If you are into great saddle blankets I want to recommend my friend Christina “Tina” Bergh. She owns and runs the Brown Cow Saddle Blanket Company based here in Santa Fe. She’s made a half dozen custom blankets for me over the years – and they are all favorites. Beautiful design, bold colors, you can customize everything, and they last a very long time. Highly recommended.
She just made me a saddle blanket that is a copy of a Navajo “Empty Center Style Double Saddle Blanket Tapestry-weave double saddle blanket, Empty Center style, 1920–40.” I saw the original at a recent exhibition at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe. Cool to be able to replicate that classic Indian look.
You can get to her company website by clicking HERE.
From her website:
Christina Bergh’s abiding fascination with Textile art dates back to her early years as a child and her grandmother’s extraordinary home in northern New Mexico where one of Santa Fe’s foremost Spanish Colonial collections – of both Textile and hand-crafted furniture – was on display.
At age twelve, in this home, starting with a primitive Nambe loom, a bundle of wool and cotton, Christina embarked upon a career of art, fabric and timeless beauty drawn in large measure from the surrounding colors and starkness of New Mexico’s famed cliffs, sand-ladened arroyos, and external vistas. At age 13 she began weaving for Alice Parrott at her Santa Fe studio on Canyon Road. This apprenticeship lasted though college. During the summers, at the Santa Fe Folk Art Museum, she studied weaving with a variety of noted textile artists such as Pear Sunrise, Kay Sakemachi, Gerhardt Knodel and Michelle Lester.
Inspired by Alice Parrott to dye her own yarns with Vegetable and chemical dyes, Christina set up her own studio and dyeing kitchen on Old Santa Fe Trail. Her Custom weaving business flourished.
While attending Geogetown University with a major in Russian language and history, she also worked at the Smithsonian in the Textile division under Rita Adrosko. Her loom was never far away. After graduating, and with the encouragement of Santa Fean Nathanial Owings of Skidmore Owings and Merrill, she continued to weave custom tapestries and rugs for residences, corporations and banks. Her godmother, and grandmother’s best friend, Dorothy Skarritt Mckibbon (the “Gatekeeper of Los Alamos in 1943”) were also instrumental in their support of Christina’s work.
Another very close friend of Christina’s family was Gustave Baumann. Many afternoons were spent with the Baumanns making bread and enjoying the sunny Santa Fe summer days. Ann Baumann, Gustave’s daughter, was the first to inspire her to weave Gustave’s work as tapestry. This began a fifteen year project which is now well developed with the Fine Arts Museum in Santa Fe. Christina’s Gustave Baumann tapestries are woven on a rare, custom built Jacquard hand-loom.
In her Santa Fe studio, Christina, an avid horsewoman and competitor, weaves custom tapestries, rugs and saddle blankets. Her yarns are hand-dyed and designs are exclusive to her studio. A lifetime of work in wool, silk and cotton.