6'2" x 6'9" Pakistani Ziegler Rug | Wool | Chocolate Brown and Beige

A hand-knotted wool rug measuring 6'2" x 6'9", seven inches off true square and close enough to read as one on the floor. The field is chocolate brown, covered edge to edge with cream and apricot flowerheads on a thin linked vine, and it is framed by a broad border on a pale wheat ground. Seen flat, as in the overhead photographs, the brown reads almost black in places and lifts toward a warm coffee tone where the pile leans toward the light.

Design

The Ziegler drawing here is an all-over one, with no medallion. Large serrated palmettes and round rosettes sit on a loose grid, joined by a fine scrolling vine that carries smaller eight-point stars and single blossoms into the gaps between them. Several of the palmettes have an arched shield centre, others a small square eye at the middle, so the repeat never settles into an exact copy of itself. The main border runs a row of dark brown star palmettes alternating with pale vase-and-leaf forms, and two narrow guard stripes of leaf and bud close it in on each side, with a plain brown outer stripe at the very edge.

Colour

The ground is a deep chocolate brown, struck through with the fine horizontal striation that comes from slightly varied wool, visible in the close detail shots. Against it the flowers are drawn in beige and cream shading to apricot, with pale sage green filling the inner petals and the shield centres. Burgundy appears sparingly, as a square at the heart of a rosette or a pair of short sprigs beside a palmette, and those few points of red are what keep the brown and wheat from going flat. The border ground is lighter than the field flowers, a wheat gold that carries the same dark brown outlines back out to the edge.

Making

Knotted by hand in Pakistan with a pile of fine Ghazni wool, a highland fleece with enough lanolin to take dye unevenly in a way that suits this kind of open brown field. The back photograph shows the knotting throughout, with the pattern legible from the reverse and the selvedge wrapped in brown. The rug is new, in perfect condition, with full pile and plain ivory fringe at both ends.