Very Sad!  Can’t trust your Caller ID anymore.

Anyway, today, in the hopes of helping everyone find us, I bought a bunch of Johann domain names and a few other misspellings of our store.  Perhaps you too are a small business owner who is perplexed as to why your own customers have a hard time finding you when you are right there?  Do a little spell check and that might be the answers to your problems!  (Well, maybe just one problem.)

Like the Greeks, the Persians eat Feta cheese all the time.  Actually, they just call it, “cheese.”  Well, “panir” is what they call it in Farsi.  Ask any Persian, and they will tell you that the best feta cheese comes from Bulgaria or “Bulgaristan,” and any good Persian grocery store worth its salt will carry this.  The title for the best feta cheese commercials, though, hands down goes to Kraft and Athenos.  Good Job!

Equally horrifying to the drama in Shahs of Sunset is the lack of Persian carpets seen in the show.  After seeing the promo shot of the cast situated on a Persian rug (hard to tell, might be an antique Meshakabad or some sort of reproduction), I assumed the homes of these characters would be chock full of them.  A few of the condos had a lovely Tabriz rug here or there (and granted, I’ve only devoted 3 hours of my life to studying this), but some of the cast have bare floors and machine made rugs.  Machine made rugs!  In the abodes of the Shahs of Sunset!  Nevermind the cat fights and the materialism, this whole rug situation is disgraceful.

The Shahs of Sunset pose on a Persian Rug. source: ryanseacrest.com

On the surface of the rug you can’t tell a thing.  It looks totally normal.  However, when you hold the rug, you can easily feel that one side of the rug has a lot less heft than the other.

Perfectly normal looking rug. Photo by Me.

Because learning types of weaves is one of the harder things that I’m still trying understand, I thought I’d write up this rug as a little case study from which we can all learn.  In the following picture, you can see that the weave of the rug changes a little bit, right about where the light blue of the bigger, inner border ends.  See?

Notice how the weave appears to change in the lower borders? Photo by Me.

The end of this rug is done in a Turkish knot which is often used in the region of Hamadan and other tribal areas.  Above the outer border of the rug, a Persian knot is used.  This is more prevalent in the area of Arak or Sarouk which is geographically very close to Hamadan.  (Assumption Alert: Turkish knots are not called Turkish because they were invented in Turkey.  The knots have been around a lot longer than Turkey the country, and while it is possible that the technique was invented long ago in what is today the country of Turkey, no one really knows for sure.)

Here is a close-up of the Persian knotted section of the rug:

Persian Knots. Photo by Me.

Let’s look at a close-up of the the Turkish knots now:

Turkish Knots. Photo by Me.

Now, if you have a sec, go ahead and google Turkish and Persian Knots.  You’ll be able to see close up drawings of the structure of these knots.  I know, it doesn’t help much, but maybe after staring at the above pics for a while, it will click later.

I’ll point out what I’m noticing and what I’m hoping I will recognize in rugs down the road.  The Persian knots from the back appear to be perfect little boxes.  The Turkish knots look like two, side-by-side boxes.  If I didn’t know better, I would count each half of the Turkish knot as a separate knot, but now I know that the Turkish knot is a little bit wider and consists of two boxes, bumps, lumps, loops, thingies, or whatever you want to call it, and in the Persian, only one of these per knot is visible.  As a rule of thumb, finer rugs are done with a Persian knot, and less fine rugs are done with a Turkish knot.  Or, translated into Katie speak, formal living room rugs are done in a Persian knot, and family room rugs are done in a Turkish knot.

Now, back to this particular rug with an identity crisis.  I have no explanation for what happened here.  Perhaps the first weaver was fired or won the lottery and left the weaving business entirely?  It isn’t very often that one weaver does both types of weaves.  This rug remains a mystery, but perhaps it has helped us to unravel the issue of the Turkish vs. Persian knot.

Going off just this picture, a rug expert (my dad) and a rug expert in training (myself) believe this rug to be a Tabriz, but maybe there is the slightest chance that the rug is a Bakhtiari.  Whatever it is, it is a beauty for sure.  Mr. President, has this rug be cleaned in the last 5-7 years?  If not, give me a call!

Underneath the tree and the "Bo" statue, lies a gorgeous rug! Photo by AP.