Glossary

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  • See supplementary weft.
  • A type of tapestry in which the wefts of adjacent color sections loop around each other when they go back and forth.
  • See tapestry
  • An eight-petalled motif adapted from Indian patola designs, known as chabadi bhat (flowering basket) in India.
  • Chinese term for ancient polychrome textiles, usually in warp-faced compound plain weave.

  • Cloth, skirt.

  • Cloth.

  • Skirt cloth made by the ikat technique.

  • A flatwoven (pile-less) floor covering. The technique of kelim is slit tapestry.
  • Head, referring to a part of the body or a local leader.
  • (Indonesia) a ceremonial dagger, owned and worn by a man, part of his ceremonial attire.

  • A technique using a single element or yarn in which a loop is drawn through a previous loop at the edge of a fabric. It first appeared during the Middle Ages, probably in the Islamic world, and spread to Europe, and from Europe to the Americas.

  • (Pueraria sp) type of bast fiber made from the wild kudzu vine.
  • A narrow strip of cellulosic or proteinaceous material, serving as a substrate for gold or silver leaf; see also metallic yarns.
  • A compound weave structure employing two sets of warps and wefts. One set forms the interlacing for the ground weave, the other for the pattern. Lampas textiles display contrasting surfaces, most often with the ground weave being warp-faced and the weave for the pattern weft-faced.
  • A fine rattan mat often featuring solar, lunar, bird, boat and tree motifs burned in with a hot poker (see pokerwork), often paired with a tampan during ceremonial occasions.
  • Fibers extracted from leaves, such as banana, abaca and raffia. Compare bast. In the Indonesian and the Philippine archipelago these include abaca (a type of banana), lemba and lontar palms. Such fibers were probably important throughout the region before the advent of cotton but are now confined to a few regions.
  • A rod, sometimes a pair of rods, usually inserted during warping and used to maintain a warp crossing. Generally found close to the warp beam.
  • See heddle string.
  • A bast fiber obtained from flax (Linum usitatissimim).