Assembling the Soul: A Guide to Setting Up a Traditional Iranian Carpet Loom — Epoche C1
Before anything: which loom are you building? An Iranian pile carpet is woven on an upright wooden frame called a dār , and the first decision — which of three kinds of dār to build — has to be made before a single beam is cut, because it fixes the longest carpet the loom can ever produce. The earlier version of this guide described one loom while giving it the properties of another, and the contradiction is worth clearing up first, since everything downstream depends on it. Wulff's survey of Persian crafts (1966) and Edwards's account of the industry (1953) describe the same three types. The fixed village loom. Upper and lower beams are fixed in the uprights. The warp is stretched once between them, and the finished carpet can be no longer than the distance between the beams. As the work rises, the weaver's plank is raised on pegs or blocks. Simple, cheap, and limited. The Tabriz loom. The warp is a continuous loop passing round both beams. When about a metre has been woven, the tension is slackened and the whole warp is drawn downwards so that the finished portion passes round the lower beam and up the back of the loom. The weaver never moves. The maximum carpet length is roughly twice the free height of the loom. The roller-beam loom. Both beams are rollers. The unwoven warp is stored wound on the upper beam and the finished carpet is wound onto the lower one, each locked by a ratchet or a peg through a hole. Carpet length is limited only by how much warp the upper roller holds — which is to say, effectively not limited at all. The earlier text specified rollers with ratchets and then said the loom's height is chosen to suit the intended carpet. Those are the specifications of two different machines. If you fit rollers, the height of the frame is set by the weaver's reach and the ceiling, not by the carpet. If you want the height to determine the carpet, build a village loom and save the ironmongery. One further type falls outside this guide but should not go unmentioned, since calling the upright loom simply "the traditional Iranian loom" is inaccurate. Nomadic and many village weavers use a horizontal ground loom: two beams staked out on the ground, dismantled and rolled up when the camp moves. As Housego's introduction to the tribal weavings of Iran (1978) makes plain, it is not a primitive version of the upright loom but the correct solution for a household that moves twice a year. 1. The workshop: two things in it that are not atmosphere A kargāh can be as plain as a room with a north-facing window, and most of what makes a good one is unromantic. Two features do real work. The first is the light. Even, indirect daylight is a requirement rather than a preference, because the weaver's whole job is discriminating between adjacent colours in the pile, and direct sun washes near-neighbour dye lots out in the glare and flattens them in the shadow. A north window gives light of nearly constant character all day, which is why painters' studios face that way too. The second is the floor and the wall behind it, and the reason is calculated in section 2: a warped loom is storing a great deal of elastic energy and pushing its uprights apart, so it must be footed on something that will not shift and is usually braced against a wall. Packed earth is adequate if the feet are bedded; a smooth concrete floor is not, unless the frame is fixed. Of the tools, three are used constantly and should be to hand rather than on a shelf: the daftin , a heavy metal-toothed comb used to beat each row of knots and wefts down onto the row below; the qeychi , shears for cutting the pile to length; and a knife, in Tabriz fitted with a hook, for cutting the yarn after each knot. 2. Erecting the frame: the load it actually carries "Robustly constructed from sturdy wood" is true and uninformative. It is worth knowing what the frame is holding, because the number is surprising and it explains every heavy joint in the structure. Warp count comes from the fineness of the carpet. Iranian workshops grade fineness in raj : the number of knots in seven centimetres across the width. Each knot, whether the asymmetric Persian type or the symmetric Turkish one, is tied around two warp threads, so a 50-raj carpet requires $2 \times 50 = 100$ warp threads per seven centimetres, or about $14.3$ per centimetre. A carpet 150 cm wide therefore needs roughly $14.3 \times 150 \approx 2{,}140$ warp threads. Each of those is tensioned. A working tension of about $10\,\mathrm{N}$ per thread — the order of a kilogram hung on each — is plausible for a fine cotton warp, well below its breaking load but firm enough that the thread rings when plucked. The total is then $$2{,}140 \times 10\,\mathrm{N} \approx 2.1 \times 10^{4}\,\mathrm{N}$$ which is about $2.2$ tonnes of force trying to pull the two beams towards each other. That is the load on the joints, and it is why the uprights are mortised and tenoned rather than nailed, why the beams are thick relative to their length, and why a loom that is not braced will slowly rack itself out of square. The figures are illustrative rather than measured, but the order of magnitude is the point: a structure carrying a load comparable to a small car, held by wooden joints, in a room with a beaten floor. One correction to the earlier text. It advised using a spirit level to make the loom perfectly upright. Uprightness is not the requirement, and a loom leaning back slightly against a wall is perfectly serviceable. What matters is that the two beams are parallel to each other and square to the warp. If they are not, the warp threads at one edge are longer than at the other, the tension differs across the width, and the finished carpet comes off the loom as a trapezium. Rugs that will not lie square are one of the commonest faults in the trade, and this is where most of them begin. 3. Warping: why the warp is cotton The warp threads — chelleh , the process of laying them being chelleh-keshi — are almost