Camel Gold and Rust Palmette Kilim, Hand-Woven Wool

Material: 100 percent hand-spun wool, flat-woven. No pile.

Care instructions

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

Animals in the border are worth pausing over. Weavers across Central Asia have always put creatures into their work — birds, dogs, horses, sometimes camels — and they appear most often in the border rather than the field, walking round the rug in procession as though guarding it. Here they alternate with palmettes on a rust-brown ground, drawn simply enough that you might take them for abstract devices until you notice the legs. The field is quite different in mood: large palmettes and serrated leaves on curving vines, spaced generously across a camel-gold ground, with a narrow column of rosettes running down the centre. It is a lighter, more open rug than most flatweaves of the region.