Horse Hair Tapestry

This is a piece I made in college this year - early 2004 - in my "off-loom weaving" class. This took forEVER.

This is a tapestry. The warp is just some string, but the weft is entirely horse mane hair.

I ride on my college's equestrian team (nationally ranked, go us!!) and work in our barn. Before our shows, we tidy up our horses, including pulling their manes. I had everybody save all the mane they pulled in buckets, and I pulled some myself. Everybody thought I was a big weirdo for saving it all, heh. Anyway, after that, I sorted it into black, chestnut, palomino, and grey. Then I attempted to wash it... there was straw, wood shavings, dead flies... not to mention horsey dandruff and grease coating the hair. I swished it all around in buckets of water and horse shampoo, but when that didn't seem to really clean the hair at all (and when the hair started smelling mildewy because it wouldnt dry) I just said screw it and didn't bother to wash most of it. Dried the rest with fans.

THEN, I had this elaborate design I was going to weave, but that idea was soon trashed when I discovered that horse hair is super hard to weave. It doesn't bend, so you can't go back and forth like with yarn. I had to end up simplifying my design into what it is - A gradation with rectangle in the middle having gradation going opposite way - and the hairs are all just laid horizontally. The result is that it's very hairy on the edges, but I think that turned out to be a good thing. Weaving this made me sneeze, and itch, and it coated my fingers in horse dandruff. That was one of the bad parts.

I wanted to extend the white at the top farther, but the warp is so tight I could no longer manage to weave higher. Plus, I threw away all my remaining hair (it was getting pretty stinky). So... at this point, I don't know what to do with it, and have left it in the frame, and it sits in my closet.

Sorry for the lengthy description, but this piece was an event in itself being made, and it's part of the piece I do really like it. Although I wish the gradations were smoother, I think for it being my first time weaving horse hair, and being that the materials were so difficult, that it turned out very well. Also, it has bits and pieces of all the horses I love in it (You can see some of the horses who donated hair to this project in the rest of my gallery)