For years I sought the ideal material for rug restoration. From 1976 to 1982 I made annual trips to Anatolia and Iran to buy handspun wool at source, a sort of "Lawrence of Anatolia" concept, in keeping with the Zeitgeist, and which still characterizes the thinking of a certain kind of ethnic rug plunderer. I had fun, though: having a haircut during an earthquake in Izmir in 1978 (a 5-point-something on the Richter scale, I came out looking like a Mohican!); waking up in Sivas in 1980 to the shock of the General's takeover; the pathological xenophobia in winter 1979, shortly before the Shah's enforced leave-taking. I remember the laughter and skepticism which greeted me on my first visit to the Istanbul bazaar in 1976: natural dyes? handspun wool? Project DOBAG and its prolific rug spawn were still some years off.
The best place to buy wool yarn was East Anatolia. For hundreds of years the Kurds have controlled the trade throughout the whole of Turkey. Like the Navajo, the Kurds have maintained their traditions. West Anatolia - industrialized, touristik, western-Europe oriented - was uninteresting. Noboby wanted to know about these skills from the past. But there were problems in the East, too. Most of the herds one saw, and the yarns one could buy, were from colored animals -brown, grey, black. These were heavier sheep that gave more milk and were consequently furthered to the detriment of the all-whites.
I had a friend in Ankara who had a friend in the Tarim ve Kredi (sort of Turkish agricultural institute) and he had a friend in Selim köy... that's how it works in Turkey. I went to Selim köy (near Kars) and was formally welcomed in the usual Lawrence of Anadudu style. Nobody had an idea about wool, of course. In one little dukkan (store or shop) I found a single glorious hank of snow white yarn, and after some juggling with my Redhouse Dictionary managed to determine its origin: Igdir.
East of Kars, over the mountains from Dogobeyazit, where they grow oranges in winter and the temperature rarely falls below -5 C (in nearby Erzerum one morning I measured - 29 C and falling before retreating into my hotel), I was again directed to a friend of a friend in Igdir - he's the guy who owns the gas station just outside of town, a comprador. Of course, he had no idea about wool either. I did eat a huge free meal there, though, and returned dismayed to the town. This was one of the most depressing moments in my life. I put up in the little workman's hotel and went out for an evening stroll. Turning a corner on a dimly lit street, I saw a row of shops with hank upon hank of carelessly displayed handspun wool and great mounds of promising stuff within. My heart lifted.
As for the mighty, soul-destroying tussles which took place between me and the collective haggling power of the Igdir wool dealers, the less said the better. I paid, of course, far over the local kilo price and still got it cheap. On my last trip in January, 1982, I employed Aisha (who later killed a man and ran off) and his one-eyed brother to do my shouting for me. Word had got out that a crazy ferengi was in town and people from all the neighboring villages brought yarn by the sackload for sale. I sat in a corner of a little dukkan hunched over a two-bar electric heater whilst Aisha & Co. did the business. I realized that he who could shout longest would win through - for a percentage.
We worked from 9:00 to 5:00 and I must have sorted through a ton of wool in one week before buying 200 kilos. Much of the good quality stuff was smuggled over from Iran, bartered against whisky and other non-lslamic comestibles. The whole place had something of a Wild West atmosphere to it, perhaps characteristic of border towns everywhere. I was ceaselessly shadowed by a scion of the wool clan - annoying but useful in view of the relatively large amounts of cash I carried with me. They were protecting their investment.
I checked out the local society: the Turks ran everything, the Kurds were vaguely - in their own homeland - tolerated. Once, visiting some Turkish acquaintances, I made the mistake of taking my "shadow" with me. In the little tailor's shop where we used to drink tea the atmosphere became icy. My "shadow" beat it out the door fast, then all became relaxed and misaperverlik. I had friends on both sides and wondered how long such tensions could endure. That was my last oriental voyage of self-discovery. It had become Increasingly difficult and expensive to make these trips. I came also to doubt the efficacy of using rough, hand spun yarns in a purely restoration context. For reweaving purposes they were appropriate, but for the many cliff-hanging situations which are the rug restorer's daily fare a more flexible material was needed. One could not sew cleanly through a rug with the handspun material without yarn (or rug!) breaking in the process, and repiling with the coarse wool often caused as much damage as it was meant to correct.
The handspun yarns were carded or at best primitively combed, meaning that they reflected less light than a 100% combed yarn, where the fibers lay absolutely parallel. The new Anatolian wools were coarse and heavy, the outer fiber being made up of thick scales which in antique rugs are almost completely worn away, resulting in the usual sheen and patina. It became clear to me that a world of difference existed between the massive new wools and the thin, brilliant surfaces of antique rugs. This is, in fact, the difference between weaving a rug and restoring one.
