The carpet rugs, in which the horizontal stripes are enriched with geometric figures, have regional differences in color and decoration. The most numerous in the collection are the carpet rugs from the Teteven region. Among them, the earliest dating is the carpet rug from the Pobornnikovi home, woven in the middle of the 1979th century and donated to the museum in XNUMX.
The collection also contains samples made in the major Bulgarian carpet-making centers – Kotel, Chiprovtsi, Pirot, Samokov. Of particular value are the Kotlen carpets with woven dates, names and initials of the weavers. The earliest of these is dated '1865' and the latest '1915'. There is also a great variety of the donated and bought small diapers and baby diapers included in the collection, woven most often on a wool base with a wool weft. They are characterized by the striped decoration of multi-colored yarns.
The "Fabrics" collection also includes bedding fabrics bearing different names depending on the region - woolen blankets from the Pirin area, linen and fur blankets from the Rhodope region, kebeta from the Sliven and Kotlen Balkan regions, etc. The National History Museum also owns two of the rare Koprivshten felts from the beginning of the XNUMXth century, belonging to the group of non-woven textiles.
Fabrics for home furnishings also include a considerable collection of pillows - from the regions of Silistren, Ruse, Haskovo, Rhodope region, Kyustendil, Blagoevgrad, etc. They are woven most often with a woolen weft on a woolen or cotton base and are less often all-cotton. Their ornamentation is mostly geometric and stylized plant motifs. In rare cases, mainly in Northern Bulgaria, pillows with zoomorphic images are also found. Pillow with inv. NIM No. 44324 from the village of Kichevo, Varna Region, has a figure of a horse and the year "1926" embroidered on its front side. The collection also stores the so-called "suvren" pillows related to the wedding customs of the Kapan population from Razgradsko.
The fabrics for home use in the collection are arranged in several groups. Most of the bags, which are more than 50 in number, are woven with cotton warp and woolen weft, the woolen group is large, and a few are all cotton. Most regions of our country are represented, and the most impressive with their characteristic colors and bright geometric or stylized plant ornaments are the bags prepared for the children of the Kapan population from the Razgrad region.
The colanders and cradles, intended for carrying objects and children on the back, and stored in the collection, are mostly from South-West Bulgaria. This group also includes saddlebags, which are relatively few in number.
Bohchis and mesals, whose function connects them directly to food and eating, are in most cases lithowoven pieces of cotton cloth of different lengths and the ornamental decoration characteristic of the respective region.
The towels in the collection are a numerous group, which includes different materials in terms of size, purpose and decoration - from small cotton towels with the most elementary decoration to large silk towels for mirrors and home iconostases, with "openwork" and "torn" execution techniques of the ornaments. The decoration on the towels is concentrated most often in the two narrow ends of the fabric, with mostly geometric and stylized plant motifs. The variety of ornaments is extremely large and is determined by the specifics of the respective region from which they originate. Samples of towels and towels from almost all regions of the country are stored in the collection. The silk cloth "klanjachka" is beautiful, with which the bride in Kyustendilsko bows to her father-in-law and mother-in-law, the best men and other participants in the wedding rites. Specific and outstanding is the woven decoration in the form of city towels, in which, along with multi-colored cotton and silk threads, tinsel and "clobodan" (a fine metallic strip) are used.
The collection also features other textile materials, mainly characteristic of urban housing at the end of the 1892th and the beginning of the XNUMXth century. These are bed mats crocheted from cotton threads; window and door curtains in three parts (two side and one cross), imported from Western Europe; tablecloths with a wide variety of materials and the technique of making them - hase with "white embroidery", linen with hand-colored embroidery, plush, wool, etc. Curious exhibits are a tablecloth made by a Bulgarian woman as a course work at a school of applied arts in Paris, as well as a tablecloth, a handicraft, gifted by Abdul Hamid II to Stefan Stambolov in XNUMX; towels from the home of Karavelovi and others.
At the beginning of the 1980s, a group of fabrics was received from the "Boyana" Cinema Center in the collections of the NIM, for which experts, taking into account their type, decoration and characteristics, assumed that they were related to the royal family and originated from the palace. Among them there are oriental souvenir tablecloths, woven from the decoration of the Jewish temple, Turkish towels with extremely rich embroidery ornamentation, etc. Also of interest is a face on a pillow with the embroidered text "GIFT OF HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS PRINCE FERDINANT OF BULGARIA 1889".
Collection "Fabrics" does not stop its enrichment. A large number of donated materials, part of the collection of Marina Kalcheva, a milliner who worked in the middle of the XNUMXth century, collected by her mostly in the region of Central Northern Bulgaria, stand out among the most recent arrivals.
Exhibits from the "Fabrics" collection can be seen in the "Bulgarian Traditional Clothing" and "Calendar Holidays" exhibition halls, as well as in temporary exhibitions of the National History Museum.
