Cow Tipping and Rug Flipping – What Do They Have in Common?

While shopping for a rug with clients today, watching the men flip the heavy knotted wool of the exotic handmade art pieces, at Tribal Arts, one after another as we critiqued the myriad colors and designs, I was taken back over the years and through all the times that I have experienced this incredible task of selecting just the right rug! Today the search was for an 8×10 which is certainly not the largest, but still takes good shoulders and backs to flip.
The nap of the rugs requires that you move from one end to the other to experience the color change that often occurs. Depending upon the type of yarn – silk really “pops” and wool, depending upon the texture of the nap can read like two completely different rugs from one side to the other.
Seasonal flipping of your own rugs can be a good thing, for two reasons, actually. First it will rotate the wear areas and secondly because if the nap is doing its thing, you will feel like you have a different colored rug! Perhaps you want the lighter side as you enter the room for summer and the darker side when you enter the room in the winter – or vice versa.
As I left my clients, having successfully experienced a unanimous vote for one of the 6 rugs that we had delivered to their home to try, the one pictured here that was more square in shape and had a most interesting and unusual background pattern, I was reviewing in my mind all the flipping that occurred and as I silently said to myself…”rug flipping… cow tipping” for no apparent reason – except for the sound of it – and therefore, there is really nothing that the two have in common except the gerund form of the verbs! Cow tipping might be fun in some circles, but I never wanted to do that to a poor cow – and I would prefer that someone else flip the rugs while I watch!