Cream Oushak-Floral Handwoven Rug, Emirgan Series

Two drawings meet on this rug: the large open flowers of Oushak, the weaving region of western Anatolia, and the plaited mat pattern Anatolian weavers call hasır. Cream Oushak-Floral Handwoven Rug, Emirgan Series — cream ground, purple and green through the field, pink and blue in the flower heads. Made on the Aegean side of Anatolia. One piece.

Oushak drawings are open and generous; hasır is a tight interlace copied from woven reed matting. Setting one inside the other is what gives the field its changes of scale — a flower head opens across four or five inches, and the ground behind it is worked in a plait small enough that you have to bend down to find it. Pink and blue appear only in the petals, and in a north-facing room they are the two colors still legible after everything else has gone gray.

Months at the loom, at a knot density high enough to hold that interlace together. The warp is viscose and the weft is wool and viscose; viscose is a plant fiber that takes light much as silk does, which is why a cream rug in this construction has a sheen on it. Rugs like this were once standard in the reception rooms of senior Turkish institutions and are barely made now — the weavers who can do it are older than the trade. The fringes are plaited into flat ribbons. Take it to a professional washer and to nobody else.

• Worked by hand on the Aegean side of Anatolia, over months.
• Oushak floral drawing set against an Anatolian hasır plait.
• Cream ground with purple and green; pink and blue confined to the flower heads.
• Viscose warp with a wool-and-viscose weft, worked at high knot density.
• Viscose carries the shine; wool carries the softness.
• Flat plaited fringes at both ends.
• Professional washing. This construction is rarely woven in Türkiye now.

What makes it worth having is not the flowers but the plait behind them, and almost nobody is still weaving that.