2'7" x 18'8" Pakistani Kazak Runner | Wool | Blue and Red

A runner of 2'7" x 18'8", hand-knotted in Pakistan with a wool pile. At thirty-one inches wide and well over eighteen feet long it is built for a corridor rather than a room, and the pattern is drawn to suit that: a single file of stepped medallions on a teal-blue ground, held between wide ivory borders that run the full length without a break.

The design

The Kazak drawing here is the medallion-and-field type, each medallion a stepped octagon with small latch-hooks and curled tendrils springing off its edges, and a cross-shaped centre filled with apricot wool, a tiny rosette and four leaf sprigs. The medallions sit one after another down the narrow field with no connecting lattice, so the eye reads them as a procession rather than a repeat. The main border is a broad ivory band carrying a serrated zigzag of red and blue with small hooked fillers in the triangles, and it is flanked on both sides by narrow guard stripes: a row of dotted boxes outlined in black, and a ribbon of X motifs alternating with round rosettes. Corner resolutions are worked rather than cut off, with the zigzag turning cleanly at each end, as the close view of the corner shows.

The colour

The field is a blue that sits toward teal, slightly greener in some lights than in others, and it is the colour doing the most work since it surrounds every medallion. Against it the medallions alternate between a clear madder red and a deep near-black indigo, each outlined in cream so the shapes stay separate from the ground. Inside them the centres are a soft apricot bordered in pale celadon, which keeps the middle of each figure lighter than its frame. The borders are beige and cream, warmer than the field, with the same red and indigo repeated small-scale and occasional dots of orange and light blue in the rosettes. Black outlines run through the guard stripes and tighten the whole arrangement.

The making

Hand-knotted in Pakistan on a cotton foundation, with a wool pile of medium height, as the folded views show. The selvedges are overcast in blue and the ends finish in plain ivory fringe. The rug is new and the condition is listed as perfect, with no wear, repair or colour run to report. Length of this order is uncommon among the hand-knotted rugs that come out of the Pakistani workshops, and it was woven in one piece rather than joined.