If you have heard one of my lectures, I talk about how people walk into the gallery and ask, "Do you have any real Navajo rugs?"
They usually ask the question when I am standing in the rug room surrounded by a couple of hundred weavings. It happens three or four times a year.
"What do you mean by real?" I always respond.
"You know, where they use all their sheep wool and make all their own dyes."
It's a surprise for them when I share the true story that Navajo people seldom made their own dyes. As soon as commercial yarns and dyes were available, they were quick to use them. The red yarns found in the early wearing blankets were obtained mainly by unraveling wool blankets, re-spinning them, and weaving with them.
Aniline dyes were common by the 1890s.
Of course, a few dyes were made with Native plants, but it was not common.
We've done some newsletters about Sallie and Bill Lippincott, the young couple who bought the Wide Ruins Trading Post in the 1930s and were the first to insist on the weavers in the area using vegetal dyes. They only wanted to purchase striped rugs without borders incorporating hand-spun Native wool. Sallie was not the first person to encourage that style of rug. Their friend Cozy McSparron, at the Chinle Trading Post, had worked with several weavers to create a similar design, but he didn't insist on it as a condition of buying their rugs.
Sallie and Bill sold the trading post after WW II, but their influence lived on, and weavers in the area became increasingly efficient in working with vegetal dyes. The quality of the weaving continued to improve. It also became more detailed. Lippincott liked simple striped patterns, but the Navajo woman is a born artist, and it wasn't long before those weavings began to incorporate patterns that accented the simple stripes.
During the 1970s, vegetal dyeing in the area reached an artistic peak. Extraordinary weavings, many smaller and more appealing to customers who wanted them for wall hangings, came out of this period.
Today, most (but not all) vegetal dye weavings are made with commercially dyed single-ply yarn colored to look like vegetal dyes. Many of these are beautiful, but to my eye, a real vegetal dye weaving has a soft and gentle depth the commercial yarns can't match.
It's been over 40 years since many of these weavings were woven. Every once in a while, we get a collection. But an interesting thing happened this winter when a gentleman from Minnesota sent six lovely weavings from that time. We opened the box, and it was like Santa Claus had shown up late! What a treasure it was to pull one beautiful weaving after another out into the light, where its colors were warm and soothing.
See all Wide Ruins Area Weavings in the Gallery
Unfortunately, the man did not have the names of all of the weavers that made these rugs, but a few had old tags on them with a name. Some look familiar enough to guess at, but I hate to do that as it disrespects the woman who wove the rug.
But for someone who wants a "real Navajo rug," none are finer or more beautiful than these pieces from Wide Ruins.
