Carpet School

12/18/2009

After visiting Saqqara we made a quick detour to see a carpet school. I was excited to visit one because I was very confused to what a carpet school was. I had seen them while driving from site to site. We walked in and I was already amazed. We saw several large pieces of equipment that two to five people were working at. A carpet school is a school that will help teach children and young adults how to make carpet, and the different types of material that you can make carpets form, and they pay them for the work that they do. It is a great way for them to make a little money, while learning a trade. While we were there visiting we got to see several carpets being made. A silk carpet was being made by two young women and they were incredibly fast with the knots. They did slow down a little so that we could see in slow motion what they were exactly doing. A few brave students sat with them and tried it out. I was not one of them. I wouldn’t want to mess it up. Each carpet follows a specific pattern. There was what looked to be a family working on another carpet. A little boy probably around the age of six was asking everyone to sit by him and have a shot at it. After one or two rows of knots were completed they took what looked like a chisel and hammer and made the knots very tight and very close together. Then they showed us that you must cut out the extra string, this helps it from not looking like a shag rug and you are able to see the images a lot better. This school also had a professional that does tapestries for them, now that is a hard working job. He usually took four months to complete on tapestry. It didn’t look like anything at the time, but once we went upstairs to see the completed pieces it looked amazing. The rugs ranged in prices from $5 to $25,000!! They were beautiful! It would definitely be worth the investment. This was a detour that well worth the hour and a half spent there.


Posted at 12:07 PM by Amanda Gibbs