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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Jeff Drum, post: 4378070, member: 6444&quot;]Thank you for that very interesting and informative post. Way more information than I expected, and it sent me down a rabbit hole searching museum collections to find out more. I have a lot of experience with antique oriental rugs, but very little with native american weavings. Since I live in New England, I haven&#039;t had that much exposure to Navajo art in general, though I have found a fair amount of silver over the years. I did have one navajo wall hanging that was produced and given to me in the 1970&#039;s by an Aunt who bought it from a tourist site in Phoenix, but it was destroyed by moths to the point that I had to discard it years ago and before I really took the opportunity to study it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Since then I have only found two other Navajo weavings, of which this is one. The other one I am keeping in cold storage due to my paranoia about moth damage due to past history. This one came with the moth damage, but I am going to thoroughly decontaminate it before I let it into my house. An aside about moths - is it true that this is much more of a problem in cold weather climates than it is in the southwest? If not, I wonder how so many of the early wool weavings survived to make it into museum collections.</p><p><br /></p><p>I was most surprised by the Chief Blanket weaving technique you described, wider than long. Based on my experience with oriental rugs, that just seems so counterintuitive to use such a long loom when a smaller one could be used. But that is undoubtedly part of the reason why an authentic Chief blanket is so rare - I noticed far more &quot;serape&quot; of similar size and age but longer than wide in the museum collections (I searched boston museum fine arts, met, and smithsonian).</p><p><br /></p><p>One of the other things my research showed is that although the full size blankets were no longer made due to the competition from Pendleton etc you noted, the smaller saddle blankets continued to be made. This is shown by the saddle blankets in the smithsonian collection as well as this less reliable, but I think believable in this case, vendor page: <a href="https://www.navajorug.com/pages/navajo-saddle-blankets" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.navajorug.com/pages/navajo-saddle-blankets" rel="nofollow">https://www.navajorug.com/pages/navajo-saddle-blankets</a></p><p><br /></p><p>So this is a saddle blanket size, whether blanket or rug. But that forces me to wonder something that I couldn&#039;t find an answer to: when does a blanket become a rug? Oriental carpets are inherently different from cloth weaving, since the rugs are knotted. But since navajo blankets and rugs share the same weaving technique, it seems likely to me that it would be a matter of fineness of the weave and density of the finished product. But are there any metrics for this? Either threads per inch or weight per square inch? If so I couldn&#039;t find them. Have you run across such a thing?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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