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Most rug weaving happens in villages - small workshops, farm houses - in agricultural settings. Yarns are dirty to begin with; un-rinsed dye, seeds, burrs, dirt from the floor. Just taken from the loom a newly woven rug is filthy. The backs are fuzzy. The fronts so shaggy you can barely see the design. A producer friend used to say that the rug on the loom had the DNA - materials, dye, design - but that the final result was about the finishing. Like cutting a diamond. Turns out you can weave rugs with the same 'DNA', finish them differently,...

THROWBACK TUESDAY: THE MOORS, SPAIN AND HER SHEEPIt is 30 April 711 and the Berber commander, Tariq Ibn-Ziyad, and his small force of soldiers had just landed in Gibraltar when the commander issued a startling command: “Burn all our ships”! His troops, shocked and puzzled, wanted to know how they would return home if all the ships were burnt upon which Tariq Ibn-Ziyad issued even a more shocking command: “We are not going home. THIS is our new home”, and thus began the invasion of the Umayyad invasion into Spain. What followed for the next 800 years would be a...

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20160817-the-last-nomads-of-iran?ocid=ww.social.link.email

Long, long ago a gentleman from a faraway land, with the knowledge of weaving carpets, immigrated to Persia. When he saw Kashan he fell in love with the city and its people. Although the Kashani weavers made beautiful carpets, he decided to set up a factory to make new carpets with new designs that have never been woven in Kashan before. In the beginning there was some resistance to his business from competitors in Kashan and they were mocking him and laughing at his designs but his perseverance and passion paved the way for his success in such a way...

THROWBACK THURSDAY: SMOOTH AS SILK“Patience and the mulberry leave becomes a silk gown” – Chinese ProverbThe legend of the discovery of silk in China goes back to 4000 BC: Lei Zu, the wife of Emperor Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor, was sipping her midday tea under a mulberry tree when something unexpectedly fell into her cup. She looked to see what it was she saw a cocoon starting to unravel slowly. After the silk cocoon completely unravelled it stretched the entire garden long and Lei Zu saw the silkworm that was the creator of this magnificent silky thread. She imagined...