March 2, 2026

   You’ve been catching glimpses of it for quite some time now, but Martin finally found the deliberate imperfection which is always placed in an actual Persian carpet a couple of days ago. We got the carpet on 9/21/2022 and it took that long to find the imperfection. Why is one always deliberately placed?

“In many handmade Persian rugs and carpets you will discover the deliberate mistake. Followers of Islam believe only Allah makes things perfectly, and therefore to weave a perfect rug or carpet would be an offence to Allah. The original deliberate mistake is usually made in the execution of the pattern of the rug and not in the dying of the wool or silk, and certainly not the quality of the weaving. Genuine deliberate mistakes in oriental rugs and carpets may be very difficult to spot and can be as subtle as a different colour used in a flower petal. ( https://www.orientalrugexperts.com/deliberate-mistakes-in-handmade-persian-rugs-and-carpets/ )”

There the imperfection is, exactly as expected a subtle difference in the color of the petals of the flower. Click on the image to see the rug itself at full resolution. This carpet was made in the Isfehan provence in Iran by the Davari family. They “signed” it on the left edge in the middle, in persian, of course 

Finally get to show off a feature that Apple added to the iPhone 17 camera without even mentioning it. It now can take extreme macro photos! These were shot with the iPhone about an inch off the carpet.

An important measure of a carpet’s quality is the number of knots in a square inch. As you can see, there are 24 knots per inch or 576 knots per square inch. This is a very high quality carpet! Since its about 8’ x 10’ that means that 8 * 10 * 144 square inches/square foot * 576 = 6,635,520 knots were made.

Martin’s new optics let him see the extremely deep blues that he thought were black. The extremely white areas are silk, the rest is wool.