Ruby Red and Ivory Diamond Gül Jaldar Rug, Hand-Knotted Wool

100% wool pile, hand-knotted, finished with a generous ivory fringe at both ends. A guard stripe of three millimetres carrying its own motif is only possible at a high knot count — at a coarser gauge the band would come out as a plain line.

At this size the rug will most likely go somewhere with concentrated traffic — a doorway, a bedside, in front of a basin — or on a wall. The ivory in the borders and the medallion centres is the vulnerable colour and it accounts for a great deal of the surface, so this is not a piece for a kitchen floor. The red ground is forgiving; the borders are not.

The border on this rug did not shrink with it. The whole piece is 64cm across — small enough to pick up in two hands — and the two side borders take 18.8cm of that width between them, twenty-nine per cent. Measured band by band, the left border resolves into eight separate stripes inside 10cm and the right into ten inside 8.8cm.

The narrowest of those bands is 3.2 millimetres wide. Not a plain line — a stripe carrying its own repeating motif, drawn and outlined, three millimetres across. Several of them run at exactly that width, alternating with wider panels of 1.8 to 2.3cm. That is the interesting thing about a rug this size: the weaver has not simplified anything to fit. The border system is the same one a room-size carpet of this design would carry, with the same count of bands and the same alternation of wide panel and narrow guard, compressed until the guards are three millimetres. Everything else follows from that decision — the four güls repeating every 22.9cm down a 93cm field, and a knot fine enough that a three-millimetre stripe can still hold a pattern.