Photographs (left to right): Crab Claws (?) Flower, Niagara Falls Butterfly Museum, Ontario Canada, Mushroom, Rush, New York, Water lily, Niagara Falls Butterfly Museum, Ontario, Canada

Wampum Belt Archive

 

 

Glass Beaded Garter

Iroquois or Algonquian

1700 - 1770

British Museum AN111333001

Original Size:	Length: 12.4 inches. Width: 3.5 inches.
Reproduction:
Beads:
Materials:

Description:

Loom woven imitation-wampum glass bead garters, each consisting of 19 rows of cylindrical glass beads, roughly with the 'Tree of Life' design, consisting of three panels, the top and bottom rows consisting of half black, half white triangles, with a central 'tree' of obtuse triangles joined apex top base, between the top and bottom panels. Three twines are used. The 20 warps are of two-ply 'Z' twist reddish wool, with additional edging warps of a blue two-ply wool, and wefts of a two-ply 'S' twist cord of uncertain material.
The tassels, or ties, are treated differently. Both garters have at one end, the warps gathered and twined, and periodically wrapped with white quills, to form six thick ties. At the edges the warps are twined decoratively with blue wool cords, which form additional ties at the bottom and top, but these are not wrapped with quills. The two garters, at the other end, have ties formed from the unadapted warps, with top and bottom the same twined blue and red cords as are present on the ends already mentioned. The wefts are continued/started after the beadwork, for several rows, and without the beads therefore the garters narrow at both ends. Both garters have intriguing additional features: on one
side [say the top], three squares or triangles in from the ends with the thick quilled cords, are little loops of skin, taken through the first row of beading in one garter, and the second row in the other, held together with orange quills, the short quilled knob projecting out over the edge of the garter.

Reference:

British Museum. For more details see - http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/search_object_details.aspx