Ivory Garden 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.

This is a light rug from edge to edge: soft ivory in the field, peach in the border and medallion, and very little dark anywhere to absorb a mark. That is what makes it glow, and it is also why it belongs somewhere it will be looked at rather than walked on.

Look for the darkest colour on the field. Almost everything here is drawn in soft tones — rust, sage, olive, pale blue, peach — outlined in brown rather than black. There are only two places where a near-black mass appears: a small dark tulip spray directly above the medallion and another directly below it, both on the long centre line. They are tiny compared with the bouquets around them, but they are the first thing the eye catches from a distance, and they fix the vertical axis of the rug the way a pair of pins holds a sheet of paper. Cover one with a finger and the field seems to drift; uncover it and the whole composition settles back into line. It is a small economy of the design: rather than adding a heavy frame or a strong medallion outline, the weaver let two dark accents do the structural work, which keeps the rest of the field light.