PATTERN

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The only colored decoration on the Chincha domestic cloths is in the form of stripes. This section presents an analysis of the types found on thirty-odd specimens.

Stripes in this sample group either border the edge of the cloth or make an allover pattern. With the exception of four cloths, the stripes are warpwise of the materials; these four have stripes both warpwise and weftwise, and thus may be classified as plaids. Edge stripes occur in combination with an allover strip pattern in specimen 16-1287 and in combination with plaid in specimen 4-3973d (pl. 6,f). There are no cloths crossbanded only with colored wefts.

Apparently there was no preference as to the texture most appropriate for patterning by stripes; both fine and coarse cloths are thus decorated. For example, specimen 16-1225 is very fine (thread count, 102 warps by 42 wefts per in.) and specimen 16-1234 is medium coarse (count, 36 warps by 28 wefts per in.). Both cloths are allover striped. Edge stripes occur on a relatively fine cloth, specimen 16-1255a (count, 62 warps by 40 wefts per in.), and also on a coarse cloth (count, 28 warps by 24 wefts per in.).

Five cloths in the Chincha lot are allover striped. One (16-1252) has solid blue and brown stripes at irregular intervals. The arrangement contrasts with the regularity of the other allover-striped materials and of the symmetrical plaids. Other allover stripes (fig. 8, a; pl. 7,c) have units a quarter-inch wide, brown on a neutral ground. There is both color and texture interest in these specimens. The brown warp units are in pairs, the neutral-color warp units between each two brown units are alternately all single warps and all pairs of warps. As a result, every other neutral-color stripe is appreciably thinner than its neighbor stripes (pl. 7,c). The third allover striped specimen (16-1224) is alternately blue and neutral color, each stripe unit approximately one-sixteenth inch wide (fig. 8,c). Specimen 16-1225 has striping in the same colors and to it is seamed a piece with blue on a reddish-orange ground. The blues appear to have been the same, but the cloth, otherwise in good condition, is so badly faded that the photograph does not reveal the stripes in the blue-orange section (pl. 5,d). The fourth allover-stripe pattern is common to two specimens, one of them shown in figure 8,b. The colors blue and tan stand out from a neutral ground. The sequence is blue-blue-tan, blue-blue-tan, and repeat. The stripes measure one-sixteenth inch in width and are about the same distance apart.

Fig. 7. Schematic representations of stripings with color changes indicated by symbols. Units consisting of pairs of warps represented by pairs of triangles. Chevron marks center of bilateral groupings of colors.

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The four fragments symmetrically plaided with an identical arrangement of warp and weft stripes (16-1279; 16-1303) probably came from the same cloth despite the different numbers.

Edge stripes, the most numerous group, vary in width from three-sixteenths inch to one and three-eighths inch. They are simple in construction, eight of the thirteen being symmetrical both in arrangement and count of colored warps. The semblance of balance is marked, also, in those stripes which are not symmetrical.

The edge stripes with two exceptions (16-1260, a kerchief, and full breadth 16-1287) border only one of the selvages on the complete widths analyzed for this section. The opposite selvages have hanging threads, remnants of the stitchery which originally seamed two breadths together. The stripes decorated the outside edges of this seamed rectangle.

No specimen in the Chincha plain-weave group has stripes showing more than three colors, exclusive of the color of the ground material. The ground color is usually neutral and may originally have been white or brown cotton. The most frequently occurring color in the stripes is brown, followed by blue. Red and rose occur only twice.

In five specimens we found the warps used in pairs. In specimens 16-1224 (fig. 7,a) and 16-1280 (fig. 7,k) the colored warps are paired, the ground is set up with single warps; in 16-1240 (fig. 7,j), the stripe warps and certain sections of the ground warps are paired, the greater portion is set up with single warps. In several specimens the otherwise uniform setup of single colored warps is broken by a warp unit comprising a pair (fig. 7,f), and in two specimens (cf. fig. 7,d) the series of single warps is broken by two pairs of warps in one of the stripes. These units may have been deliberately planned by the weaver, since they are maintained for the entire length of the preserved stripe.

All of the Chincha striped cloths examined for this study were woven either in the over-one-under-one interlacing or its variation, twin warps crossed by single weft, a technique sometimes designated as the semibasket weave. What textural differences there are between the colored stripes and the ground material are the results of combining the single-warp plain weave with its twin-warp variation. The following tabulation shows the occurrences of these two techniques among the thirteen striped pieces in figure 7:

Weave of ground material Weave in stripes No.
of
specimens
Single warps, single wefts same as ground 1
Single warps, single wefts single and twin warps, single wefts 2
Twin warps, single wefts single warps, single wefts 7
Twin warps, single wefts same as ground 1
Twin warps, single wefts single and twin warps, single wefts 2

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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