This is the afternoon of Sunday October 30, 2011-Day 5 of our trip.
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| You can buy Turkish rugs everywhere. |
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| Turkish flags hanging on this Castle |
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| Our tour guide took us took a very nice carpet company to see carpets made from the silk worms. |
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| Silk worm carpet |
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| The silk worm is dead inside its casing. The casing is made of silk and when it is soaked in boiling water, they pull thin strands and place it on spools. |
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| This pictures shows the silk worm casings being soaked in hot water, the strands hanging become very coarse (Like horse hair) Then they spin it to make the rugs. |
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| silk worm casings and the dead silk worm is inside. |
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| They use special dyes and after spinning the silk and dying it they brad them and then they are ready for carpet weaving. |
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| Different materials the turkish use to make their carpets ie: wool, yarn, cotton and silk |
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| When we arrived at this carpet store, they brought us to this large show room and continued to tell us how their unique and expensive rugs are made. They laid out hundreds of rugs and we felt the texture of all of them. My favorite of course was the silk, it was so smooth but very expensive. the cheapest rug was 2,500 American dollars. They wined and dined us and then had turkish salesman ascend upon us and asked us which rugs we wanted. Bill and I were in no way prepared to spend that kind of money. |
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| They were fun to watch roll out the rugs for us, they are very heavy and make it look so easy. There were several couples in our group (15 people) that bought rugs. Later we talked to them on the ship. One couple bought 5 rugs for their home and spent 20,000 dollars that day and had the rugs shipped to them free. I told Bill it would have been nice to get one for a souvenir, but they were too pricey. |
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| The silk from the silk worm is not the only reason why these rugs are so costly, it is because they take months to years to complete. Each row is perfect. The turkish people send their children to "Carpet schools" to learn how to do this for a living. Just like we send our children to school to learn do a profession. They have Carpet schools all over the place in Turkey. These people make minimum wage just to have a job and they work long hours every day. |
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| This Turkish women is weaving a rug for a customer that requested this horse picture. |
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| more silk worms. |
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| I got to hold one and you can see the soft strands of silk starting to unravel after they have been placed in hot water for such a time to get ready to spin. |
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| You can see this girl taking the silk from the casing and spinning it on a spool, it looks like a thin thread. You can get alot of silk off of one silk worm. (it is amazing how all of God's creations have a purpose in life) |
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| When she scooped up the casings all of the threads stick together and this girl has to separate and prepare for the spinning. |
