Hard Work on Antique Rugs

Imagine this scene, if you care to:

A workshop. A large stone and brick and straw building, no windows. Maybe a few open doors. Dust motes swirling in the late afternoon sunlight that shafts in from the single open door. The smell of cloth, and of sweat, is cloying, inescapable. The heat is suppressing, stupefying, deadening. Hair is limp, clothes are pushed back and rolled up and tied back. Eyelids droop, but fingers fly. The room is dark in the corners but the sound of the looms is deafening.

Tensions are high. Sweat dons brows. Everyone feels an unpleasant flush on their cheeks, a sting on their backs, the frustrating feeling of damp sweaty clothes. Maybe desk partners don't get along. Maybe one worker has a thing for his neighbor's wife. Maybe the person in charge is an unreasonable jerk. Maybe someone's singing a song, to pass the time, voice carrying over the sounds of hands weaving, or looms and spinning and knotting.

This is an old antique rug production station. Of course, the production of rugs has changed over the millennia, but the fact of the matter is, a hand-woven rug takes decades of man-hours to produce. Every fiber must be spun, every thread must be woven and knotted into the tapestry with perfect precision. The geometric shapes of classic Persian rugs takes a brightness of dye and a precision of eye that seems machine like, but was invented thousands of years before the industrial revolution.

And even though now, many rugs are produced on mechanized looms instead of by hand, that legacy carries on. When one gazes into the complex patterns, when one looks at the storytelling going on in a carpet or a rug, one is gazing into hours and hours of work, into blood and sweat and triumph and frustration.