throw pillows

Professional Staff	Quality Products	Testimonials
Browse Our Catalog	FAQ	Site Map
Quick Links	Read Our Policies	Safe & Secure Shopping

throw pillows - The filling threads, often of gold or silver in the original fabrics of this name, float in embossed or embroidered effects in the figures. Motifs may be of flowers, foliage, scrollwork, pastoral scenes, or other design. Its uses include curtaining, hangings, pill_ows, portieres, evening wraps, and church vestments. Similar techniques are used in the manufacture of brocades made of cotton and synthetic fibers. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the republic of Venice was the hub of Europe's trade with the East and a dominant power in the Mediterranean. The collaboration of bankers, merchants, and fine craftsmen had made the city the center for a number of luxury trades, among them the manufacture of si_lk and fine lace. Lace making in Venice maintained its high quality into the seventeenth century, even after the industry, challenged by competition in France and Spain, had declined in the rest of Italy. In Venice it was sustained by wealthy patrons and the strength of the lace-makers guilds. In buratto work, darning stitches are worked with a needle on fine gauze or net (called lacis) to create the

pattern. A form of counted canvas embroidery, it is finer, looser, and more flexible than needlepoint. Buratto was used as border trim on clothing and various draperies. Stitched onto velvet, the gauze backing would sink into the pile and disappear from view, leaving the impression that the embroidered pattern was floating on the surface of the fabric. Bright colors and a vase-and-niche motif reveal a strong Turkish influence in the ten repeats of pattern in this length of buratto. It is still stitched to its original backing of blue paper, which protected the gauze from distortion when handled or rolled. Like the ancient Egyptians and the Chinese, pre-Columbian peoples interred their dead with f_urnishings for the afterlife. In coastal Peru's dry climate ancient textiles have survived in remarkable numbers, emerging from their long darkness with astonishing freshness of color. Some date to two thousand years before Spanish contact. Mantles, turbans, ponchos, shirts, and belts were wrapped in as many as four layers around the body to form a conical mummy bundle; a single burial might include as many as twenty pieces of clothing.

throw pillows