5' x 5' Chinese Qom Design Round Rug | Silk | Burgundy and Teal

A round rug measuring 5' x 5', hand-knotted in China with a pile of silk, drawn to a Qom design. At a glance it is a single pale star floating on a dark red ground, ringed by a wide blue border and finished with a long ivory fringe that runs the whole circumference. The silk carries light differently depending on where you stand, so the field photographs darker on one side than the other in the same shot.

The design

The centre is a sixteen-point star medallion, each point filled with its own panel of fine vinework and small palmettes outlined in dark brown. Inside it sits a black core knotted with interlaced strapwork and lilac palmettes around a single small red square, which holds a four-petalled rosette no bigger than a thumbnail. The field around the medallion is not plain: it is covered edge to edge with a close tendril scroll, worked tone on tone so it reads as texture until you are standing over it. The main border is a band of scrolling paisley cartouches, each one filled with small flowerheads, separated by black guard stripes carrying a lilac vine. Outside those, a narrow ivory band of single rosettes runs to the fringe, interrupted at one point by a small woven cartouche.

The colour

The field is a burgundy that shifts toward magenta where the light strikes the silk and sinks almost to black in the shadowed arc near the border. Against it the medallion is a pale blue, closer to ice than to sky at its outer points, deepening to a saturated teal through the border paisleys. Ivory and a dull gold do the outlining work, and small touches of soft brown, lilac and black hold the two large blocks of colour apart so neither bleeds into the other.

The making

It is hand-knotted with a silk pile on a round format, the knotting fine enough to carry the hairline scrollwork in the field and the thin gold outlines in the medallion without them breaking up. The weave is Chinese, following a Qom drawing rather than coming from Persia. The rug is listed as new and in perfect condition, with the fringe full and even all the way round, and it sits among the hand-knotted rugs we stock in small round sizes.