Red Hand-Knotted Wool Rug Pillow Cover, Konya İnlice

İnlice is a village in Konya province, in the middle of the Anatolian plateau, and this piece began there as a rug. It is now a hand-knotted red wool pillow cover, 56 × 108 cm (1'10" × 3'7"), made up from an older İnlice weaving that spent its life folded rather than walked on. One of one. The proportion says what it was for.

01Where it sits in the house

A little over a meter long and barely more than half a meter deep is not a sofa cushion — it is the shape of the long floor bolster that lined the walls of an Anatolian room, where seating meant the floor and the wall did the work a chair back does now.

02From the hand of the weaver

The drawing is in knotted pile rather than flatweave, so the figures stand up from the ground and the red has a depth that a flat face cannot reach. Sandık eskisi is what the trade calls a piece like this — literally, old from the chest. Weavings were made, put away in a dowry chest and left, sometimes for decades, which is why the color on one of them is stronger than the age would suggest. In place of wear it brings creases, deep ones, and they flatten out over a month or so once the piece is lying under its own weight.

03Knot by knot, by hand

Professional cleaning, and keep it off a sunlit sill. Hand-knotted in wool at İnlice, on the Konya plateau. 56 × 108 cm (1'10" × 3'7") — a long bolster proportion, not a sofa cushion. Made up from an older village rug rather than woven as a cushion. Sandık eskisi: kept in a dowry chest rather than used on a floor. Knotted pile, so the figures stand above the ground. Fold lines from storage settle out over a few weeks. Professional cleaning; keep it out of direct sun. One piece, and the rug it came from is finished. It spent its working life folded in a chest instead of underfoot, which is a strange history for a floor covering and the reason the color is still where the weaver left it.