Indigo and Camel Jaldar Nested Medallion, Hand-Knotted Wool and Silk Rug

Hand-knotted from wool with silk, with a natural fringe at both ends. The silk carries the fine repeat inside the medallion centres, which is where the rug does its closest drawing, and it is what gives those panels their slight lustre against the matt navy ground. It also means the rug must be treated as a silk piece rather than a wool one for cleaning.

Wool and silk shrink at different rates, so this rug should never be washed, steamed or shampooed — any deep clean is a job for a specialist in mixed-fibre rugs. A near-black ground hides everyday marks well; the exceptions are lint and pale fibres, and the apricot medallion centres, which are the palest thing on the rug and sit directly on the centre line where a runner takes its traffic.

Look into the apricot centre of any of the three medallions. It is not a plain panel with a device in the middle — it is filled with a fine all-over repeat of small leaves and hooked sprays in salmon, green and grey, worked at a scale of a centimetre or so and running edge to edge inside the medallion. What is inside each medallion is, in miniature, exactly the kind of pattern that would cover the whole field of another rug.

Once you have seen that, the structure of the rug becomes clear. There are repeats at three different scales here — the tiny one inside the medallions, the diamond diaper filling the wide borders, and the large diamonds of the end panel — and every one of them is enclosed within a frame. The field is the exception: it holds three medallions and their connecting arms and nothing else, no repeat anywhere. That is the reverse of how most rugs are organised, where the field carries the repeat and the borders contain it. Here the repeats have all been pushed into the containers and the field has been left to do something else.