Friday, February 20, 2009
Don't miss: Persepolis - this place is amazing. It was the Persian capital between 500 to 300 B.C. And they are still excavating.
Don't bother: Worrying about how Americans are treated. The Iranian people are very interested in speaking with Americans and learning about us. (And no alcohol for three weeks is not unbearable.)
Coolest souvenir: Two small (old, not new) Persian rugs.
It started serendipitously nine years ago. Giuseppe Di Leo and Jim Hampton, friends and fellow teachers at a Montreal high school, attended an auction of oriental rugs.
“We’d seen ads in the newspaper and wanted to know more,” Di Leo said. They each bought a rug and, says Di Leo, “probably paid too much.”
The experience implanted in them what Di Leo calls “the rug bug.” The two friends began studying and learning everything they could about oriental rugs and then they began collecting them.
Some of the rugs from their collections are on show until March 29 at the Museum of Costume and Textile of Quebec in St. Lambert.
The rugs hail from the Caucasus, the geographic region between the Black and Caspian seas that includes Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagehestan and Georgia.
The exhibition features 27 rugs, on loan from 10 collectors who are members of the Montreal Oriental Rug Society.
“This is a focused exhibition of rugs from that particular region,” says Di Leo, a co-curator of the exhibition with Hampton. “Caucasian rugs feature geometrical patterns: stars, flowers, plants and stylized animals.”
A few are kilims, meaning that they’re flat-woven, and the rest are pile rugs, he said.
And because they’re antiques, ranging in age from 100 to 150 years old, the colours come from natural vegetable dyes. “When you look at them, you’re mesmerized by the colour and geometric shapes, by the designs and materials,” Di Leo said.
Hampton describes himself as an eclectic collector. “I like Persian, Turkish, Caucasian and Turkomen rugs,” he said, adding that as a “rug hunter,” he finds his best treasures at estate sales. “Washington and Boston are where the really avid collectors are,” he said. “But the Montreal Oriental Rug Society has been going on since the 1970s, and we’re resurrecting it now.”
The society began having shows at Di Leo’s urging. Now an art teacher at Dawson College, he co-curated a show at the CEGEP last year.
Di Leo says he and his friend educated themselves about the rugs by reading, attending auctions and visiting rug dealers. “We wanted to know why there’s such a large price range in Oriental rugs,” he said. “To understand a rug, you must understand its structure, its colours and whether the warp and weft are in cotton or wool.”
The antique rugs were made by nomadic peoples. “These were individuals who were not sophisticated artistically but they were very strong in how they used colour and pattern. For them, creating rugs is an intuitive process,” Di Leo said. “The rugs speak to me. I wonder what the weavers were thinking while making them. Every knot has a thought in it. This is a matriarchal industry that gets passed down from mother to daughter.”
Di Leo and Hampton will be at the museum with several other collectors on Saturday, Feb. 7 to discuss the rugs. Anyone who owns an oriental rug and has questions they’d like answered is invited to take the carpets to the museum that day.
The Museum of Costume and Textile of Quebec is at 349 Riverside St., St. Lambert. It’s open from Tuesday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends. Admission is $4.
8:10am Friday 30th January 2009
SOUTH Lakeland carpet retailer Goodacre is to move from its Aynam Road factory shop in Kendal to new premises on the Dockray Hall trading estate.
Company boss Mike Cornish said the relocation would show customers that Goodacre had “moved on” from its past.
The business, which once manufactured carpets and in its heyday employed 150 people, was bought by Mr Cornish after going into administration several years ago.
The new premises will provide more room for the firm’s specialist range of oriental rugs.
Carpet firm on the move
617-358-1240
The chemists, Richard Laursen, a professor in the Boston University Department of Chemistry, and Xian Zhang, a chemistry graduate student, have refined a technique that helps archaeologists and anthropologists identify the plant species that ancient people used to make fabric dyes. Their technique has not only provided researchers with a new, more powerful tool for analyzing previously known dye types, it also has led to the discovery of at least one never-before described dye. In addition, the BU chemists have started a catalogue of plant sample characteristics for use by dye researchers around the world.
Historically, researchers have used a hydrochloric acid mixture to extract the delicate dyes from fabrics such as wool and silk. But, according to Laursen, hydrochloric acid cleaves glycosidic linkages, the bonds that hold sugar-like molecules to many dye molecules. Without these sugars, researchers lose valuable clues to which plants were used to give the dyes their color.
Keeping these clues intact is especially important when analyzing yellow, flavonoid dyes, not only because such dyes are chemically more delicate than red or blue dyes, but also because they can be derived from a greater variety of different plant sources -- from onion skins to pagoda tree buds.
Laursen and Zhang tested dye extraction methods using both ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) and formic acid instead of hydrochloric acid. These "gentler" extraction solutions leave the glycosidic linkages in place. The chemists analyzed the dye extracts using a combination of high-performance liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry, and a diode array detector to determine their solubility properties, molecular weight, and exact color absorption in nanometers.
The researchers have already put their new method to the test, even discovering a new type of dye component, a flavonoid sulfate, in textiles found with 1,000-year-old mummies in Peru.
"Nobody could have seen the flavonoid sulfate with the old method," says Laursen. "Every time we analyze something we find something new. It's really kind of exciting."
On a recent trip to China, Laursen and Zhang obtained textile samples from yet another mummy. The chemists were attending a Getty Conservation Institute-sponsored conference at Dunhuang, a town at the edge of the Gobi Desert. A site near the town is honeycombed with caves containing ancient Buddhist art. While at the conference, the BU chemists joined an expedition into the Takla Makan (the name means, "You go in, but you don't come out.") desert. Chinese researchers found the fabric at a Takla Makan burial site, and Zhang, a native of China, convinced a Chinese archaeologist to give her tiny samples of the 3,000-year-old cloth.
According to Laursen, the fabric, and the person entombed with it, are of Indo-European origin, probably linked to ancient migrations west through Central Asia. He plans a trip this spring to collect plants from Central Asia and nearby countries like Turkey, Iran, and Uzbekistan for a chemical comparison with the fabric's dye to find out more about the mummy's origin.
"The people in the area have a long tradition of making carpets and textiles," says Laursen, "there is very little known about what plants were used to dye them. We hope to fill this void by collecting as much plant material as we can."
The plant samples he collects will join hundreds of others in a dye "fingerprint" database that the BU scientists are creating for use by researchers around the globe.
"You get a characteristic spectrum of dye components," Laursen explains. "If we had this library, maybe we could figure out what was used in our Chinese samples. That type of information would be of use to archaeologists and anthropologists who are trying to figure out migration patterns and technologies of ancient people."
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