A few years ago, in Asheville, North Carolina, my wife and I wandered into a repurposed brick warehouse in the River Arts District and came out with a treasure: a clutch purse made out of a piece of a kilim rug, trimmed in black leather.

I call it a “treasure” for a very specific reason: Shana loved it at first sight. This almost never happens. Self-denial runs in her family. When she sees something she likes, the gears of an ironclad internal mechanism creak to life, suppressing the positive impression — especially if the price tag exceeds a bargain basement price.

The kilim purse was no bargain, but we were on vacation; she loved it; and I was thrilled to be able to give her a gift I knew she’d use.

And use it, she has, subjecting that colorful little clutch to the brutal stresses of her workaday world. Alas, after years of noble service, the poor thing is just about ready to give up the ghost. (And by that, I mean the purse, not the wife.)

The kilim is a rug of humble origins. Once woven almost exclusively by village women using primitive floor looms, today’s kilims are produced with more modern equipment, but their ancient design has certain vulnerabilities. These were rugs created out of scarcity; their name is derived from the Persian word gelim (ghel-eem), meaning “to spread roughly.” Unlike other “oriental” rugs, in which the warp and weft are protected from wear by a soft, thick pile, kilims are flat woven, meaning they have no pile at all.

Because of their roughness, and their poor reputation for wear and fading, kilims weren’t typically made for export. Instead, they were left to develop along tribal and geographical lines, relatively undisturbed for millennia.

This quiet, indigenous evolution resulted in an explosion of visual creativity, as each tribe sought to distinguish — and ornament — itself with unique patterns and colors.

What we see, as modern consumers, when we look at a kilim, is an abstract design, an exciting composition of line and shape rendered in lush organic dyes. The information encoded in the rug — its point of origin; its secular or religious purpose; the meaning of its graphic symbols — is beside the point. The fact that we can’t crack the code is part of its exotic charm.

Kilims represent a deep nostalgia: an ache for the pre-modern world, with its low-tech, earth-friendly ways, a time when the word “local” really meant something.

But here’s how you shop for a kilim clutch these days: by turning to the ultimate souk, the sleepless, infinite market of the Internet.

A quick Google search turned up the name of the store in Asheville, but they weren’t able to help with a replacement, so we broadened our horizons. Believe it or not, you can find kilim purses on Amazon, which is our go-to vendor these days, on account of the free shipping and the ease of returns. But none of the purses on Amazon was quite right. We were looking for an exact match.

Sipping cups of tea in the comfort of my little office, we turned to eBay, where in a matter of moments we found what we were looking for: the very same purse! The bit of kilim was different, of course. But that’s the whole point of these clutches: no two are alike. Unfortunately, the leather trim wasn’t quite right. It was brown, not black. But there was hope. We now knew that clutches of the same design were still being made in Turkey.

Next stop: another website, www.etsy.com, which has become a major online retailer in the world of handicrafts. A keyword search on “kilim wallet” turned up another near miss: right design; wrong color leather. The vendor was in Germany, but I took a chance that their English was decent and wrote an email asking whether they might have any clutches trimmed in black.

Within minutes, there was an answer, in perfect, colloquial English. They were sold out of black, but how urgent was the need? They might be able to scare some up from their “workshop” in Turkey.

The next day, I received an email with several attached photos: a collection of twenty-six purses in all, every one of them trimmed in black, for my lady to choose from.

So this is the story of a bit of tribal rug from Turkey, repurposed, or “up-cycled,” into a fashionable purse — a purse that was located with the help of a global network of Internet servers; purchased electronically with virtual currency; and shipped to the United States from the Levant, by way of Germany. Such an intricate global dance!

But you know what they say: happy wife, happy life.