Religious Symbolism in the Islamic Prayer Rug

[MineralMan]

46. I already cut it off the loom 15 years ago, after weaving a plain

end to match the other end. As I said in the OP, it's in use as an end table runner, and as the rug under our holiday tree each year. There was really no chance I'd ever finish it, and its unfinished state stimulates questions, so I don't mind.

I guess I learned what I set out to learn about rug-weaving. Life just got busy and other interests got in the way of time to spend knotting pile yarns.

The design included a central lozenge-shaped element, and was symmetrical. I liked the colors, too. The interwoven elements of the pattern interested me, as well. I didn't use any traditional symbolism in it, and decided to make it purely geometric in form.

While I wish I had finished it, there were many other projects that followed, each of which was designed to teach me something. Each pile row took about 1.5 hours to knot. I can't remember how many rows the rug would have taken, but when I did the math, clearly it was a bigger project than I imagined at the beginning.

Even creating the knot-by-knot cartoon took hours to finish. I have enormous respect for rug-weavers. I did have the cartoon attached to the loom for a while, but switched to counting knots for each color not long after I started. It was easier to follow that way. This was all pre-computer. Today, I'd create the pattern in a spreadsheet and print a numerical knot count. I do not know how the traditional rug-weavers managed the patterns, and never found a description of that process. A knot-count method for each row would probably have been the simplest method. But, I did see references to cartoons being used during my research.

One of my antique tribal rugs, though, appears to have been designed during the weaving by the rug-maker. It's not symmetrical and has some almost random elements in it. It's all fascinating.