Altho I am probably too hung over, this appears to be a glaring opportunity to talk to the Reverend about saving him from the rug merchants. Doc, I don't have a bit of problem with the idea that easily recognizable shapes abstracted from the world about us (stars, half-moons, flowers, vines, maybe horseshoes also)dominate the world of the "stick-built", the "pieced", and the "knotted". All these traditional processes are laborious and repetitious (following a sequence of instructions hundreds and thousands of times). You don't engage in that kind of discipline and tedium and then hide your love away by deciding that a monochromatic rug would be somehow easier because you could wear your fingers out without producing the universal references. Similarly, you'd have to be a scammer caught in a technological transition to blue over your taffy-pull barrels rather than etching up the patterns which attest to exactly what the barrels are and how constructed. The obvious quibble with the prima facie correspondance of pattern and motif between very different processes is that not all iterative processes are capable of the same subtlety of representation (a twist which will produce a vine on the surface of a gun barrel is not something I've seen). The simpler geometric abstractions (four-rayed star)can be discovered in the possible patterns of twisted steel and iron on the surface of a barrel; the sinuously "organic" as well as the geometric are possibilities in your rugs. I'd say that your rugs have a more extensive vocabulary than your barrels. What both share is a proud statement about the processes of premodern technology.
jack
