Sean McLain reports from Lahore on Tariq Mirza, the master carpet weaver. From The National:
When the curators of Historic Royal Palaces in London needed a carpet, they contacted Tariq Mirza. The charity that cares for Britain’s unoccupied royal palaces needed to decorate King Edward I’s bedroom with a Spanish carpet from the 13th century. The problem was that the technique for making this sort of carpet died out hundreds of years ago. This was part of the appeal for the man who calls himself a “medieval craftsman”. “The more challenging, the more difficult, the more research involved, the more I love it.”
That carpet now lies in the Tower of London, but few people know its story. One cannot tell by looking at it that it took six months of painstaking labour by Mirza and his master weavers in the Pakistani city of Lahore to complete it.
“We could have made a Spanish design carpet in any weave. When it is on the floor, you would not be able to tell. It is only close examination that shows this.” But that would not have been good enough for Mirza. The project turned out to be more complex than even he anticipated. “The museum wanted a Spanish weave carpet, which was current in the 13th century. They wanted it technically woven in that way. That weave has been dead for ages.” To meet the demanding specifications, Mirza first began with research. He contacted museum curators and anyone with a Spanish carpet from that era to rediscover the lost art of their making. Using their analysis, his own guesswork and several high resolution photographs of the weave pattern, he began to reverse-engineer the carpet. More:
