Madder Red and Camel Jaldar Rug, Hand-Knotted Wool and Silk

Wool pile with silk highlights, hand-knotted, finished with a cream fringe at both ends. The silk is used in the emblems, where it catches light differently from the wool around it and makes the güls and lozenges lift slightly as you move past them.

The mixed fibre is the thing to plan around: wool and silk behave differently to water and to abrasion, so this rug needs to be treated as silk throughout rather than as a wool rug with a little silk in it. On colour, the deep madder ground is very forgiving and the camel borders are not. The borders take up more of this rug than the field does, and a light camel ground at the outer edge is where feet arrive and where furniture sits.

There are two different emblems on this field, and they share one lattice. Sixty elongated hexagonal güls sit on a grid of five columns by twelve rows, spaced about 25.8cm apart across the width and 15.5cm down the length. At the centre of every cell those güls enclose sits a second emblem entirely — a serrated lozenge, smaller and sharper-edged, with none of the gül's flattened hexagonal outline. Counting both, the field runs on a diamond lattice with a cell of roughly 12.9 by 7.7cm, and the two emblems alternate at its nodes like the squares of a chessboard.

The consequence is that no gül ever touches another gül. Every one of them is surrounded by four lozenges, and every lozenge by four güls, all the way to the edges. It is a harder pattern to hold than a plain repeat, because the weaver is carrying two separate drawings and has to keep them in phase over more than a hundred emblems without either drifting into the other's place. What it buys is a field that stays regular without becoming monotonous — the eye reads a single even texture from standing height, and only resolves it into two distinct emblems when you come closer. The field does not stop cleanly either: rather than cutting the lattice at a straight line, the weaver let it run into the border, so the red ends in a row of points made of half-emblems.