An exceptional silk and cotton Yoruba wrapper.

NW513 -Fine and rare Yoruba women's wrapper cloth dating from late C19th or early C20th with an exceptionally complex and subtle array of warp stripes incorporating magenta trans-Saharan silk "alaari" in an indigo dyed hand spun cotton ground. Unlike strip woven aso oke produced by male weavers, these cloths were woven in two wide panels on an upright single heddle loom by a woman weaver. The use of silk in these women's weave wrappers was an established tradition in the C19th and at the start of the C20th, allowing wealthy women to outshine the plainer blue and white style.

However today it is extremely hard to find surviving examples and almost all those we do see have been patched or repaired. These cloths are not well represented in museum collections and published sources, reflecting their rarity but one piece collected before 1890 and now in the American Museum of Natural History, New York may be seen here. This is a particularly fine completely intact example in excellent condition and with an unusually elaborate configuration of stripes. It would have been an heirloom cloth passed down from mother to daughter over several generations. It retains it's very neat hand stitched seams throughout. Measurements: 78ins x 66ins, 200cm x 168cm

Click on the photos to enlarge.‘ To see this cloth and others in our online gallery of Nigerian women’s weaving click here.

Cloth of the month: a unique embroidered Yoruba wrapper.

AS435 - Unique women's wrapper skirt cloth hand sewn from early C20th aso oke woven with local hand spun indigo dyed cotton with weft stripes of magenta silk “alaari” imported via the trans-Saharan caravan trade. Exceptionally the cloth is decorated with endless knot motifs and lines hand embroidered in colourful imported thread. Embroidery on wrappers is not usual among the Yoruba (although there was a brief vogue for machine embroidered wrappers in the 1970s) but was a custom among the Hausa, so it is possible that the embroidery on this piece is by a for a Hausa woman patron, or was influenced by knowledge of Hausa examples. Excellent condition. Dates from circa 1920s - 30s. Measurements: 77 ins x 55ins, 197 cm x 140.

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Minimal #7: Yoruba women’s weave, trans-Saharan trade silk and wild silk.

More from an occasional series of posts that will highlight some rare West African textiles where the elaboration and complexity of design that usually typifies high status textiles is replaced by a more minimal aesthetic….

NW489 - Another extremely rare and early type of Yoruba women's weave cloth, dating from the late C19th or early C20th. One is shown in the classic book "Nigerian Weaving" (1980:200) by Venice Lamb and Judy Holmes and captioned "a very old pure silk Yoruba cloth." We have collected three others over the years, the last one about 5 years back. The warp is local beige and white wild silk sanyan, the weft white hand spun cotton, while the design alternates rows of openwork holes with threefold lines of supplementery weft float woven from thick loosely spun magenta silk from the trans Saharan trade. Formed of two panels of cloth joined at the centre and woven by a woman using an upright single heddle loom. Condition: loose fibres from the magenta silk have spread onto adjacent beige and white fibres in places, creating an appearance similar to slight colour bleeding, otherwise condition is excellent. Measurements: 78ins x 56, 200cm x 142.

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More details on our gallery here.

An exceptional C19th Yoruba aso oke cloth

This classic style of nineteenth century Yoruba aso oke cloth involved the alternation of a simple warp striped strip with a second design in which supplementary weft float motifs are laid out on a fine blue and white checked background. In an early example such as this the magenta silk thread alaari from the trans-Saharan caravan trade is combined with local hand spun indigo dyed cotton. In some cases, as here, there is one different warp striped design to add variety. Although the supplementary weft float motifs are largely based on the Koranic board shape (a wooden rectangle with an arrow head at the top, used by boys at Islamic schools as a writing board) in early examples as here the weaver plays around with variations on the shape. On C20th examples the design format becomes more rigid. This cloth can be dated by comparison with examples in the British Museum accessioned in 1900. It has a very slight pink tinge from a recent washing but otherwise is in very good condition for a piece of this age. More details here.

This is one of a group of rare Nigerian textiles we have recently added to our website. Click here and visit the Nigerian gallery pages for more.

Wearing African Textiles - part 3

	Yoruba aso oke strip woven cloth from Nigeria was widely admired in West Africa and was traded in large quantities to nearby countries. In this rare postcard image from Sierra Leone, taken around 1905, the lady at the right is wearing an aso oke shawl similar to the C19th example below.
	Very rare C19th wrapper cloth. Magenta trans-Saharan silk is used for both warp and weft in the plain strips making the cloth very lightweight. These strips alternate with magenta silk weft float patterns on a fine blue and white check ground. This is an early example of a style of cloth that continued to be made into the 1950s. More information on this cloth in our online gallery here