Berber Women
With the exception of a limited area in eastern Morocco, all these textiles are conceived and created by women. In their nomad tents or in simple adobe mountain houses, women traditionally worked the wool from the moment it was sheared to the moment of tying the final knot. The symbols are theirs, the signature signs are theirs, the secrets are theirs. These women, misrepresented as illiterate, only knew the Berber language (Amerzigh) as an oral tradition; thus each carpet became an anonymous diary, an individual book.
The system remained unchanged: the wool once sheared was washed, hung to be dried and then locked away. Some weeks later the dry wool would be carded, often while formulae were chanted to ward off evil spirits and to ensure the successful completion of the weaving. The vertical loom (the top indicating the sky and the bottom the earth) was given a special place in the tent or house and itself purified before the weaving begins.
The dyeing process involves collecting the various flowers, leaves, fruit and dried insects and boiling the ingredients with the wool, fixing colours with rock salt or alum. Pomegranate skin, saffron and broom flowers made up the yellow tint; madder root produced red; mint for greens; henna leaves for orange; tea, tobacco or crushed walnut shell for brown and black. The weaving could then begin.