2'8" x 19'2" Pakistani Khal Momadi Runner | Wool | Red and Navy

This is a hand-knotted runner measuring 2'8" x 19'2", knotted in Pakistan in the Khal Momadi manner with a 3/8" wool pile. At arm's length it reads as a single band of dark red carrying a column of small diamond medallions, and it is long enough to run a corridor end to end without a seam or a join.

Design

The field is divided into stacked panels, each one a grid of squares filled with four-petal rosettes and squared hooks in navy. Centred in every second panel is a navy cartouche holding a diamond medallion, outlined in ivory with a dotted edge, and the medallions repeat down the whole nineteen feet at even intervals. Flanking the field on both long sides is a serrated, wave-edged inner guard that scallops in and out against the ground, a detail that gives the runner its rhythm when it is seen from one end. The main border carries squared latch-hook figures and small trees, bracketed by zigzag minor stripes, and both ends finish in a flat-woven kilim band before the fringe.

Colour

The ground is a dark madder red that leans to brick where the light crosses the pile and to a deeper wine where it does not. Against it the drawing is almost all navy blue, dense enough to read as near black in the border and in the cartouches under the medallions, which keeps the red from spreading flat. Ivory does the fine work: the dotted outlines around each medallion, the zigzag guard stripes, the fringe. The kilim ends pick up small amounts of green and gold that appear nowhere else in the rug.

Making

Hand-knotted in wool on a wool foundation, the pile cut to 3/8", the weave fine enough that the small rosettes inside each square hold their shape rather than blurring. The condition is listed as new and perfect, with full pile, straight selvedges and the flat-woven ends intact, as the close photographs show. Khal Momadi is a Turkmen design of Afghan origin; this one was woven in Pakistan, where it is among the more common patterns on the loom, and it sits alongside the rest of the hand-knotted rugs here as a long, narrow, heavy-wearing piece made for a passage.