Gendje Runner No.7

This is the Gendje Runner, no.7 in Meik and Ian McNaughton's Making Miniature Oriental Rugs & Carpets.  I worked much of this while I was staying at my mom's this past month.

The chart was originally designed for wool, but I've converted the shades, and "faded" them slightly, to DMC floss as I am still happy "playing around" with fibers and gauges.  I used 28-count Monaco instead of the original 24-count canvas, mostly because I've got rather a lot of the Monaco!

This is a pleasing, fairly straightforward chart, and makes a handsome little carpet.  The McNaughtons clearly have orderly minds, as the designs are well-thought-out and tidy, and while the carpets have a more restrained feel than, say, Frank Cooper's charts, giving probably more the "flavor" as it were of Oriental carpets than the reality, the McNaughtons have done an excellent job in scaling down a wide variety of carpet designs and styles into simplified and quite manageable 1:12 scale pieces for new and new-ish petitpointers.

This piece did tweak a bit as I stitched, and then while I was exploring online to find out if the Gendje runners were generally fringed or not, I came across an old example that had seen better days and in fact had a mend on one corner, noticeably a different shade of blue, and so I decided to let the crookedness go where it would, and make a less-than-new carpet -- hence the "mend" --

Gendje carpets are from the town of Gəncə or Ganja, now in Azerbaijan, in the southern Caucasus.  The diagonal lines filled here with boteh, the teardrop-shaped motif on which paisley is based, are typical of the long and narrow Gendje "runners."  The McNaughtons give a date of "late-19th century" for this particular type of carpet.

I have been joking, to myself and others, for some time now -- "oh, ha-ha-ha!" -- that I need to make a carpet shop room-box to have a place for all of the miniature carpets I make.  This has been manifesting itself in occasional thoughts of buying a shop front kit and turning it around at the back of a room box, to be the view from inside the carpet shop, which I thought an amusing twist on the usual room-box "shop".  Then at my minis group meeting in June, one of the ladies said, "So I've got a friend who's had some Dura-Craft house kits in her garage since the 1980s, does anybody want them?"  Another member said she was, that she'd put one together and then give it to her favorite charity for raffling off at the next fund-raiser, and I, with a small gulp (having heard about the sheer size of some of the Dura-Craft houses!), said I'd take the other one.  As it turned out, the charity lady decided that she already has enough on her workbench -- so both of the kits arrived at my house while I was away at my mom's --

Yes, those are grown-ups for scale in the photos.  Hmm -- could I make the San Franciscan into a sort of boho shop?!  The mind began to whirl ...

And at the very same meeting (while I was away, remember), another of the ladies said she'd inherited the full set of Houseworks' "Street of Shops" room-box kits -- three separate "shops" that fit side-by-side in any combination or order -- also sitting in sealed boxes for umpteen years, and since she'd heard me joking about a carpet shop, would I like them?! 

So my previously-whirring mind is now in fact boggling, not only at the generosity of miniaturists with their knowledge and "spare" stuff, but with the possibilities ....

Comments

[Dawn in NL]

That's going to keep you busy for a while! Nice work on the carpet, I like the mending for a used feel.

[Susan D]

Ah, a few things to work on in your spare time. Do you actually have room for either of those biggies? On top of you new/old house you've been restoring.

Lovely runner, Jeanne.

[Toffeeapple]

What utter beauty you have created there; I love th 'repair' idea, it makes the carpet look as though it has had a lot of wear and, therefore, more authentic.

I look forward to the transformation of your 'new' buildings...