Now, to textiles. When I was in the US, I told a few people about how I like Persian/Oriental rugs, and how I had bought a bunch. Pictures were requested, so here they are. All are handmade tribal rugs I bought from Riyaz here in Doha; if you haven't been to see the Rugman, you missed something here in Doha. All the photographs include a US $1 for scale. Also note that I am working from memory, so as Nicole and other correct my recollections, there will be modifications to this post. Finally, I don't have anything, and am fairly sure I don't want anything, that we don't walk on everyday.
Now, in no particular order: I really like the following rug, especially since if you look at the bottom (in the sense of the image) border you can see some little asymmetries. These aren't made from a pattern, but rather some geometric sense of the weaver, so you get little bits of "goofiness" like that.
I believe this a Turkmen, and you can see it is fairly small. I especially like the yellow/brown bits, which I believe are actually just undyed wool.
This is an prayer rug, which I believe Riyaz said was at least 20 years old. I had some trepidation about placing a prayer rug in my home, as I didn't want to seem disrespectful or culturally insensitive. I spoke to a couple Muslim friends of mine, and they said not worry, as long as it is done in god taste. Anyway, the pattern really pops when you are a couple feet away from it.
I believe this was also a prayer rug. Two interesting things to note: First, the pattern is directional, which I thought was cool. Second, the background color is black, which is not common in my experience, and as you can sort of see on the right side before the square border, two different dye batches were used for the wool, resulting in slightly different blacks.
More later.
