Istanbul, day ten. It feels like I’ve been here for so much longer than ten days; getting used to the cultural differences took a while. However, it is definitely worth the trip to be able to experience the uniqueness of Turkey. Today Cidnee, Rachel, Cait and I were able to participate in tile painting. At first I had in my mind that we drew out a design then painted it. Oh no, much more complicated than that. We had to choose a design, poke tiny holes with a needle in the outline of it, and place it where we wanted on the ceramics. After that, we put charcoal on top of the paper and when we lifted the paper, it left the outline of the picture from the tiny holes. Then we “connected the dots” with a pencil and outlined it with black paint. After that, we finally were able to begin adding in color. For me personally, it was a tedious process. I don’t know about the other girls, but I’m definitely not a patient person and I’m enough of a perfectionist to make the tile painting stressful. But despite this, all the paintings turned out beautifully. Hopefully we’ll have them back soon in order to post pictures of them J. I think it made most of us feel like we were only creating simple designs a child could do when Betul began to lay her design out. It was so beautiful and detailed that I think it made all of us feel quite inadequate, never mind that it was our first attempt and she’s been doing it for years on end. Unfortunately we didn’t get to see her finished work because we needed so much help with ours.

            After tile painting, we immediately headed over to a place that specializes in making and repairing kilims. A kilim is a type of flat woven carpet that is quite popular here. There are a few different types of kilims, but suffice it to say that it depends on the material and how the knots are made. Some run upwards of $10,000 to $100,000. We each learned how to weave the thread through kilim in order to repair holes, as well as having the opportunity to learn a new way to thread a needle when it came loose. What we took 10 minutes to do (each), Hussein, the professional, took 5 minutes to undo what we did and redo it perfectly. It’s amazing to think that this is a dying art because the complexity and intricacies of making the kilims is incredible. I cannot imagine how people could take a simple carpet made in a factory over a handmade carpet or kilim. Unfortunately, the mass production of factories are making the kilims more affordable thus putting stores that have put all their time in effort into hand making these, out of business. In the end, even if they are going out of business, we need to take advantage of learning the art while we can to perhaps one day bring the tradition back.