Vadas József (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 13. (Budapest, 1993)
E. NAGY Katalin: „... elegyesen kötött öreg száras gomb" a 17. század második feléből
KATALIN E. NAGY MASTERPIECES OF HUNGARIAN BUTTON-MAKERS FROM THE SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY There are two velvet 'mentes' from the seventeenth century in the collection of the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts (see picts.1-2) that can be closed by 12 pairs of tablet woven buttoned bands 1 (see pict.3). We often meet these buttoned bands on paintings of contemporary aristocratic galleries, on death portraits and cuts 2 , as well as on the stamps and sign of the various button-maker guilds; their technique, however, avoided the attention of most experts. The research of tablet woven textiles started rather late; in the 1890s several experts were trying to reconstruct the technique. The first successful attempt was M.Lehmann's - he published the result of his efforts in 1897, in the Illustrierten Frauenzeitung. Ethnologists, historians and archaeologists from different countries started to study the history and production method of this ancient technique. 3 A book was compiled from the collected material, then in 1902 a comprehensive and detailed exhibition of tablet weaving was organized in the Kunstgewerbc Museum of Berlin. 4 Research has proved so far that tablet weaving is one of the oldest weaving technique, used all over the world and reaching back as far as the Iron Age. 5 The tools used in this technique are small tablets of 4-8 angles, with a hole on the corners. The tablets were made of different material that varied from country to country: bone, horn, wood, leather, pergamen and paper were used. They were mainly rectangular (measuring 3-7 cm or 4-6 cm), sometimes triangular. Hexagonal or octagonal tablets were used for the weaving of richly patterned bands. For making exceptionally strong and stiff bands, the middle of the tablets were holed; even durable cores could be used in this way. In the weaving procedure, the differently coloured threads were threaded through the holes of the tablets, with one end fixed to a solid point (wood or angle), the other to the waist of the weaver (see pict.4). During weaving the tablets were turned in S or Z directions (see picts.5-6) and passed forward and backward (see picts.7-8). The weft thread was then passed through the gap called the shed, with the help of a dand-shuttle (see pict.9). There were plenty of variations for patterns with changing the position of the tablets or the twisting direction; each tablet could be independently passed or exchanged with each other. The simplest way is when the pattern and the main weft are at different height which can be produced by stretching or loosing the warps. When warps are stretched, the result is an indented surface; when loosed, the surface of the band protrudes. The most characteristic type is "border weaving", i.e. when the starting and ending border of a woven band was finished by tablet weaving.
