What's knot to like?

incredible colors...women knotting Anatolian carpets in Goreme, Turkey

 a silk wonder...

 

tea break

 

the young Turks selling in the showroom...

Goreme and the Kismet Cave House Hotel

Goreme caravanserai filled with carpets

 The Kismet Cave House Hotel

 The breakfast terrace at Kismet Cave Hotel

a door that used to be green.

(Are you lusting after carpets yet?)

The Bullerswood Carpet, Now you see it.....

The Bullerswood is the grandest of all the hand-knotted carpets made by Morris & Co.  It dates to 1889 and is based on ancient Persian and Turkish carpet samples collected by Morris.  It has woolen pile on a cotton warp, is colored with vegetable dyes, and is HUGE, approximately 4 meters by 7.5 meters (13 feet by 25 feet).  It is currently on view in the British Galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

The carpet is rarely displayed and its colors are still vibrant.  While researching the carpet I found a fascinating article about how scientists have determined the ideal display and lighting conditions for this masterpiece.

The vegetable dyes used in the carpet "range from reasonably light-fast to very fugitive."  (What a great use of the word fugitive!)  The curators must consider that the "brighter the illumination, the easier the object will be to see but the greater the rate of light-induced deterioration."  What to do?  The approach was to carry out a series of experiments on the back of the carpet.  Sections of different colors were brightly illuminated over time intervals long enough to detect fading by measuring spectra of reflected light with a spectrophotometer.  Unexpectedly, they discovered that the blue areas on the carpet faded the most with the least fading occurring for burgundy, opposite of what is typically the case for objects colored with vegetable dyes.

 The V&A has developed a lighting policy which establishes acceptable fading rates for artifacts, namely that changes be limited to one 'just noticeable fade' (JNF) in 50 years.  After a very technical discussion of how one measures a JNF (a new unit for this scientist) the article concludes that exposure for the carpet would need to 19 years of display at 50 lux to conform to the policy.  As the light level in the gallery is 100 lux, it was decided that the carpet would be on display for only 5 years, a length of time which allows for errors in the above calculations as well as preserving the possibility of a further five years display over the next half century.  Pretty interesting!  I now realize how lucky I was to even get a glimpse of this beauty.

 Morris notebook sketch of design for Bullerswood Carpet

Happy Easter from Happy Valley...

I just returned from visiting my kids in Happy Valley, Pennsylvania, the region around the town of State College.  Nobody seems to know why this area is called Happy Valley but the town does seem to "talk the talk"....

A little closer to home, here are a few more pics from Pioneer Valley, in western Massachusetts.  Specifically, these are 19th century tobacco barns near Deerfield.  In the 1860's, Deerfield was the leading grower of tobacco in the nation ---- this old wood seems almost spiritual.

All the door panels are thrown open when the tobacco leaves are drying.

Finally, there is a new museum, the Flynt Center of Early New England Life in Deerfield that displays a large collection of 18th to early 20th century decorative arts.  Here is one piece to give you a flavor....it is a wool "bed rug" from the late 18th or early 19th century, in a Tree of Life pattern, based on 17th or 18th century Indian palampores.  What is interesting is that William Morris was inspired by the very same fabrics and patterns later in the 19th century (see this post here)......compare to his wallpaper pattern below.

What you see here is about five feet across.

Morris Pink and Rose wallpaper (1891)

Arts and Craft Carpets from Afghanistan

I found the above picture in a home magazine recently.  It is a hand-knotted wool carpet from Afghanistan woven in Morris's Pimpernel pattern.  The scan doesn't do the tan, baby blue and brown colors of this carpet justice.  It is being sold by Landry&Arcari, local rug merchants, for $11,000 (9ftx12ft).

The fact that it is made in Afghanistan got me thinking about Morris's vehement protest of imperialism during his lifetime including, no doubt, the Anglo-Afghan war in 1878.  His hatred of aggressive nationalism was what first roused him to political action in 1877 when he protested Disraeli's foreign policy in the near East.  In his "A Note on Morris and Imperialism" Peter Faulkner writes "Morris was, as one would expect, particularly concerned about the effects of imperial expansion on the cultures of the colonized peoples.  In "The Art of the People" in 1879 he drew his audience's attention to the poignant fact that while the developing interest in decorative art had led pattern-designers to look to the East for inspiration, the very art that they admired was being destroyed by "the advance of Western conquest and commerce"."

Thus were the seeds planted of Morris's ultimate vision of a Utopian world in "News From Nowhere" and of his transformation into a leading Socialist philosopher.  On Landry&Acari's website there is a very interesting photo gallery that explains the entire rug making process  -- it is almost all by hand.  The company is a member of GoodWeave, an international nonprofit organization devoted to building schools, programs and opportunities that give children back their childhoods by ending child labor in the handmade carpet industry in South Asia.

Would all of this meet with Morris's socialist approval?  This is where I step far out of my area of expertise but am happy to stand in awe of Morris's powerful and continuing influence on socialism past and present.  Indeed, if I lived near London I would go to the event below later this month, where I'd no doubt learn much of interest.

Instead, I'll ponder this essay about William Morris by Adam Buick, a socialist leader and (see comments :-) writer who is giving the above lecture.  Here is a short excerpt (I hope Buick doesn't mind--if he does, I'll take it down).

"Although the task of toning down Morris's socialism for the benefit of his wealthy admirers began almost as soon as he was dead, in Marxian circles his reputation as a 'revolutionary socialist' survived. His 'News From Nowhere' which leaves no doubt as to where he stood on this issue had a very wide circulation. It was quickly translated into German (by the wife of the pioneer German socialist, Wilhelm Liebknecht) and distributed by the Social Democratic Party.

At the end of his life Morris's political position was more or less that of the SDF (Socialist Democratic Federation) and it was this organisation which first kept alive his reputation. The Twentieth Century Press which was at the service, if not under the democratic control of the SDF, reprinted a number of Morris's writings: some of the pamphlets he had written for the Socialist League, an article How I became a Socialist. The anarchists too reprinted some of the Socialist League pamphlets. Besides these pamphlets, articles and lectures Morris's books Signs of Change and Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome (written with Belfort Bax) were also available. So that at the turn of the century, when the reform-revolution problem was re-opened, socialists could have had access to a fair number of Morris's socialist works. After the turn of the century yet more of his works became available. In 1903 the Fabian Society published a lecture of his on Communism. In 1907 the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which had broken away from the SDF in 1904, brought out another lecture 'Art under Plutocracy' as a pamphlet entitled Art, Labour and Socialism. In 1913 the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co. in Chicago which specialised in popular editions of Marxist works reprinted Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome."

The beautiful rugs of C.F.A. Voysey

 

 

 

   

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  I was looking at these beautiful reproductions of the rugs of Charles Voysey (1857–1941) recently.  Voysey was an English architect and designer who was influenced by William Morris and the Arts and Craft movement.  The rugs, which retail for about $4000 for an 8'x10', are sold here among other places.

For those with less money to spend, here are some artsy-crafty rugs from Home Decorators Collection.  I have Orange Blossom in my kitchen and love how cheerful it is (this rug was also sold by Garnet Hill last year at a higher price).  I wish I had a spot for Marigold.

 

 

McIntosh

  

Summer Day

  

Orange Blossom

  

Marigold

 

Poppies

Here's an earlier rug post you might like:  Some Magic Carpets