2'7" x 19'11" Pakistani Transitional Runner | Wool | Ivory and Wheat

A runner of 2'7" x 19'11", hand-knotted in Pakistan with a wool pile. At a glance it reads as a single pale field, ivory at the edges and warming to wheat down the centre, with pattern so lightly drawn that it only surfaces when the light crosses the pile at an angle. Twenty feet is a long thing to see all at once, and the first photograph shows how little interrupts it.

Design

The transitional drawing here is kept almost to a whisper. A narrow border runs the full length on both sides, set off from the field by a change of tone rather than a change of colour, and inside it the ground carries a faint all-over tracery of leaf and vine that the close photographs pick up better than the full-length ones. Scattered through the field are small rosettes and single flecks in a dull rose-brown, no two spaced regularly, the only marks on the rug with any contrast to them. Both ends finish in plain ivory fringe.

Colour

The palette is built from one family. Ivory and chalk-cream along the borders, moving to pale wheat and a faint honey in the middle of the field, with broad soft bands where the wool changes batch and the tone shifts a shade lighter or deeper across the width. Against all of that, the few rose-brown flecks and the odd tan speck are the whole of the contrast. Nothing in the rug is dark, and nothing in it is bright.

Making

Hand-knotted in Pakistan with a wool pile, cropped fairly low so the small-scale drawing stays legible rather than being buried in the nap. Among the hand-knotted work in our rug inventory this is one of the longer runners, cut for a corridor rather than a landing. The table records it as new and in perfect condition.