Over the next few years we wrote literally hundreds of letters to wool factories world-wide - China, Russia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East. The answer was always the same - minimum quantity, one ton. I finally found a factory here in West Germany which could manufacture the wool I wanted to my own specifications, albeit in 500 kilo quantities. This is the wool I am currently working with for restoration purposes: lustrous, long-staple worsted yarn, which is still coarse enough for knotting rugs. The wool looks hard but is in fact quite soft, demonstrating that what one feels is not always the same as what one can see.
Areas repiled using this material can be cut low without fear of the knots working loose, and the wool sits extremely well in the rug - excessive pressing, hammering, etc. is not necessary. The wool has a very straight shape which cuts squarely making a pile end with a minimum of fuzziness. The yarn has been spun in a 6 12 count - 600 meters per kilogram weight, ZIS two-ply.
The single ply is a well-tested yarn for restoring kilims. It is soft enough to bear respinning into a thicker Z single, which is not apparent when done properly. The 6/2 is probably the perfect make-up for a restoration yarn. It's curious how many rugs can be restored using this spin count.
No one kind of wool can be perfectly suited to the many hundreds of different kinds of Oriental carpets, but I feel this wool fulfills the basic requirements of luster, strength, straightness of fiber, smoothness, flexibility, ease of use, and, last but not least, economy.
I began dyeing with natural dyestuffs in 1974. In 1982 I switched over to synthetics, which I have used exclusively since 1984. I do not recognize any great difference between the two traditions, all dyeing being the result of chemical reactions, and the work of the dyer to produce beautiful and lasting colors. The current preoccupation with "natural" dyed rugs probably represents our Western nostalgia for a time long since gone by, a Golden Age when people saw the world in a purer, less complicated way. It is somewhat sentimental.
Clearly, the invention (should one say discovery?) of synthetic dyestuffs was a watershed in the history of mankind's collective sense-perceptions. Coloristically, we can no longer see the world in the same way as our pre- synthetic forebears, having grown up in a multi-colored environment. Look around at the number and variety of colors in your immediate vicinity, unthinkable before 1856 when life must have been much more monotone and color a precious, hard-won commodity.
The large-scale production of "natural" colors is a complex and dirty affair, crippling for the environment and expensive. For ecological reasons, I would be against its widespread use today. Synthetics are often blamed for poor coloring of most modern rugs, but the fault is with the dyers. It's becoming consistently easier for me to produce the typical low intensity shades of old rugs (this also has to do with my backlog of 1,500 dye recipes), but the problem is to teach this to the peasant woman in Anatolia or the Persian village dyer. There are highly capable wool dyers at work, but in the rug factories of Rumania, China, and elsewhere.
With natural dyestuffs the recipe is in the root; with the synthetic one has to work by painstaking and consequent experiment. Nevertheless, I predict that in the next 10 years, growing out of the "natural" dye movement, we will see a whole new generation of rugs with synthetically dyed colors, and which transmit the feeling of their illustrious predecessors. The unlimited possibilities which synthetic dyes open up are the real stumbling block.
Although with the traditional dyestuffs I could make colors which were often astoundingly accurate, production was time-consuming and expensive. With the exception of indigo, 1 could never be sure how light and wash fast my colors were, whereas the synthetics I now use are all lab tested to international standards.
As with the wool, there are no perfect dyestuffs, merely compromise solutions. I am using metal-complex dyes with excellent all around wash and lightfastness (average wash fastness at 40 centigrade 4-5; average lightfastness on 1/1 dyeing 6-7; maximum wash fastness is reckoned at grade 5 and lightfastness at grade 8). In general, the darker the color, the more lightfast it is but, conversely, the less wash fast. This has literally to do with the depth of shade - with the amount of dyestuff on the fiber. It is, therefore, accomplished dyeing to make light shades which will not fade and dark shades which do not run when washed.
The metal-complex dyes can also be applied in a broken,
uneven way to the fiber, thus approximating the plastic effect
of antique rug colors. This is a definite advantage over
industrially produced yarns which are dyed perfectly through.
My dyestuffs are not new - some of them have been on the
market for more than 50 years!
The onset of synthetic dyes in the Orient marked the end of an era in rug manufacture. With their acceptance, and the subsequent abandonment of "natural" dyes, the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. It remains to be seen whether the baby can be retrieved. I experienced this process during my apprentice years as a dyer and restorer. Having begun with natural dyes and hand spun wool, I've come full circle back to the use of synthetic dyes and machine-spun wool. My aim has been to produce yarns which have the feeling of the Oriental orignals plus all the qualitative advantages which modern technology offers. Good to excellent dyed yarns are currently available, of course, but only by chance are they appropriate for restoration purposes. Many classical madder red shades are not available at all - and there are thousands of red shades to be seen in Oriental carpets.
The production of accurate matching shades is therefore a priority of the first order which I hope will benefit those restorers of rugs everywhere who are striving continually for higher standards.
