Boucherouite Rug

Description

Unique Piece weaved by "Atelier Mozona" The Boucherouite carpet is woven into traditional Atlas Mountain culture. When poorer families were low in supplies during a cold winter, they washed and tore up old clothing to furnish the carpet or used the left over "Boucherouite": Anyone familiar with the lively Moroccan rug and carpet market will have noticed the emergence in recent years of a previously little known type of rug (called Boucherouite or Boucherwit, from Moroccan Arabic "bu sherwit" a piece torn from pre-used clothing) which marks the (provisional) end of a development in which the traditional materials used for weaving (mainly sheep's wool) are rapidly being augmented and substituted. This development is an inevitable consequence of widespread economic, social and cultural changes in Morocco's rural areas: with the move away from nomadic animal husbandry to settled farming and other modern forms of rural employment, wool as the primary raw material for the production of carpets for Moroccan domestic use has become ever rarer, and replacement materials have become ever more important. The materials used include recycled rag strips and yarns from a variety of textile remnants including wool, cotton, synthetic fibres, Lurex, nylon and plastic.This development started during the 1960s and 1970s in the plains mainly settled by Arabs around the towns of Beni Mellal and Boujaad To know more about the origins of the Moroccan Berber carpets, the following quoted text from my favorite reference (Berber Carpets of Morocco: The Symbols Origin and Meaning) sums it up quite nicely: