Ivory Scroll 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.

The ivory field is densely drawn, which helps it hide small marks better than a plain pale ground would, but the coral border and the sage guards are soft, light colours with little dark in them to absorb a spill. The corners, where the border pushes inward, are also the points most likely to be stepped on or brushed by furniture.

Every rug border has to turn four corners, and a running floral pattern does not turn corners easily: the repeat that fits the long side will rarely arrive at the corner at the right point to continue down the short one. Weavers solve it in different ways — a mitred join, a squeezed motif, a pattern that simply stops. Look at the four corners of this rug for how it was done here. The coral border does not meet itself at a clean diagonal. Instead it bulges inward at each corner, pushing over the sage guard stripe and into the edge of the field, and a large rosette sits in that notch as a kind of hinge. The running vine on each side ends against the rosette rather than having to bend around the corner, so neither side of the border needed to be adjusted to fit the other. It is a deliberate, planned corner rather than an improvised one, and on a rug this small, where the border takes up so much of the surface, it is one of the first things the eye settles on.