Yellow Oushak Hand-Knotted Silk and Wool Rug, Harem Series

Nine square meters of floor: 257 × 347 cm (8'5" × 11'5") is a rug for a room with real distance in it, and the Uşak drawing on this Harem-series piece was scaled accordingly — beige, cream, brown and red over a yellow ground.

01The geography of the weave

Çınar Halı wove it in Türkiye. A single rug. Yellow is a difficult ground at small sizes and a generous one at this scale, because there is enough of it for the color to become the room's light rather than an object in it.

02Color, by the light

The Uşak motifs are worked in beige and cream where they sit against the yellow and in brown and red where they need to hold an edge, and the effect at nine square meters is closer to a painted floor than to a rug on one.

03Knot by knot, by hand

It was drawn for palaces and it behaves like it: put it somewhere with height, or it will overwhelm what is standing on it. The Harem series is woven in first-class wool and silk, on fleece taken at the first shearing in Erzurum, and the knot is the Gördes — symmetrical, over two warp threads, at a density that took an extraordinary quantity of hand labor to complete across an area this large. Weaving of this class gets scarcer in Türkiye every year — a fact about the industry, not a claim about the rug.

04The mark of slow weaving

It should be cleaned by washers who work on rugs of this standard and by nobody else. Woven at the Çınar Halı looms in Türkiye for this series. First-class wool and silk, on fleece taken at the first shearing in Erzurum. The Gördes knot — symmetrical, over two warps — at high density. Yellow ground with Uşak motifs in beige, cream, brown and red. 257 × 347 cm (8'5" × 11'5"), roughly nine square meters. It needs a large room with height; a small one will not carry it. Cleaned only by washers used to this class of weaving. Yellow grounds keep a room lit through a northern winter, which is the reason they were woven in the first place.