Multicolored Ethnic-Pattern Handwoven Wool Floor Cushion

The rug villages of Afghanistan make more than rugs, and this is one of the smaller things that comes off their looms: a wool floor cushion measuring 50 × 50 cm, patterned in orange, green, yellow, blue, purple and cream, with a wool face over cotton.

01Knot by knot, by hand

Weavers who have worked at this for decades produce them between larger pieces. Purple is what separates this one from its neighbors on the shelf. It arrives in short runs against the orange and the green, and since purple is the most difficult of these tones to hold at full strength in wool, it is usually the first to soften under a window.

02The origin of the pattern

Everything on the face is geometric. There is not a curved line anywhere on it. It is built by the flatweave method the region has used for centuries, which is why the piece is thin and weighs so little; it folds, travels and puts away flat.

03The rule of care

Day-to-day care is a shake and a vacuum. A specialist wash is what holds the colors where they are, and it should not be soaked at home. The face of a handwoven square is never perfectly true, which is better learned now than on the day it arrives. Flatwoven by hand in Afghanistan, in the villages that supply the region's kilims. Wool above; cotton carrying the structure below. A 50 cm square, thin and light enough to fold. Orange, green, yellow, blue, purple and cream, in geometric figures with no curved line. Purple softens first in strong daylight. Professional washing; no home soaking. It ends up wherever a room needs one more place to sit, which in most houses is the floor by the window.