City Vs Country: This Even Happens With Rugs!

To determine the origin of a rug it is necessary to pay attention to its colors, its designs and its knotting.

    Regarding design patterns, these are directly taken from what the human eye can behold that is to say from nature:the sky, plants, flowers and trees, mountains, and animals. The imaginative element is also present in the design of a kilim. Nowadays the designs are drawn on graphic paper and by following the pattern drawn the weavers make the rugs. In contrast to this, the weaver of a more traditional nomad rug may raise the sheep, shear, spin and dye the wool as well as design the pattern and finally weave the rug.

  Nomadic kilums use geometrical motifs related to their ethnic heritage. This means that a rug may present variation in its design patterns and motifs according to the origin of the people who weave it. In some communities kilums are woven by women and they constitute treasures to be part of the dowry for a woman’s marriage or they are made to mark the birth of a child.

On the one hand we find country rugs which are usually made of material found in the region; for instance, a lot of rug weavers use cotton for the warp and weft of the rugs they weave.Cotton is less elastic than wool which makes it easier to weave a straight and flat rug. However,semi-nomadic pastoralists like some Afghans use wool for their warp and weft because they do not produce cotton themselves. These country Persian rugs are frequently less tightly knotted than rugs made in cities.  Their designs are geometrical and plainly drawn. In the making of country rugs fewer colors are used (five or six) and even vegetable dyes such as madder and indigo are still used.

  On the other hand, we have city rugs that are made specifically and purposely to be sold. This indicates that their design and colors are chosen according to what is more likely to be better sold at markets than to keep the conventional patterns and colors of a traditional kilim. What’s more, these rugs display intricate patterns with many colors, usually more than ten. City rugs are often the product of very specialized labor as opposed to the care, love and dedication put into each traditional rug by the country weaver. In the making of city rugs lots of people participate in each different stage of the process: designers and graphic makers decide on the design; dyers come up with the colors for such designs; weavers create the carpets and finally washers wash them to end the process with a high quality rug ready to be commercialized.

  So, when a choosing a rug for bringing personality to your home you should bear in mind the style you would like to convey to the place where you will put the rug. If your idea is to display a true work of art then it is a traditional kilim that you should choose; now if you are the person who likes to go with the flow then just go for an industrialized city rug. In the end you will always be getting the best of rugs.