In Palm Springs for the Restoration Industry Association convention.

If anyone ever follows my Facebook pages, you would know that I am currently in balmy Palm Springs California for the Restoration Industry Association convention. This is amazing on a number of levels: 1. It was totally FREEZING in Seattle when I departed on Monday in the midst of an early spring snowstorm that I was afraid would close the airport. 2. It's about the only place to hang with my peers in rug cleaning and restoration in the United States and
3. Today I had the great pleasure of lunching and visiting with Dr. Khosrow Sobhe in Los Angeles
(well, closer to Beverly Hills if you must know) and meeting his lovely wife and son.

Check out Ashkan's web design pages.

For those of you who may not know Dr. Sobhe, he is the President of Sobco International Trading with offices in Tehran and Los Angeles, He has multiple college degrees, is on the board of the Southern California branch of the Textile MUseum and more! On top of it all, he is just a genuinely nice person. With rugs.

Last year I had the singular pleasure of visiting Iran for the Kish International Handknotted Rug Exhibition, thanks to the efforts of Dr. Sobhe and others. It was a truely moving event for me
and I appreciate everyone's efforts on my behalf. Thank you too, Barry O'Connell for introducing us! Another genuinely nice person.

Thea

Blog 0 Rama - keeping busy in an economic slowdown

Well! I never thought that I would be complaining about being too busy, especially now, but the horrid weather of December is the savior of January.

We were not only inundated with snow and rain, but when it all melted it had to go somewhere......

like homes, businesses and the local antique mall.

Especially after the Corps of Engineers decided to release a bunch of water without noticing how ligh the water levels were already. Obviously a governmental agency. Check out the video Barry O'Connell made the day after rugs started coming in. So no time to blog when you're up to your armpits in alligators, as it were.

Rugs started coming in on Friday night, we worked on just getting the water out of rugs and drying them all day Saturday, Sunday and finished up on Monday. Barry was a great help as we needed all the hands we could muster. They all still need to be cleaned, but now we're waiting on insurance adjusters.

SO between regular work and dealing with wet soggy rugs, el-bloggo has been neglected and I need to get back on track.

Here's some other interesting things that have been going on: The global economic slowdown is affecting carpet making in Iran. Here's the latest from Tehran Times....

Anyone besides me remember Gulistan rugs? Here's a great history put out in the Armenian Reporter..... Gulistan's were beautiful rugs and we still see them occasionally.

Here's some humor on a lighter note, I really despise the romance novel genre HOWEVER the cover pictures can really get me going laughter wise. This creative and innovative man has gone where no one has dared before and put much, much better titles on these schmaltzy books. Remember folks, these aren't mine.

Emmett Eiland, well respected rug scholar and over all nice person is publishing his new novel in serial form on the internet. Check it out...

If you love San Francisco, check out the tribal arts and textiles show Feb. 12-15, 2009. The San Francisco Rug Society will also have some activities going on around this as well. You'll also find on their homepage the sad news of ACOR being cancelled this year.

That's all for now, back to rug cleaning here in Seattle.

Winter wonderland?

Between my guy having a total hip replacement surgery and the pre and post surgery hooha AND our special little weather treat, I haven't had much time to blog.

Streets here have been closed, we have 14 inches of snow in our yard and while (finally) main streets are getting plowed, most side streets are closed. 8 inches of solid slush is common. It was coming down faster than we could get rid of it.

We were unable to get the employees to work to clean rugs, unable to get the trucks out to clean rugs, clients were unable to get out to bring us rugs SOOOO the gist being we were pretty much closed between the 18th through Christmas. We're currently shooting for next Monday the 29th.

Even UW was closed for three days in a row. Now the thaw is hitting and the air is warmer than the snow so there's an odd looking fog everywhere rising from the snow. Rain is forecast starting tomorrow so we expect flooding and some busy times between water, holiday parties and pet accidents.

Hope that you all had a safe holiday. After the fist fight I saw today at Fred Meyers I guess the Peace on Earth thing is over until next year. Check out the lovely (and PEACEFUL) Christmas greeting from Dr Mehrabadi at the Iranian Interests Section in Washington DC. on Barry O'Connell's main page. I find it somehow ironic that all of my Christmas morning phone calls to wish us holiday greetings were from my Muslim friends.

Thea

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

OOOooooh, I'm on Youtube!

My friend, Steve (Dusty) Roberts just sent me a Youtube video where he mentions our rug morning on December 6th! I've never been on Youtube before so this is very cool.

Possible "Rug Morning" on the horizon and other ramblings

I found my good friend Dusty Roberts post to my blog and thought I'd post the link to the web album of the trip to Kish to share. It was so awesome and really the trip of a lifetime. My deepest and most sincere thanks to Dr. Khosrow Sobhe for facilitating this for me.

Dr Sobhe, in addition to his many other talents, has a rug showroom and cleaning facility in Los Angeles, CA. I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Sobhe in person and hearing him speak this July
at The Oriental Rug Retailers Association meeting in Atlanta GA. His personal blog pages are a great inspiration to me.


Possible "Rug Morning": On the East Coast is the wonderful Textile Museum in Washington DC.
One of their most fun activities is the "Rug Morning" where anyone can bring an interesting textile or rug pertaining to the theme of the day and the TM staff will tell them about what they have. Doesn't that sound fun? Barry O'Connell has been in Seattle for work and has kindly offered to help me put on a few "Rug Mornings" starting December 6th! I will post more details as they come up.

Yesterday at Emmanuel's we were fairly busy with rugs coming in. I hope that this is a positive economic indicator and not just the result of all our rain.