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The key to understanding carpets is understanding how and why they are made in the first place. Although they are becoming increasingly rare, tents of nomads can still be seen in Turkey, Persia, and Central Asia, where the art of carpet-making is thought to have originated thousands of years ago. For these tribes, carpets are part of everyday life and serve as trading items. Through selective breeding of sheep, they obtain high quality wool, trade for silk and cotton, and today buy chemical dyes, which have replaced the vegetable dyes of the past. The carpets are woven on small looms, which can be easily taken apart for transportation.
Tribes will sometimes sell their surplus goods for cash, but money is not their objective while making a carpet. Thus, the market exerts little influence over their work. Tradition is what determines the form and patterns of the textiles, which have a variety of uses for the nomads. Carpets are made to fit the tents of the nomads where they serve to protect from the hard ground. Large and small storage bags hold food or household goods and decorative hangings are made for tents and animals.
Weavers work from memory on motifs that have been passed down from past generations. They are able to memorize plot designs that can take up to a year to finish. Young girls are often the ones who make these carpets, as their small hands are better for tying the thousands of knots required to construct a carpet. Soon-to-be brides make their own carpet for their future dwelling as part of their dowry.
Due to commercial constraints, the changing lifestyle of the nomads, and poor chemical dyes, this tradition of tribal carpet making is slowly evolving, giving way to other market-oriented systems. As nomads move into villages – an age-old process – they begin to make carpets solely for commercial reasons. Materials stay the same and so do the size of the carpets, which do not usually exceed 8 feet in width using conventional looms. Weavers become more adventurous with their designs and are influenced by other motifs they see on other carpets and foreign textiles. But often times, weavers are unable to pull-off these designs as accurately as the traditional ones they had been executing with flawless memorization. The ‘mistakes’ in these carpets are in fact what make them more valuable: slight imperfections give the carpets a sense of vitality.
There are also workshops where weavers are given a dotted pattern that shows them how to weave a motif designed by an artist. Cotton and silk are used more often, which increases the intricacy of a design. To get an understanding for how detailed a silk carpet can be, a Turkish Hereke silk carpet has over 1 million knots per square meter of carpet.
Tip Top Design has access to and endless array of carpets and tribal weavings directly from the Grand Bazaar through our partner in the Grand Bazaar, The Anatolian Carpet Shop. Contact us to find out how we can bring these to you.