In a kilim the weft passes straight through the warp and the cloth comes out flat and identical on both sides. In sumak it is wrapped around the warp instead, so every wrap stands slightly proud and the surface is braided and in relief. Polish collections file the two separately, with the pictorial gobelin as a third, and the museum at Sierpc built a whole exhibition on the distinction.

Postwar Poland ran its hand-weaving through a network of production cooperatives, and those cooperatives put a name on the work. Not a workshop stamp, a person. Mieszczka is Polish for a townswoman, the wife of a burgher, and she stands square with her hands on her hips in a wide patterned bell skirt. There is at least one more by the same hand, Nosiwoda, the water carrier, so somebody was working through a cast of Polish figure types.

Who J. Sowa was, we cannot tell you. In this system the name is sometimes the designer and sometimes the weaver, and some pieces carry both listed separately, so even which of the two this records is open. We looked in both languages and found nothing. The label gives the weight of the wool to the gram and nothing about the person at all.