Multicolor Patchwork Loom-Woven Wool Rug

Multicolor Patchwork Loom-Woven Wool Rug — a wool-pile rug of 200 × 300 cm (6'7" × 9'10"), assembled as a patchwork of classical Anatolian drawings: a navy panel under a cream flowering vine, a red panel with a large rosette medallion, mustard panels crowded with flowers and leaves, and one wide beige field carrying red-orange rosettes and green branches. The panels borrow from Hereke, Uşak and Kayseri, three towns that never wove alike, so what you get is a comparison rather than a repeat.

01Color that shifts through the day

Navy is the dark and formal corner. Red is the warm one, and the rosette at its center is the only thing on the rug that behaves like a proper medallion. The mustard sections are where the color is loudest, and the beige field is where the eye goes to rest.

02Coming off the loom

Buying one of these is buying four or five rugs and agreeing to look at all of them at once. It is made in India, on looms that combine machine knotting with hand weaving, which is how it arrives at the thickness and feel of a knotted rug without the years.

03What Wool does

The pile is entirely wool. The foundation is wool and cotton worked together, unusual in itself, and it is what gives the rug its weight. Fringes are finished afterwards by hand, each one tied separately.

04At the loom in in Uşak

Wool cleans easily enough, but there is a great deal of it here, and we would not recommend it to anyone who avoids wool. Wool pile; foundation of wool and cotton together. Loom-woven in India — machine knotting with hand weaving. Panels drawn from Hereke, Uşak and Kayseri patterns. Navy, red, mustard and beige sections, each with its own drawing. Each fringe knotted separately after the piece comes off the loom. Large at 200 × 300 cm, drawn for a sitting room or a dining room. A lot of wool in one rug; not our recommendation for anyone who avoids it. Professional washing. What does loom-woven mean on this rug? Loom-woven sits between hand-knotted and machine-made.

05Knot by knot, by hand

The pile and structure are set on a loom with machine assistance, and the finishing — the fringes included — is hand work carried out afterwards. The result has the thickness and the hand of a knotted rug for a small part of the weaving time. Where do the patchwork drawings come from? Each panel takes its drawing from a different Anatolian weaving town: Hereke, Uşak and Kayseri.

06A line from the archive

Their patterns were never made to the same rules, so the panels do not match, and the mismatch between one section's red and the next is the point rather than a fault. Hang paintings around it and it will hold its own; leave the walls bare and it becomes the only picture in the room.