Camel and Burgundy Banded Kilim, Hand-Woven Wool

Material: 100 percent hand-spun wool, flat-woven with soumak embroidered banding. No pile.

Care instructions

• Always use a rug pad underneath — a flatweave slips easily without one.
• Vacuum gently with the beater bar off, working along the bands rather than across them.
• Turn the kilim over every year — it is reversible and wears evenly if used both sides.
• Blot spills immediately, working from the outside in.
• Have the kilim professionally cleaned when needed — never machine wash.

The motif that repeats across this field is the tree, reduced to its simplest form: a vertical stem with paired hooks branching from it, worked over and over in burgundy, cornflower and orange. It is among the oldest images in weaving anywhere, and here it is drawn small enough that the rows read as texture before they read as trees. What holds the piece together is the camel ground — undyed or lightly dyed wool, warm and slightly uneven, showing between the motifs and softening the whole. At three metres this is one of the larger flatweaves of its kind, and the end panels alone carry as much banding as some rugs manage across their whole length.