Red Anatolian Hand-Knotted Wool Rug Pillow Cover, Konya İnlice

Think of it as a small rug given a different job: a hand-knotted red wool pillow cover, 62 × 107 cm (2'0" × 3'6"), made up from a village weaving at İnlice in Konya province, with Anatolian figures across the face. It came out of a dowry chest. There is one. Sixty-two by a hundred and seven is wide for a bolster and long for a cushion, and what it actually suits is a bench, a window seat or the back of a daybed — anywhere a rectangle of pile can lean against something rather than be sat on directly.

01The mark of slow weaving

A knotted face is thicker and warmer to the hand than a flat one, and it holds its figures in relief, so this reads as an object with a front rather than as a piece of cloth. Wool, knotted by hand in central Türkiye, then made up as a cover. İnlice weaving is village work, which is to say the figures were held in memory and set out by eye, and the drawing accordingly drifts: a motif near one end will be a knot or two wider than its twin at the other.

That drift is the piece's signature and the reason a photograph of one is not a photograph of another. Nothing here is repeatable — it came from one weaving, and that weaving is used up. Wool, knotted by hand at İnlice, Konya province, Türkiye. 62 × 107 cm (2'0" × 3'6"), backed and finished as a cover. Knotted pile, so the figures sit in relief and the face has weight. Suits a bench, a window seat or the back of a daybed. Figures drift by a knot or two between one end and the other. Came from a dowry chest rather than from a floor. Professional cleaning. One piece, from a weaving that no longer exists. The rug it was cut from is gone, and this is the part somebody decided was worth keeping.