Kyrgyz Ornamental Rugs

My Dad & Preston

My brothers are good guys. Both of them are pretty cool dudes & I'm proud of them both. Will maybe get around to posting pictures of my entire family (& maybe even me :) ) up here eventually, but yeah, wanted to show of some of Preston's rugs here.

My brother Preston is the genius guy in the family. He won't tell you that, but he's the one who is going to be Dr. Holloway soon with his Ph.D. in Materials Engineering. He's working on some neat projects hoping to reduce waste products from mining & smelting plants. (most of it, I don't understand, but I catch a little of what he's trying to do).

Preston respects & admires the Muslim culture & has some solid friendships with Muslim folks. Yes, he realizes, as do most Muslims, that there's some factions of Islam that are pretty destructive, but he knows too, that the reality is that people are people. Most of us just want to be left alone & have the freedom to do what we want & believe what we believe. His friendships have shown the kindness & hospitality that can characterize the Muslim people.

Anyhow, Preston spent 2 months in Kyrgystan, a neat place in central asia that few people know about. He went down there to try to teach some community gardening principles to help people supplement their diet with fresh vegetables & grains that they grow themselves on tiny plots of land. Things didn't go as expected, but he still fell in love with the Kyrgyz people & culture.


From that, Preston's taken on a lot of projects with a distinctly Kyrgyz flavour. He built himself a Yurt; a tranditional round Kyrgyz tent - it's like 12 feet across & around 8 or so feet in the center - pretty cool. And the other thing he's taken on is making these beautiful Kyrgyz rugs.

The Kyrgyz make a lot of stuff from felt. I think a lot of the Kyrgyz people are shepherds & get the felt from the wool (I may be lying here, so don't trust me). In the Islamic culture, they don't allow you to make a picture of anything that represents anything real (i.e. no art that includes people or animals). This is for fear that the 'art' becomes an 'idol' which would break the first pillar of Islam, "there is one God & Mohammed is his prophet". So for Muslims, art involves a beautiful mixture of colours & geometirc patterns. The Kyrgyz people wrap this into these felt rugs with all these beautiful patterns. Preston's been making these rugs for a bit, adding his own flavour & colour schemes. Normally he'll make one pattern as a gift & then make the inverse pattern for himself. I think they're beautiful & figure it's just one more of the really cool things my brother does (& fits the fairly labour intensive projects into his already hectic schedule).