Sand and Slate Blue Stripe Gabbeh, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

100% Ghazni wool, hand-knotted, with a natural fringe at both ends. Wool is resilient and forgiving underfoot, and the lanolin in a highland fleece like this one gives it a degree of natural resistance to soiling.

A plain pale field is less forgiving than a patterned one: footmarks, vacuum tracks and spills all show more clearly with no pattern to break them up. The abrash banding is a feature of the wool, not a fault, and it will not wash out or even up over time. A runner in a corridor takes concentrated traffic down its centre, so use a rug pad and rotate it end for end regularly.

The banding across this rug is abrash, and it is worth knowing how to tell it from a stripe the weaver intended. Abrash happens because hand-spun wool is dyed in small lots: one batch takes the dye a shade deeper than the next, and when the weaver reaches the end of a batch and ties on the new one, the change shows as a band running the full width of the rug. Its edges are soft and slightly uneven, because the switch happens knot by knot across the row. Compare that with the two blue lines near the end — hard-edged, uniform, clearly drawn. On a patterned rug abrash is something to be hidden. On a gabbeh, where the field is deliberately left empty, it becomes the entire design, and a weaver will sometimes stretch a dye lot or hold one back to place a band where it will read best. The wool is Ghazni, a highland fleece kept long in the pile so the lanolin stays in and the surface catches light.