http://www.hereke-carpets.com/

Often I read or hear from our customers: "It’s true that such fine carpets, like your genuine Hereke silk Carpets can be created only by gently child’s hand?"

This question shows the risen sensibilty for that theme, but on the other hand also the lack of knowledge about the various techniques to produce an hand knotted carpet.

Oriental carpets are basically hand knotted with the symmetric (double, Turkish, Gordian) knot or the asymmetrical (simple, Persian, Senneh) knot.

The symmetric double Turkish knot is famous due to its stability. Carpets, which are hand knotted by these knots, therefore achieve their proverbial durability.

Editorial endorsement

First, I must say that I am not a dealer for the movie producers and have not been paid a cent for this.

Anyone with an interest in rugs or an interest in purchasing a true Oriental rug should purchase the DVD, "Colors Of India, a rug making journey."   This movie is a work of art itself as it explains in remarkable detail how a hand knotted rug is made.

Filmed entirely  in central and northern India, Colors of India shows the process from shearing of sheep and hand spinning the wool to centuries old techniques of color preparation - all this before the manufacture begins.  Then you see the hand knotting, and many finishing steps required before there is a finished product.

In the fall of 2007 I traveled to India where I saw weavers tieing knots on rugs.   I wouldn't trade that experience for anything but learned more in 40 minutes of this movie than the days I spent there.   I think most people will be amazed at the effort and expertise needed to produce a  beautiful hand knotted rug.

This is not an infomercial for a rug manufacturer.  This is the detailed inside story of how a traditional hand made rug is made.

Please go to http://www.samad.com/colors_home.html where you can not only see brief previews from the DVD but can order your own copy.   You will also see testimonials from rug industry veterans.   This is a good one for your library.

Now I think it's time to load my copy into the DVD player and watch it once again.

With a few, tentative exceptions, rugs with the palette and general design features of this rug are labeled ‘Baluch’.

Conventional wisdom holds that they were woven in the Khorasan region of northeast Persia in the vicinity of the village of Ferdows.

A minority view believes they were produced by ‘Baluch’ weavers in the Sistan region.  One would imagine this position is based on the rug’s ‘happy’ palette.

Even today, several decades after their initial appearance on the international market, these ‘Ferdow-Baluch’ are still considered very rare.  This is unusual on a couple of accounts.

Typically, when a ‘rare’ or ‘unusual’ rug-type appears on the market it gradually produces a stream of similar rugs.  Before long, the ‘rare’ becomes rather commonplace.

That has not occurred with these ‘Ferdow-Baluch’.

The design and cotton foundation suggests a village workshop origin.  Village workshop production, in turn, suggests a viable commercial, export market once existed for these rugs.

Why are there not more of them?  Were only a few produced?  Did only a few survive?

A Personal Opinion: A ‘Baluch’-‘Afshar’ from Northeast Persia

The rug literature is replete with the doxology that the ‘Baluch’ weaver was a ‘copy cat’ weaver; that she adopted or copied designs from other, implicitly more skilled and imaginative, weavers.

The tradition of carpet weaving predates written history and there is no proof of where or when the first carpets were made. Academics and experts will present theories, but it is very unlikely that the whole story of the development of this art will ever be known.

The oldest surviving pile carpet in the world is called the "Pazyryk Carpet", dating from 2500 BC. It was excavated in 1949 from a Siberian burial ground where it had been preserved in ice in the valley of Pazyryk. The origin of this carpet is attributed to either the Siberian Turkic groups, Scythians or the Persian Achaemenids. This carpet is 6'6" x 6' (200 x 183 cm) and has 360,000 knots/m²

In the Varanasi area of India, rugs are graded using two numbers, like "5/40," "9/60," or "12/60." The first number represents the knots in 9/10 of an inch of the rug's width. The second number represents the knots in 4 1/2 inches of the rug's length. 0.9" x 4.5" equals 4.05", almost four square inches, so an easy conversion is to multiply the two numbers together and divide by 4 (sq. in.) to get the approximate weave in knots per sq. in. For example, with a "9/60" quality rug, 9 X 60=540 and 540/4=135 knots per sq. in. Note that most rugs from India have strongly offset warps, so you will only see one element of the knot on the back of the rug.

In Pakistan, indicated qualities like "16/16" or "16/18" for rugs in Persian design represent the number of knots per linear inch across the warp and weft counted in the normal way. For example, a "16/18" quality Kashan has 16 X 18 weave, or about 288 knots per sq. in. Note that these rugs have strongly offset warps, so you will only see one element of the knot on the back of the rug.

So-called "double" Bokharas from Pakistan in qualities like "9/18," "10/20," "11/22," and "12/24" are different. In this type of rug, warps lie side-by-side and are not offset, so both elements of the knot show on the back of the rug. Be sure not to double-count the weave across the width when examining a Bokhara.

Fatih has one of those occupations that goes unnoticed by most people but which nevertheless quietly buttresses Turkey’s important carpet-selling business.
Still only 32 years old, he has been painstakingly restoring old carpets and kilims for the last 20 years, giving new life to pieces that might otherwise have had to be discarded.

He hails from Sultanhani, a pinprick of a place between Aksaray and Konya which has managed to corner the market in carpet restoration work. There, in the shadow of one of the finest surviving Selçuk caravanserais, his cousin taught him how to reweave carpet patterns.

For 14 years he plied his trade in Bergama before moving to Göreme almost six years ago and starting work for Tribal Collections, a shop that specializes in selling old and antique pieces. I would be lying if I said that I knew nothing about carpets before I came to live here. On the other hand, it would probably have been fair to say that what I knew about them could have been written on the back of a matchbox.
 
I already owned a couple of pieces that were at least interesting -- a sofra, or nomadic tablecloth, and a Bakhtiyari opened-out camel bag that I loved for its mixture of textures. I had, too, a couple of scrappy pieces of old carpet picked up in an Urfa bazaar, plus a besik, or baby’s cradle, that had been a birthday present from a carpet-dealer friend, but had someone unrolled a carpet in front of me and asked me what it was, I would have been at a complete loss to come up with the answer.

Cicim or Jijim is a carpet weaving method which is done with different colored design threads. These are applied & tightened between weft & warp threads & is applied on the reverse as against the warp style. Generally composed of bristle weft, cicim weaving is quiet common in carpet weaving practice. The designs on this kind of weaving surface may have different appearances which can be due to the width of the threads employed.

Making use of a bezayagi technique, cicim is woven with weft-face & there are at least two or three types of cicim which are seen according to the style of looping the pattern yarn. The weaving method is even produced making use of the weft thread. There are two or three kinds of cicim weaving stles which are according to the application of the thread design.

Woven on a balanced plain or weft-faced weave, cicim is crafted with an additional design thread used in a semi-wrapping sequence. It forms fluffy patterns later highlighted with embroidery work using a needle on the weaving surface. These patterns acquire different appearances as per thickness, yarn thinness & their scattered motifs. The weft yarns or pattern yarns follow an order in cicim weaving while the patterns are being formed. The pattern yarn is looped over one or more warp yarn as per the desired pattern after weft yarn is looped, thus, helping in creating the final pattern.