Cream Carved Floral Handwoven Wool Rug, Sultanahmet Series

At 197 × 312 cm (6'6" × 10'3") this goes under a long dining table with the chairs still pulled out: a cream floral rug from the Sultanahmet Series, handwoven in India from a wool and cotton build with bamboo viscose worked in, its ground drawn tone on tone and its border worked in dusty rose.

01Reading the motif

One piece at this size. The field is deliberately hard to read from a distance — flowers in the same register as the cream they sit on, so the surface looks textured rather than patterned. All the definition is at the edge, where the dusty rose border carries flower and leaf figures at full contrast and gives the rug its outline.

02What Wool does

Bamboo viscose is spun into those motifs, so the border brightens or dulls depending on the angle the light strikes it from, and the pattern lifts forward and settles back through the day. Tens of thousands of knots went in by hand across several months in India, on a cotton foundation with wool through the ground.

03Knot by knot, by hand

After the weaving comes the part that decides how the rug looks: each motif is cut around with shears, by hand, so it stands slightly proud of the field and throws a shadow of its own. Solid timber and walnut are what it was drawn for.

04What the yarn is

Day to day it wipes and vacuums; for the real wash, someone who does it professionally. Made by hand in India over months, in wool with cotton and bamboo viscose. 197 × 312 cm (6'6" × 10'3") — a large dining floor or a full seating group. Cream ground with tone-on-tone flowers; dusty rose border at full contrast. Bamboo viscose in the border motifs, which is where the shift in brightness comes from. Each motif cut around with shears after knotting, leaving it raised. Tens of thousands of knots in the piece. Drawn to sit with solid timber and walnut. Routine sweeping suits it; wash it through a specialist. The carving is the thing to look at last and the thing that will still be visible in twenty years.