A Large Turkoman Carpet

This is the Turkoman carpet, designed by Sue Bakker, from Venus Dodge's Dolls' House Needlecrafts. It is is a rather frustrating book, with hundreds of projects in all different kinds of needlecraft, from knitting and crochet to sewing to needlepoint and embroidery, but with pictures far enough away from the particular instructions that flipping back and forth from one to the other is inevitable, and in particular the needlepoint carpets are all photographed in a room setting, i.e. under furniture or dolly feet so that you don't necessarily have a particularly clear idea of what a piece is going to look like -- a fairly major flaw in a needlecrafts book.  The ultimate frustration (so far) for me has been that the very charming Arts & Crafts carpet in the cover photo -- which I would stitch in a heartbeat -- isn't even in the book at all.

I've already given my theory on the Problem Chart for this carpet, so I will only say here that although the instructions imply differently, the chart itself is meant to be flipped -- that is, it is only one-quarter of the finished carpet -- otherwise you will have to drastically alter the border as charted to fit the much-smaller main field.  I worked my version as the full ten-gul carpet, as it looks much better that way to my eye, and I like Bakker's designs. On my 28-count Monaco canvas, the finished piece turned out to be 5 3/4 x 7 3/4 in. (14.6 x 19.7 cm), less the fringe.

I also decided to try "fading" the colors this time, to make the carpet look older.  Instead of using two strands of the given colors, I used one of the original and one of a shade lighter -- this not only "fades" it a bit, but gives the colors a bit of depth, I think.  This is what I used, original shade first and the lighter one second --

• dark brown 3371 + 938
• blue 3750 + 930
• cream/ecru 3033 + 3866
• gold 3045 + 422
• red 355 + 3830

The fringe is 3866.  Since I was going for an older-carpet look, I decided when I was beginning to fill in the red ground, that I would also give it some "abrash", which is the word for the color variation you sometimes see in oriental carpets, as when a slightly different dye lot has been used in one section, or one dye lot has faded at a different rate than the rest, or simply due to natural variations --

(I've taken these details from carpets in the Wikipedia article.)  In a woven carpet, abrash often appears as a "stripe" across the width of the carpet -- to mimic this, I just used two strands of the lighter red for a few inches, then two rows of the blended, one more of the lighter red again, then back to the blended red for the rest.  I'm really pleased with the way this turned out!

Turkoman carpets -- now usually called Turkmen -- were produced by the Turkmen tribes in what is now Turkmenistan, as well as Afghanistan and Iran.  The deep red background is a distinguishing characteristic, as is this "Tekke Bokhara" design of symmetrical repeated guls, here the oval motifs, separated by stars or diamonds.  (More information here, and some examples from past auctions here.)  Bakker's version looks like it might date from the early or mid-Victorian period to somewhat later, so is ideal for either a Victorian setting or, like mine, as a family heirloom!

Comments

[Beth G.]

absolutely beautiful.

[Susan D]

It's stunning. And yes, the fading so works.

[Toffeeapple]

I do admire your patience! Well done.