Multicolor Handwoven Wool Floor Cushion, 50 × 50 cm

Fifty centimeters square (1'8" × 1'8"), woven by hand in Afghanistan: a floor cushion with its face worked entirely in wool and its foundation in cotton, in green, yellow, purple and orange set against each other with no attempt at a scheme. The figures come out of Anatolian and Central Asian weaving — hooks, stepped bands, small starred forms — reduced to whatever fits inside a square this size.

01Reading the motif

At that scale a motif that would be one small element of a floor rug becomes the entire composition, which is why village cushions often look bolder than the rugs they descend from. The colors give the origin away: green beside purple is not a pairing anybody arrives at by planning. It is made in the rug villages of Afghanistan, on the same looms and by the same weavers who produce the floor pieces.

02What Wool does

Wool on the face, cotton in the structure, flat rather than piled — so it is thin. It serves as a seat pad, as a cover over a stool, or thrown across a chair, and it is not thick enough to be something you sink into. Handwoven in Afghanistan's rug villages. A wool face carried on cotton. Fifty by fifty centimeters. Green, yellow, purple and orange, in Anatolian and Central Asian figures. Flat-woven and thin — a seat pad rather than a deep cushion. Works as a chair cover or a small throw as readily as a cushion. Professional cleaning. A square this size ends up wherever it is wanted — a chair, a bench, the floor beside a window — and rarely stays in one place for long.