Gauzes, needle lace, and bobbin lace are all types of openwork, a textile where patterns are formed by intervals of empty spaces. The three differ in how weavers or lacemakers create them, and the tools they use to do so.  Needle lacemakers use needle, thread, and a temporary pattern base to create the needle laces you see throughout this exhibition. There is no warp or weft to anchor the overall textile; the needle lace maker works freehand, using the temporary pattern base to guide their movements.¹ Gauze weavers use a loom, crossing warp yarns over one another to create openings, and setting those openings in place with weft yarns.² The above textile is a zoomed-in reconstruction of the Allover gauze (the highlighted part, only), so it's easier to see where the warp yarns cross. You'll notice that in the band at the bottom of the reconstruction textile, the warp and weft yarns intersect at 90 degrees. If the weaver stopped here, this would be a standard plain weave. But by crossing the warp yarns at various spaces as the weaving progressed, the weaver created openings of various sizes. Elaborate designs and motifs require even more elaborate weaving techniques, and sometimes supplementary techniques such as embroidery, decorative borders, fringe, tapestry weaving and dyeing the textiles once finished.³'⁴

Reconstruction of Allover gauze, created for the 1948 masters thesis Textile Periods in Ancient Peru III: The Gauze Weaves by Lila M. O’Neale and Bonnie Jean Clark. Plate 3c.

Though these textiles may look very fine, they are strong and resilient. There are many ways to make a textile strong so it can be worn, and resist tearing. A weaver can achieve this with the type of fiber they choose (some are inherently stronger than others), the way the fibers are spun into individual yarns, the way those yarns are woven together to create a textile, the way that textile is finished, and so on. Late Intermediate Chancay weavers paid special attention to the way cotton fibers were spun into individual yarns. They twisted the yarns anywhere from moderately tight to super tight -- this packed a lot of fiber into a single yarn, which gave these highly twisted yarns more strength and flex than a loosely twisted one.⁵ As the enlarged detail image above shows, it also gives these gauzes a curliness when you look up close. The yarns would’ve been held taut on the loom during the weaving process, but once the weaver released the finished textile from the loom, these highly twisted yarns kink and curl back on themselves just like a stretched strand of curly hair easing back into its desired shape. The highly twisted yarns were also strong enough for weavers to weave single ply -- as a single yarn -- instead of double ply, where they’d twist two yarns around each other for additional strength before weaving it into a textile. Double ply yarns give strength, but they can also make the overall textile denser. Weavers, including the Late Intermediate Chancay and Andean cultures in other regions and eras, did use double ply yarns at times, which produced a denser openwork. Weaving with single ply yarns kept the gauzes lightweight and filmy. And sometimes, weavers even used yarns of different twists (some highly twisted, some moderately twisted), resulting in different visual textures and strengths in a single textile.⁶

Enlarged detail of Allover gauze, Late Intermediate Period. La Mina, near Chancay, Perú. Brown cotton gauze weave, dimensions unknown. Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, Berkeley, California. Photo courtesy of Textile Periods in Ancient Peru III: The Gauze Weaves, plate 21.