Ivory Vine Medallion

100% silk pile, hand-knotted, with silk 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.

Both the ivory field and the peach border are pale, so marks show wherever they land. The fine dark-red stems that carry the design are the thinnest lines on the rug, and they are what wear flattens first if a silk piece is walked on. It will keep its drawing sharpest on a wall, a table or at a bedside.

This field is drawn once and then reflected twice. Take any motif in one quarter of the ivory — a boteh with its pale blue fill, a cluster of blossoms, the small ornament in the corner — and you will find its mirror image across the long centre line and again across the short one, four copies in all. Only the things sitting exactly on the axes appear once or twice: the medallion at the centre, and the lozenge pendants above and below it. Kashmiri workshops weave from a written or drawn talim that gives the colours knot by knot, and a four-way mirrored design means the weaver is effectively reading one quarter of it forwards and backwards across the rug. The pleasure of it with the rug in front of you is in the small departures: silk is knotted by hand, and here and there a blossom is a knot wider, or a stem turns a row earlier, in one quarter than in its twin.