Here's a Belouch khorjin that has appeared on these boards before (it appeared in Salon 32, where it was used to illustrate how design elements can be hidden by low contrast in adjacent colors).

There's a lot about it that I like. It was part of Marvin Amstey's Vanishing Jewels collection, and in an odd sort of way it introduced me to Marvin.

More appropriate to the subject at hand, it has 11 silk knots; 9 are isolated, and 2 are adjacent. Since the piece has about 100 knots to the square inch and is over 900 square inches in size, there are almost 1 million knots within which the 11 silk ones are contained. They are not visible unless you look for them. I find this interesting, since their inclusion would be known only by the owner.

Regards to all,

Steve Price

Rehgards, Yon

Although you don't see them at a glance, if you look right at them (once you know where they are, this is easy) you can see them just fine. The luster of the silk is obvious, although I haven't done a burn test. Here's the clinching evidence: George O'Bannon wrote the description of the piece for Vanishing Jewels, and he mentions the silk.

Regards,

Steve Price

Marvin takes the prize for the fewest silk knots in a single piece, so far, but I have mentioned before that I have an Ersari torba with eight silk knots.

They are widely, and very deliberately placed so that only two of them appear together in four different quadrants of this piece.

The odd thing about these eight knots is that they do not "wink" at me at all. I know about where they are now, but each time I want to locate them again, they are so unobtrusive, that I have to search a bit.

This means, in turn, that they have no real aesthetic function and I have wondered why the weaver placed them as she did so deliberately. Perhaps she believed that the "evil eye" is particularly well-sighted.

As for Yon's question, I have never tested the fiber in these knots. They could be mercerized cotton or even rayon but my estimate of the age of this piece (last half of the 19th century) suggests to me that these shiny pink knots are in fact silk.

Regards,

R. John Howe

The unobtrusive - almost invisible - nature of the single silk knots in the Belouch khorjin and in your Ersari piece seem to me (as to you) to lack aesthetic function.

On the other hand, the owner of the piece knows that they are there. My conjecture is that the silk was a fairly expensive commodity to these people, and including a touch of silk in the item may have been a sign of affection or respect for the recipient.

Regards,

Steve Price

It would be difficult to detect the purple silk(?) knots in this Qashqai bagface by looking at the front.

They stand out on the back as you can see from the closeup of the bird.

They are much harder to see in the closeup of the front. There are 7 or 8 purple knots on each bird. I wonder if a careful examination of the backs of other rugs would sometimes reveal previously unrecognized silk knots. Sorry about the quality of the picture of the whole face, but I couldn't do any better.

Incidentally, this is the only South Persian bagface that I have come across with formally worked corners. Can anyone refer me to pictures of others?

Best wishes,

Leslie