If one will examine the Hopi blankets, he will be surprised at the skilful weaving they show. The blanket dress often has the body of plain weaving in black and the two ends bordered with damask or basket weave in blue. Sometimes a whole blanket is of damask, giving a surface that, on close inspection, has a pleasing effect. The women's ceremonial blanket of cotton with blue and red borders sometimes show three kinds of weaving and several varieties of cording. The belts also have a wonderful range of patterns. On the whole, one is led to believe that the Hopi are more adept at weaving than their rivals, the Navaho. The carding and spinning are thoroughly done, the resulting yarn being strong, even, and tightly twisted with the simple spindle. Sometimes the spinner dresses and finishes the yarn by means of a corn cob smoothed by long use. The women, by virtue of their skill in culinary matters, are usually the dyers, and the dye they concoct from sunflower seeds or blue beans is a fast blue. In old times cotton was prepared for spinning by whipping it with slender switches on a bed of sand, and this process is yet required for the cotton used for the sacred sashes. Now nearly every family is provided with wire cards purchased from traders. These cards look quite out of place in the hands of priests in the _kiva_, where they are used in combing the cotton for the sacred cord used in tying the feathers to the _pahos_. When the kiva is not in use for a ceremony it is common to find there a weaver busy at his rude loom and growing web. To the great beams of the roof is fastened the upper yarn beam of the loom, and secured to pegs in holes in the stone slabs of the floor is the lower yarn beam. Between these is tightly stretched the warp. The weaver squats on the floor before the loom, having ready by him the few simple implements of his craft, consisting of a wooden knife or batten highly polished from use, for beating down the yarn, a wooden comb also for pressing home the woof, and the bobbins which are merely sticks with the yarn wrapped back and forward spirally upon them. He picks out a certain number of warp threads with the batten, passes through the bobbin, beats the yarn home with great patience, and so continues, making slow headway. There are several reasons why the kiva is used by the weavers. These subterranean rooms, usually the property of the men, are cool and quiet, and the light streams down from overhead across the surface of the web, allowing the stitches to be seen to good advantage. The best reason is that the kiva ceiling is high enough to allow the stretching of the warp to the full length of a blanket, which cannot be done in the low living rooms of the dwellings.