Wine Red Khoja Roshnai, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

100% wool pile, hand-knotted, finished with a camel fringe at both ends. A gül on a 6.5 by 6.0cm cell holds its internal detail only at a high knot count; the fineness is the defining quality of the Khoja Roshnai design and the reason these rugs are graded above coarser Turkmen weaving from the same part of northern Afghanistan.

About as practical as a rug gets. Under half a per cent of the surface is pale enough to count as neutral and the whole piece sits in one wine red register, so there is essentially nothing here for a mark to spoil. The trade is lint: a ground this dark shows pale fibres and pet hair long before it shows soiling. The grey-rose flecks at the centre of each gül are the one light colour and what gives the field its sparkle close up.

The two directions of this field are not made the same way. Across the width, the spacing between güls is set by the warp threads strung on the loom before weaving begins — fixed, countable, and beyond the weaver's control once started. Down the length it depends on how firmly each row of weft is beaten down against the last, which is a matter of hand pressure and varies from row to row. You would expect the width to be the more regular of the two.

Measured, they are the same. Sliding the pattern across the width gives 0.75, 0.62, 0.51 and 0.42 over four steps; sliding it down the length gives 0.72, 0.58, 0.49 and 0.42. The two curves fall together and arrive at the same figure. If anything the length holds marginally better. That means the beating-down was as consistent as the loom setup — the half of the job that depends entirely on the weaver's hand matched the half that does not. It also leaves the gül on a near-square cell of 6.47 by 5.97cm, laid out as a straight grid rather than the offset arrangement these designs often use: shift by one row and one column and the match is 0.64, but shift by half a row and it drops to minus 0.14.