Saturday, November 22, 2008

Rugs - the musical

What a day this has been, what a rare mood I'm in, why it's almost like being with RUGS!
(apologies to Lerner & Loewe)

What a day it was. There's something about going to work an hour early on a Saturday (7:30 PST) and being busy from the time you open the door to go in until you leave an hour after closing time. The Thanksgiving panic is underway. A failure to plan on one parties part is not necessarily a crisis on the others........you only have so many on location appointments in a day and when they're full, there really aren't any more unless there's a shift in the time = space continuum AND rugs still take a certain amount of time to be cleaned and dried. Today was our drop dead date for Thanksgiving and between the phone and the tidal wave of rugs, it was great. No meals, no biffy breaks, no coffee, no e-mail.

WAIT! there was that little short period of time when Barry O'Connell (of SpongoBongo fame)
was in the shop trying out the new video camera on some of my oddball textile collection.

For some reason, I have managed to accumulate a large assortment of small Central Asian embroideries, camel trappings, horse thingies, etc. I like the one we shot about the blue glass beads from Herat. They are glass beads at the most primitive level attached to a macrame type of netting. Herat is near the northwestern corner of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan and there are Teke and Salor influences there, however the band in the video is Baluch. There is a distinctive greenish color to the macrame portion done by dipping the wool into indigo and afterward treating it. The embroidered pillow covers and zari work pieces are Salvation Army finds. ANYWAY......They're a still affordable small collectable.

One of the most interesting Baluch pieces I have seen for some time was at
Emmett Eiland's Gallery in Berkeley CA. They had used bottle tops as a decoration. Very enterprising people. If you're ever in the Bay Area drop in and visit them, the yurt is a real treat!

After a day like today, the current musical interlude is my sweetie snoring. He's been generously taking time out from being his mean attorney self to help me with a variety of repair projects on vehicles and equipment and I'm taking this opportunity to offer my very public THANK YOU!
Thank you also to Barry for helping me flip rugs and wait on people.

Hope all of you have a restful weekend, I'm looking forward to waking up without the alarm clock tomorrow.

Thea

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