talas’ website).  The folds should be gentle, with tissue inserted on each layer before each fold.  Every year new acid-free tissue should be used, because the idea is that the tissue absorbs acid from the textile while stored, and that is good.

PROCESS

Sorted by each QUARTER and two EDGES (tassels included), examples below.  Unfortunately we had a mishap in transfer and lost a few dozen images from the FOURTH QUADRANT and RIGHT-FACING EDGE, below.

CLEANING

After I began treatment, I realized the textile was far too delicate to undergo cleaning any place where I could not supervise the cleaning.  The weft lines being worn but not broken created problems in that they could eventually be broken through the handling that came with a wet or dry cleaning.

I decided to start surface cleaning
treatment was performed on the various quadrants, because I could surface
clean dust and even soot and perhaps
not put the textile through a
deeper cleaning.

Each area was thoroughly vacuumed
with a small textile vacuum, shown right.

A cleanser was applied to cleaning towels and used in multiple applications to remove surface dirt.  We tested it prior to using it, and it did not move the dyes.

Stains or spots were cleaned with towels and cleanser gently lifting the dirt, shown left.

A sample of the cleaning process after treatment, below.

LEFT- and RIGHT-FACING EDGES

Note:  I have combined the edges
because a good many of the images
lost in the transfer were of the
Right-Facing edge, shown right.

This edge was extremely damaged,
and required the most reweaving of
both warp and weft, and example
mid-process, shown right, where the
warp lines were being added to the destroyed edge.

The tassels were problematic, and I have no known reason why that might be so.  Some had unraveled, shown above right, and in beginning the work of restoring them to their proper shape I found they disintegrated in my hand.

They are not particularly brittle, so that is not a factor.  But they are so fragile that almost any handling can break one.  I finally found a way to gently wrap a knot in the unraveling tassels but the knots are not tight and will probably eventually unravel if the textile is used.

The edges were reinforced.  I finally found a good match in a weft yarn for the bulk of the wrapping of the edges. As the edges were wrapped, they were occasionally woven deeply into the grey-beige edge in order to secure them from pulling out easily.

This yarn was also used to repair the weft in the damaged edges, such as the Right-Facing edge shown left.

Note the losses of several tassels, left.

Broken edges and areas where tassels were missing were also anchored deeply into the body of the weave while being repaired and wrapped, shown above in the Left-facing Edge.

I found several tassels which were breaking but which could be salvaged and repaired at the base, shown above on the Left-facing side.  A warp line was run from the body of the textile into the body of the tassel, then back.

Above, the Left-Facing Edge completed.

FIRST QUARTER

A few samples of repairs from the first quarter.

Bright cream weft yarn woven into existing warp thread.

The red slub would not release, so I worked around it. Note the second repair in process bottom.

From time to time a preexisting slub would not release and I had to work around it, shown above.  Note the weft yarn used in the cream range is bright, but the best match.  Over time I assume, based on how our clients will utilize the textile, that the cream will tone down from accumulated dust.

The green strip was not yet repaired, right. The orange is in process of repair.

A relatively large whole in red; the warp line was intact.

Weaving the variegated weft yarn with the pink and red.

Another slub that would not release. Note the even stitches that are just a little bit bigger than the historic weaving.

Wrapping warp lines.

Completed repair; the weft that would not release bumps the weaving a bit.

Above and below, samples of reparation.

Weaving weft yarns through mostly intact warp lines.

Cream colored weft yarn weaving…

The cream yarn was split to fit between the reds.

Showing the repair from the back, completed. The front image was blurry.

Below, a sample of warp lines broken, and the weft infill around a broken warp line.  In these cases the weft sometimes straddled and wrapped itself to mimic a true weaving.

SECOND QUARTER

Examples of fading, above, from front
to back.  The colors that faded the most
were cool colors: purples, blues and
greens.  It is hard for me to believe
this was not from being in direct
sunlight, though ambient light can
cause fading.

Left, where I chose yarn to reinforce
the edge in colors that work for the
front, but does not work for the faded
back.  Unfortunately I had to make
several choices like this.

The reds, oranges, greens and cream
yarns were especially susceptible to disintegration.

Right, the oranges were rewoven after disintegrating but there was also missing warp threads.

Red weft yarn weaving through mostly intact warp threads.

It is easy to spot where the warp lines were broken.

Wrapping the edge with red weft yarn.

Bringing the weft yarn up to secure it. No knots were tied.

Above, a sample of a typical repair
done throughout the textile.
Below, in the center of the quadrant,
a weft repair.
Left, a bit of edge wrapping.

I used silk pins to mark the damaged areas so I would not miss them.

Starting the repair.

I repaired the weave from below, because there was warp missing and I could not just weave it from the top.

Completed repair.

THIRD QUARTER

Before (above) and after (below) of the Third Quarter of the textile.
Each silk pin represents a repair or an area to be repaired.

Matching yarns, above, for the two repairs which are side by side, below.

The yarn repair shows differently on different sides due to fading.

There was a knot of existing yarn which could not be removed; I wove around it and tried to encorporate it.

The missing weft woven into good warp lines.

At the edge, broken warp lines.

Showing the slight wrap I did with weft yarns where missing warp.

Right, a typical and easy repair, including the wrap of an edge.

Below, a difficult repair.  A 1/4-inch hole, and many broken warp lines.  New warp lines were added, and then the weft was rewoven.

Someone tied a cotton string into the hole, for an unknown reason.

Broken warp lines.

Repaired.

Below, a complicated repair of both warp and weft lines.

At least one warp lines is broken.

Beginning the weave of the weft yarn.

Continuing.

Wrapping a warp line.

Stabilizing and reinforcing the edge.

Completion.

Below, other examples of a weft repair over broken warp lines.  The holes left were able to be repaired with weft running over two warp line areas.

Broken / missing warp lines.

First completed repair.

Broken / missing warp lines.

Second completed repair.

Below, one of the many edge wraps.

FOURTH QUARTER

The last quarter had many edge lines to be wrapped.

Wrapping edge lines.

The last quadrant had the most edge
lines to be wrapped, shown above.

Left, several repairs of missing weft
woven onto sturdy warp lines.

Finally, last repair, what looked like a
small rip was actually a half-inch, but
the weft yarns were still intact.  What
was done was a reweaving of the warp
lines through the weft yarns;
unfortunately the last image was lost!

This small hole was actually a half-inch rip; weft yarns still intact.

Reweaving the warp lines through the historic weft.

Unfortunately, one of the final images of completion is missing!

TEXTILE REPAIRED

The textile was repaired and ready to be sent off to our client to be returned
to the cabin in the woods. Images shown below.

☾

 dkatiepowell  @  aol.com / mitchellrpowell  @  aol.com
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