Violet Overdyed Floral Ghazni, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

100% Ghazni wool, hand-spun and naturally rich in lanolin, hand-knotted and then overdyed as a finished rug. Ghazni wool takes a dye deeply and evenly, which is what makes an overdye of this saturation possible without the surface going patchy.

Two things follow from the overdye. The rug is very forgiving — under one fifth of one per cent of the surface is pale enough to count as neutral, so there is essentially nothing on it to mark. But the whole design depends on differences of depth within one colour, so anything that lifts the dye locally, whether a harsh cleaning product or strong sun, does not just lighten a patch: it erases pattern, because pattern here is depth. Test any cleaning product on a hidden corner first.

Overdyeing is a finishing process, not a weaving one. The rug is knotted first, in whatever colours the design calls for, and then the finished piece goes into a single dye bath. One colour goes over everything. What comes out is a rug in which the original drawing survives — but only as differences in how deeply each wool took the dye, because the hue is now the same everywhere.

That leaves a signature you can measure, and this rug carries it about as clearly as it can be carried. Take every coloured pixel on the surface, which is 99.8% of it, and record the hue of each. Half of them fall within a band just 6.4 degrees wide. Ninety per cent fall within twenty degrees. On a circle of three hundred and sixty, effectively the entire rug is one colour. Now measure how light each of those pixels is and the range runs 126 points, from a near-black ground at 26 to wisteria highlights at 152 — half the full scale. So all the variety here is vertical, none of it lateral: the palmettes, the vine, the border repeat and the field are separated purely by depth of dye. It is why the pattern reads as relief rather than as colour, and why the rug changes so much with the light in a room.