WARPS AND WEFTS
The structure of loom-made textiles consists of warps that run along the length of the loom and wefts that are woven across the loom.
In a tapestry, the warps are not visible; they are covered up completely by the wefts. Wefts of different colors are used to form designs that are structurally part of the fabric. Separate color areas use different colored threads; therefore, tapestries use discontinuous wefts. The warps in a tapestry are continuous, however, running uninterrupted from one end of the loom to the other.
In the textile border fragment seen here, a Chancay textile in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, all of the colors you see are the weft threads. The warps are shown vertically in the photo and the wefts horizontally, so you are seeing this design as the weaver would have seen it on the loom. Notice that there are vertical “slits” between some of the warps; these happen when there is a vertical element in the design that required a change of color between warps.
Chancay /Huancho. Textile Border Fragment, 1000-1532. Cotton, camelid fiber weft-faced plain weave and slit-tapestry weave, 10 1/4 x 28 3/8 in. (26.0 x 72.0 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Ernest Erickson, 73.106.3. Creative Commons-BY (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 73.106.3_cropped_bw_IMLS.jpg)
Nazca. Poncho or Tunic, 100-200 C.E. Camelid fiber, 74 7/16 x 27 9/16 in. (189.1 x 70 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Alfred W. Jenkins Fund, 34.1579 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 34.1579_front_edited.jpg)
One particularly challenging textile technique used in the Andean region was discontinuous warp and weft (DWW). In a DWW textile, neither the warps nor the wefts run the entire length or width of the textile. Instead, the weaver had to create a temporary interior framework within a larger loom and weave sections independently from each other, until they were connected in the later stages of the weaving process. DWW tend to be more loosely woven than tapestries. Also, unlike tapestries, in DWW textiles, both warps and wefts are visible (wefts do not cover the warps completely).
The detail that you see here is from a DWW poncho or tunic in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. If you look closely, you can see that neither the warps nor the wefts run continuously across the textile. Instead, the design is assembled from individually woven sections. Click on the photo to see more details of this amazing textile.
You can also find diagrams and detailed photos of a textile in the collection of the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art that was made with the DWW technique here.