Red Shawl-Pattern Loom-Woven Wool Rug, Karnaval Series

The drawing is taken from a shawl: bands of yellow, green, blue and orange laid one inside the next across a red ground, with a plain red border holding them in. Red Shawl-Pattern Loom-Woven Wool Rug, Karnaval Series — wool, worked on the loom in India, and made in more than one size. Nothing in the field repeats exactly.

01Reading the motif

Each band shifts its width and the order of its colors, so the eye travels the length of the rug instead of settling in the middle, and the border is left bare on purpose to keep the whole surface from vibrating.

02What it sits well with

Against white walls the reds run hot; on wood, in a room with a lot of daylight, they cool toward something nearer a kilim. The rug was drawn for a young person's room and it behaves like one.

03Knot by knot, by hand

It is loud, and in a space that already carries pattern on the walls it will argue rather than agree. On a loom-woven rug the frame does the structural work and a weaver does the rest; here the rest means the fringes, which are tied on afterward at both ends, one at a time.

04What the yarn is

The pile is wool throughout. Nobody should put water through this at home — hand it to a workshop that cleans rugs, and only when a vacuum has stopped being enough. Woven in wool on the loom, in India. Red ground with yellow, green, blue and orange bands drawn from Anatolian shawl patterning. A plain red border frames the field and keeps the color count legible. The fringes are knotted by hand at both ends after the rug leaves the frame. Several sizes are woven; the pattern is redrawn to fit each one. Professional washing, with regular vacuuming in between. Put it in a plain room and it supplies all the color the room will need for the next ten years.