Study On West African Stripe-Weaving Fabric And Yarn Dyed Fabric Design

Stripe-weaving fabric as one of the West African aboriginal garment has a history of almost one thousand years. The stripe-weaving fabric not only has the utility function of cloth, but also has the function to show the culture of West Africa. Because there is no written language in West Africa before the modern times, the stripe-weaving fabric as one of the non-language succession manners of the West African culture has played an important way in the West African people's lives. All the arrangements of the warp stripes are given an individual name; some typical patterns of stripe-weaving fabric have meaningful motifs, which are base on the famous history event, thoughtful proverbs, legends or religious stories. West African people use the connotative stripe-weaving fabric to express the emotion and spread the tradition and religious belief. Through the study of the West Africa stripe-weaving fabric, it's helpful to extract the design elements of West African style in stripe-weaving fabric, which could use them to manufacture the yarn dyed fabrics to help the textile producer of China to exploit the market of the West Africa deeper.It's studied the spread process of the stripe-weaving fabric into West Africa though the Sahara caravan, the development of the stripe-weaving technique in the ancient times and the Ashanti and Ewe stripe-weaving fabric in modern times. It's considered that the stripe-weaving technique spread from nomadic tribes of the east side of the Sahara and East Asia though the Sahara caravan in the 11th century. Between 11th and 16th century, the stripe-weaving technique of the ancient West African countries had all developed in deferent degrees. The establishment of social hierarchy of Ancient Ghana had speed the development of the stripe-weaving technique. Ashanti and Ewe stripe-weaving fabric had developed very well, the patterns and the stripes backgrounds had been improved, so they both formed their only styles. Beside, this paper introduces the stripe-weaving process in details; the loom is totally manual operating, which it has only two or four heddles. The weavers don't increase the heddle's number to weave the complicated pattern, but insert the weft of one color to a particular position and insert another color weft to other position. The pattern is formed by the wefts accumulating in the warp-wise.Base on the study, it's classified the design elements of the Ashanti and Ewe separately. The design elements of Ashanti stripe-weaving fabric included the stripes background, the pattern and its meaning, the color and its symbolic meaning. The design elements of the Ewe stripe-weaving fabric are classified according to the themes, including animal themes, goods themes, man themes, political themes. Then it is chosen some typical design elements of Ashanti and ewe cloths to manufacture four series of yarn dyed fabrics with Ashanti and Ewe stripe-weaving fabric styles and explain designing concept of each fabric. Beside, it's summarized the principles of the fabric weave design, including the comparison principle, symmetry principle, balance principle, Change and unification principle. It's considered that it should use the principles above in confluent to make the weave obvious and excellent.