Photo by Ingrid Schnader.
Mary Payton Davis and her mother, Vicki Noah, are surrounded by handwoven rugs that they sell out of Davis’ home on Dolly Ridge Road in Vestavia Hills.
Vestavia Hills resident Mary Payton Davis works 60 hours a week as a physician’s assistant at UAB, but when she comes home, she transforms into a textile connoisseur.
Together with her mother, Vicki Noah, they import hand woven, hand-dyed rugs from Turkey and sell them on social media. Their new business is called Ancient Thread, a name which reflects their appreciation for “old-world craftsmanship.”
Davis got the idea for the business over the past three years during her search for a new living room rug. She wanted it to be hand woven, but she said she realized how expensive these rugs can get. She said she realized that many rugs are 50 to 75 percent marked up.
“Every middle man is a price up, a step up,” she said. “So I just started digging into how to get to the first person in line so I’m not digging through five people to get them.”
She found a contact in Turkey who barely spoke any English and ordered her first 12 rugs in December. Noah felt nervous about her daughter’s new adventure at first.
“You just spent a whole bunch of money with someone you do not know,” she said. “They are in a totally different country. You have no recourse whatsoever.”
But by doing it this way, Davis is able to cut out the middleman and has found a way to make handwoven rugs more affordable for people who shop with her. She sells her rugs out of her home on Dolly Ridge Road and doesn’t have any overhead.
“Coming straight from the people who actually weave them and can mend them is excellent,” Davis said. “You can get them custom made and still be within a relatively good price range.”
Some of the rugs they sell are vintage rugs that were made 40 or more years ago, but most of the rugs they purchase are made from unweaving old rugs and using the wool to make a new rug.
“The wool is not from old rugs that you would never want to unweave,” Davis said. “They’re like prayer rugs, very thin, almost like blankets.”
She said the imperfections of a handwoven rug are her favorite part. On one rug, she pointed out three distinct lines. She learned that these imperfections are from where three different women were working on the rug and tied it off where they met one another. She also said she likes transitional rugs.
“You see new things about it every time you look at it,” she said. “Because it’s not the same across the rug — it transitions through the whole thing.”
