Apricot Camel and Indigo 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.

There is barely a square centimetre of plain ground on this piece. Where most flatweaves alternate embroidered bands with stretches of open weave, here the soumak covers the entire surface — rows of small stylised trees and paired hooks worked one over another from edge to edge, in as many as ten colours. That is a great deal of slow work, since soumak is wrapped around the warps by hand rather than woven through them, and the density is what separates a piece like this from an everyday kilim. The apricot-camel ground shows through only as the thin line between motifs, which is why the rug reads warm overall despite the indigo, magenta and teal doing most of the drawing.