Wine Red and Royal Blue Sawtooth 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.

The abrash banding across both the red and the blue is a feature of hand-spun, small-lot dyed wool. It will not wash out or even up over time, and on a plain field it is the most visible thing about the rug — worth being certain you like it before buying. Both grounds are dark enough to hide everyday marks well, though they will show lint and pale fibres.

The sawtooth edge is the whole design, and it exists because of how a knot works. A rug is a grid: every knot sits on a warp, in a row, and a boundary between two colours can only ever run along that grid or step across it. Most weavers hide the steps, using enough knots per inch that a diagonal reads as smooth. Here the opposite decision has been made — the steps are enlarged into deliberate teeth, one triangle every few knots, so the constraint becomes the ornament. Follow the seam from one end to the other and you will see the teeth vary: slightly taller in places, slightly shallower in others, and the panel itself drifting a centimetre or two off centre. That is a gabbeh woven without a cartoon, the weaver judging the line by eye over nearly three metres. The heavy abrash in both colours belongs to the same way of working: small dye lots, changed as they run out, banding the rug horizontally.