Navy Lobed Medallion

100% silk pile, hand-knotted, with the sides overcast in blue and a cream fringe at both ends. Silk is strong in tension but delicate in every other respect — it abrades, it marks with water, and it loses lustre permanently if treated like wool.

The navy field is forgiving of marks but shows lint and pale threads readily, and silk holds on to them. The more delicate part is the ivory: the corners and the medallion centre are the palest silk on the rug and the first to show a spill or a water ring. Keep it where it will be looked at rather than stepped on.

Start at the centre and move outward, and the colours come in a fixed order: an ivory core, a terracotta ring, then the navy field. Now start at the edge and move inward: the terracotta border, the ivory corners, then the navy field again. The two sequences meet in the navy, which means the medallion is laid out as a miniature of the rug around it — a small terracotta-framed, ivory-lined panel sitting in the middle of a large one. Check it by tracing the outline of the medallion with a finger and then the outline of the oval field: both are scalloped, both come to points at top and bottom, and both are held by a pale edge before the next colour begins. Designs built this way read as calm rather than busy even when the drawing is as dense as it is here, because the eye finds the same structure wherever it lands, at any distance.