Ahhhhh....the souks.

I absolutely love markets in any city that I visit. Today, I went to 3! I will describe the other two a bit later.

The first visit was to the Mubarakiya Souk in Central Kuwait City with Lisa. It is a maze of narrow halls that have an order to them - allowing you to navigate through the fish restaurants into the veggie and fruit stalls, by the fish market, and into the crash of brightly colored textile stands selling anything from Iranian Kilim to Sadu to Indian garments and more. Which is were I get into trouble.......

Down narrow stairs into a basement of sorts is where I found beautiful Kilims from Iran. These are tapestries that have designs woven into them through a technique of discontinuous wefts, leaving slits where two colors or shapes meet. The effect is a beautiful composition of geometric designs, varying in complexity.

If I were smart, I would have shot a detail of this piece, it was roughly 3' x 5' and made from dyed wool. The craftsmanship was beautiful. And no, I did not buy it......there is always time though;)











The prize of the day was the Al-Beida Selling Carpet Exhb. - so says the card - run by a gracious man, Mohsin - who proceeded to unload several feet of Sadu textiles from Kuwait onto the floor, creating what I call heaven.

This beautiful sadu textile is created with a supplemental pick up technique, creating the band of pattern down the front with floats of warp on the back. Tomorrow, I will be visitng and learning from weavers at Al Sadu house, to get first hand knowledge of all things related to the process of making and history behind sadu textiles! And of course, this is a technique I will be teaching to my Advanced Weaving class at UNT this coming spring, so I felt that I needed to bring this to them in person, for education's sake.










Because it's late I can't go on and on about each textile - yet - everything from here down are shots of the random textiles at the souk, enjoy!