Silk rug weaving [ Shaanxi ]:
I stopped for the night in a town (city to me) for the night. The motoche needed some repairs so I found a repair place and was hanging around waiting for the repair. The town was in an out of the way place so never gets foreigners. A lady next to the repair place came over an wanted me to go with her to her house. She brought me inside to a room where a girl was weaving a silk rug. She assumed the only reason I could possible by there was to buy rugs as there was no other industry there or anything else that would attract even Chinese to the town. u
Waving a silk rug. Note silk in the left hand and the cleaver like cutter in the right. She goes from left to right, pulls out each verticle line and inserts the silk thread, in this case white. The patterns above are her patterns.
It must take a few months to make the rug she's working on. It's quite tedious and you have to be mindful of the colors & etc., so time consuming to keep switching according to the pattern. She must do all one color on a row then the others in turn.
The small silk thread is inserted then cut to size. The vertical line pulled out and the silk inserted. The silk is then slid down the vertical line to its place in the row.
The cleaver look fairly clumsy for the job but obviously must be just what's needed and I could not ask to get that amount of detail.
The patterns looked very complex to me and the completed part at the bottom seemed like quite a bit of work.
The lady took me to another part of the home where rugs were stored. There were about 50 rugs there which will go to Guangzhou and on to New York, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other middle eastern countries. I would have bought a rug but did not have anyplace to put it. I may try to go back there this summer.
