The tradition of Khanty weaving was lost by the early 20th century. The process of making yarn and dyeing it with decoctions of herbs, berries and tree roots, weaving fabrics and decorating them was long and laborious, but it produced true works of art.
Nettle, later flax and hemp were main materials for weaving.
Fabrics were woven on home-made horizontal looms that at the time were much better than those of the Altaians or the inhabitants of Central Asia. The presented artifact was brought from the village of Kamennoye, Oktyabrsky district, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug — Yugra. According to a resident of the village, Yefrosinya Revak, the device consists of the following parts: navoy, nitchenka, nabelka, berdo, footrests, prishivalo, prituzhalo, and skalenki for threads.
The berdo, or reed, is a device similar to a fine-tooth comb, which is used to push (batten) and trim weft threads. Thus, the fabric comes out denser and more uniform.
Two navoy (cloth beams) were installed to tension the warp threads. A stock of warp threads was wound on the rear navoy (prishivalo), and the newly constructed fabric — onto the front beam. A prituzhalo, or prituzhalnik, supported the beam. A skalenka was a device for winding yarn onto the quill; a nabelka was a paired piece of planks where the comb was inserted (according to the dictionary of linguist Olga Iosifovna Blinova).
Yelena Gennadievna Fyodorova describes in detail the process of weaving. First of all, craftswomen prepared the loom: they pulled out threads, twisting them onto a spool, then two ends of the threads were pulled through a ring under the ceiling and stretched between six pegs. The end of the warp thread “was fastened to the corner tooth of the loom, the threads were pulled first through the shuttle, then through the comb and fixed in the slots of the beam.” Then one end was tied to the tooth again, the other was fixed between the struts.
The weavers worked sitting on a bench in front of the beam. By pressing the treadle with their feet, they lowered the warp threads, thus separating the even and odd threads. The shuttle with a weft thread passed through the gap between them. Weft threads were beaten one to the other with the help of the comb.
Underwear was sewn from a thinner cloth, while denser one was used for women’s and men’s shirts, dresses, trousers, and robes. Before the advent of factory-made metal needles, needles made of fish bones or thin bones from a deer’s leg or squirrel’s paw were used.
