Exhibitions News

Twelve diagrams at a scale usable for repeating on a loom.

Until now they were shown only in Kosiv and in private collections.

The difference is nearly invisible up close and works only from three metres.

The show places both crafts side by side: wood and wool speak one ornamental language.

The motif is traced from a classic central placement to one shifted to the edge.

An agreement with the Museum of Ethnography is in place; dates follow the close of the Kosiv part.

The rhombus with a dot inside appears in both crafts, and that is no coincidence.

A week of that is dyeing the yarn, and only two days are the weaving itself.

It arises from the technique itself: a diagonal is the simplest way to change colour without breaking the weft.

Three rows of rhombuses remain; red is replaced by terracotta and madder.

Twice a week the fulling can be seen live, in a tub rather than a stream.

Eight swatches of one wool, from straight off the loom to twelve hours fulled.

A cold mountain stream compacts more slowly but evenly across the whole cloth.

And that is why the pile lies predictably rather than as the current lays it.

Not about pattern or colour: only about what happens to the cloth in water.

Half a century of experience recorded nowhere except in the lizhnyky themselves.

It hangs beside one from last year: the same pattern, the difference is only in the dyes.

Water beats the wool until the pile rises on its own; a machine does it in an hour, but differently.

That is why a lizhnyk holds warmth: the fibre does not mat under its own weight.

Lizhnyk weaving in the Kosiv area is still alive: in mountain villages it was never revived because it never stopped.