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As promised, I’m going to show you a few woven patterns and possibly surprise you a bit with some information about weaving horsehair.

When I decided to start Wild Weaves brand 2 years ago, it quickly turned out that my many years’ experience in tablet waving was not enough for weaving horsehair jewelry. Firstly, I had to get used to working with a material much thinner and stiffer than wool, linen or cotton I had been weaving from so far. I had to learn what warp tension is best for weaving horses’ hair, what thickness of weft would work best and how hair transparency influences the visibility of pattern on a woven ribbon surface.

Have a look at the main picture in the post. There are three bracelets and three other weaves lying on the black and white horses hair. However surprising it might seem at first glance, all three bracelet horsehair ribbons are made from the same proportion of black and light hair (50%/50%). Even knowing that you still can’t resist the impression that the first bracelet on the left has more black hair than white. This is where the “magic” happens while weaving and light hair transparency lets the black hair to “win the battle”. The secret lies in arranging single horse’s hairs in a particular way so that they show needed pattern. The middle bracelet shows “basket” pattern and here, in contrast to the first and third bracelet, the hairs are not arranged interchangeably (black-light-black-light ) but in pairs, so there are at least two white hairs next to each other at every weaving turn. That results in a totally different white hair visibility on the woven ribbon surface. Third bracelet presents pattern “tweed”. Similar to the weave from the first bracelet, here also the light hair is between two dark ones when weaving but they are arranged differently across the whole warp giving the effect of tweed.

Sometimes the proportion itself might be distorted by the thickness of hair and the final effect might be different from expected half-half color scheme – see picture below where white chevrons are kind of thicker than black ones.

Another interesting thing is the transparency as such. Overwhelming majority of white hair I receive for weaving is more or less partly transparent. When I get opaque white hair I am always thrilled as I know that the pattern a customer chose will be clearly visible on the woven surface. On the other hand there will be no “magic” effect of becoming gray out of light-black mixture.

What is interesting, some horses tail hair does have that “milk” white accent but the opaque whiteness is lost along the hair after a few centimeters. Such hair is unfortunately usually too short for weaving. You can see the difference of regular white and opaque white effect in the woven pattern “zygzag” (picture below).

There is one more aspect of “white” hair I need to talk about. When you send hair to me and ask me to weave a pattern which demands two colors, please check your horse’s hair thoroughly to make sure there actually are TWO shades in the bundle. I realize that might be a little tricky. Look at the picture below. It seems there are two colors of hair-light brown and white. But, surprise surprise, when I washed that hair the whole tail was just beautifully silver white. So do not allow yourselves to be misled by what seems to be color but apparently is not 🙂

Today I focused on black and white horsehair. Next post will be about “colored” patterns. Don’t miss it 😉

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