Navajo rugs have a reputation for being expensive because of their exceptional craftsmanship and high-quality wool. Price of Navajo rugs is affected by the tightness of weaving, the size of the rug and the dyes used. Navajo rugs are typically priced between $100 and a few thousand dollars. In the 1800s, Navajo women started to weave chief's covers. These blankets were so popular that Indians all across the country wore them. These blankets, while not considered a badge of chieftainship or a symbol of power and wealth, were used to symbolize power and wealth. A few factors will affect the value of a Navajo rug: how big it is, its age, tightness, weaving style, dyes used and the condition in which it is. Navajo rugs are priced from $100 to several thousand dollars for a small rug, up to several thousand for a larger and more expensive one. Pendleton Woolen Mills, Pendleton Oregon is the only pioneer mill that still makes these blankets. They also sell to non-Indians but approximately half of their annual production goes directly to Indians, especially Navajos. Navajo rugs are available in a range of prices, from $100 for a small rug to several thousand for a larger and more expensive one.
Natural wool colors are used, except the red and theblack may have some commercial dye. With this rug, the grey can be brownish oreven tan, depending upon the fleece of the sheep used. These rugs are woven of natural, undyed, hand spun wool withdesigns of white, black, and brown. These weavers card together wool fromdifferent sheep to produce subtle shades of the white, black, and brown. It is possible to find several different shades of gray, brown, and tan in thesame rug.
These rugs were also difficult to spin, due to the labor-intensive work of the weavers.The Navajo rugs are distinctive because of their unique designs. These rugs have different geometric patterns that are unique to other rugs.We have already discussed how the Navajo weaver combines different yarns on handlooms to create multiple strips of design. These stripes were very thin, but they stood out amongst the hundreds of other stripes on the rug. The corners of the Navajo rugs were also decorated with borders that represented their culture, heritage, and spirituality. The borders were designed to tell the stories of their lives and preserve their traditions in the smallest details. These rugs are made from premium wool and yarn.
This blanket, also known as a serape or a blanket, was made during the tribe’s 1865 internment in eastern New Mexico. The piece, which is woven in rich reds and has a bordered design, is as striking for its color as it is for its border. Red was a rare color, particularly for Native Americans. They used to tear apart machine-made rugs and re-weave the thread in their own designs. This design is rare and shows how the outside world is increasingly influencing Navajo culture and art. The blanket's four corners have partial borders. The popularity of bordered textiles was a result of the intricate designs on exotic Oriental rugs. The use of these borders suggests that the weavers may have seen them in photographs and copied their style. However, borders were not compatible with Native Americans' inherit nature of design.
Weavings that incorporate images of objects and people in their designs have slowly gained in popularity since the early days of rug-making. Such Pictorial Rugs may include small representational images within a larger geometric design, or may consist primarily-even solely-of a picture. Small pictorial motifs such as feathers, arrows, animals and other common objects may have held some personal significance for the individual weaver. As the modern trappings of Anglo culture filtered onto the Reservation, strange new objects such as cattle, trains, American flags, and letters of the alphabet caught the fancy of some weavers. Pictorials made before the 1940s are relatively uncommon and usually command a premium price from collectors.
The resulting rugs were not literal copies of older pieces, but were creative variations on banded designs using a wide palette of newly developed vegetal dye colors made from indigenous plants, as well as new, subtly colored chemical dyes. Mary Cabot Wheelwright, founder of the Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe, probably started the “vegetal revival” by providing weavers around Chinle, Arizona with the new dyes and sketches of old weavings. Chinle Revival rugs typically feature bands of repeating geometric motifs alternated with plain or striped bands of contrasting colors. Common colors for Chinle rugs include yellow, gold, brown, tan, terra cotta, soft pink and other earth tones, as well as natural wool colors ranging from white to black. About the time of World War II, Crystal-area weavers developed their own banded revival rugs bearing no resemblance to Moore’s early designs.