Slate Blue and Salmon Mahi Medallion, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

100% wool pile, hand-knotted, finished with an ivory fringe at both ends. A herati drawn at a 4cm repeat with every leaf outlined is only possible at a high knot count on a closely clipped pile — on anything coarser the leaves would merge and the pattern would read as texture rather than as drawing.

The mid-toned field is reasonably forgiving and the density of the drawing helps further, since there is no open ground anywhere for a mark to sit in. The salmon borders are the exposure: they are the lightest large area on the rug and they sit where people step on and off. The one thing to protect is the fineness itself — crushed pile does more damage to a design at this scale than to a bold one, because the drawing has no margin to lose.

The herati on this rug repeats every 4.0 centimetres. Measured on a plain stretch of field away from the medallion, the pattern matches itself at a vertical shift of 4.01cm and again on the diagonal at 7.7 to 8.0cm. That means one complete unit — a rosette, the diamond enclosing it and the four curved leaves that give the pattern its other name, mahi, or fish — fits inside a square about the size of a large coin. Every one of those leaves is outlined, and every rosette has its own centre.

At that scale the colours stop behaving as separate colours. The individual elements are only a few millimetres across, closer together than the eye can resolve them at standing height, so blue, salmon, ivory and dark brown blend on the way to the viewer rather than on the rug. It is why the field reads as one soft slate blue even though blue accounts for under a tenth of the rug's surface when the pixels are counted, and why the whole piece changes character as you approach it — from across a room a calm blue-grey ground, from a metre away a dense weave of four colours. The medallion and spandrels are the same pattern in the same scale, differing only in their ground, which is why they read as areas of light rather than as separate ornaments.