Wine Red Turkmen Gül Khal Mohammadi Rug, Hand-Knotted Wool

100% hand-spun Afghan wool, naturally rich in lanolin, which gives it softness, a subtle sheen and a natural resistance to everyday dirt and spills. Hand-knotted in northern Afghanistan with a camel fringe at both ends.

About as practical as a rug gets. A fifth of one per cent of the surface is pale enough to count as neutral and the whole piece sits in one deep register, so there is essentially nothing here for a mark to spoil. The trade is lint, which a rug this dark shows readily. Worth knowing that with the frame taking two-thirds of the rug, most of what people walk on is border rather than field.

The frame on this rug is the same width the whole way round. Measured on each side it runs 50.0, 48.8, 48.8 and 48.2cm — a spread of less than two centimetres on a mean of 49, which on a hand-woven piece nearly three metres long is a genuinely difficult thing to hold. Most rugs vary the two pairs, usually because the weaver is adjusting the shape of the panel inside.

Here nothing was adjusted, and the field takes the consequence. The rug is 200 by 292cm, a ratio of 1.46. Subtract an even 49cm from all four sides and what is left is 101 by 195cm — a ratio of 1.93, very nearly twice as long as it is wide. So the field is markedly more elongated than the rug containing it. The güls follow: four columns across against nine rows down, more than twice as many one way as the other, even though the emblem itself is close to square at 24.8 by 21.0cm. The result is a field that reads as a tall panel of stacked files rather than as a grid, and a border that behaves like a true frame rather than a trim — it takes two-thirds of the whole surface.