Moqui Stripe Patterns

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Banded Navajo blankets from the nineteenth century closely resemble Pueblo antecedents. They are woven longer-than-wide, with varied rhythms of striping and color combinations. One common banded style is the so-called Moqui stripe, named with an alternative (and archaic) term for the Hopi Indians. Curiously, little evidence shows Hopis (Moquis) actually weaving or wearing this style, although it was a standard Spanish-American blanket pattern as well as one popular in the Pueblos of New Mexico.

This style used zones of repeated narrow blue and brown-black banding as its basis. These zones might alternate with plain white or other colored bands. In later versions, weavers superimposed bold red triangles, diamonds, and other motifs on the banded “background.”