Native American Rugs

Native American rugs are very popular still to this day in southwestern design. Some of the most popular Native American rugs are the hand woven rugs of the Navajo people of southwest America. These Navajo rugs would take months to make and were always very bright and amazingly artistic. The original southwest rugs were woven with hand spun cotton at first and then when sheep were brought to the area they switched over to mainly use wool.

The Navajo Indians were not the only tribes that made these beautiful hand woven rugs, many other tribes did as well but the Navajo tribes were the most famous for the art. When the Navajo women weave these rugs it is a spiritual process since the Navajos believe that the weaving artistry was given to them by Spider Woman, who is a deity in the Navajo creation story.

These Native American rugs are each unique and made on a vertical weaving loom. Traditionally the Navajo woman did everything when weaving these works of art, from cleaning the wool to spinning it and weaving it. The majority of Navajo rugs are perfectly symmetrical from right to left and top to bottom, when folded the two halves would resemble mirror images. Real Native American rugs today are sought for decoration and are quite expensive since the art of weaving these Native American rugs is slowly being lost. The amount of time and effort that goes into these native rugs is what makes them such a limited textile and this is another one of the reasons why they are very sought after and expensive, plus the fact that they are one of a kind. Originally the Navajos started out weaving blankets and then in the late eighteen hundreds they switched over to weaving their famous Indian rugs to respond to the needs and wants of the market and traders. They also started weaving rugs with pictures and these became extremely popular among all of the traders. These rugs had pictures of things like bows and arrows, trains, houses, and many different tribal symbols and gods. As the years go on and the art of Native American hand weaving slowly gets lost these rugs will become extremely hard to find.



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