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.

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