Technique: tuskaft. This rug was woven around 1935 in Smaland, and it shows clearly how a skilled weaver, using all the small pieces of cloth could create a beautiful whole. Here many small pieces of blue (the most common color for working clothes during the last 160 years) have been combined - weaving one row in blue and the next row in another color to produce a lovely rugs, with a coloring that reminds you of the summer-blue colors of the many lakes in Sweden. Looking at this rugs you can clearly see the wind blowing on the surface of the lake, the birch and pine trees mirroring themselves in the water, and the stones, so characteristic of Smaland sticking up here and there. The first handwoven rag rugs in Sweden were produced for rich homes - manors and castles, since in these homes, you could afford to use cloth for weaving rugs and the floors were made of wood or stone and suitable for rugs. In ordinary and poor homes you would often have "soil" floors (with no covering of wood or stone) and no one would even consider to lay cloth or rugs on these floors. But during the late 1800's these rugs spread to more ordinary homes and on most farms women would weave their own rugs using the pieces of "left over" or worn out cloth that was available. Even in poorer homes women would try to gather enough cloth to be able to weave rag rugs to decorate their homes and some people now say that the swedish rag rugs were "born of poverty", since they they these last 130 years have been created from all the tiny bits of cloth that women saved over the years. Dimensions: 93" x 28"