7'10" x 9'11" Tibetan Transitional Rug | Wool and Silk | Ivory and Gold

A hand-knotted rug from Tibet measuring 7'10" x 9'11", worked in wool and silk with no border at all. Big daisy and cornflower heads, some of them eight or nine inches across, drift over an open ivory ground on thin olive stems. From a standing height it reads as a single piece of drawing rather than a pattern: the flowers sit where they fell, not on a grid.

Design

The transitional drawing is all-over and deliberately uneven. A dozen large flower heads are scattered across the field, each one a different species in silhouette: flat daisies with rounded centres, spiky cornflowers, a seed head with a ring of dots at its middle, and two or three half-opened buds seen side on. They are joined by slender stems that curve the length of the rug and carry long pointed leaves, some olive, some a darker tobacco brown. Nothing is mirrored and nothing repeats exactly, and the composition is cut by the edges, so the flowers appear to continue past the rectangular boundary rather than stop at it.

Colour

The ground is a warm ivory running to oatmeal, with the soft tonal movement across the field visible in the second photograph. Against it the flowers are set in a narrow band of warm colour: wheat and honey gold for most of the petals, a clear orange for several of the centres, and a few whole heads in terracotta and burnt rust. Two or three of the seed-head flowers are drawn in a dull plum brown, the darkest note on the rug. The stems and leaves are olive and a greyed green that cools the whole arrangement down and keeps the oranges from dominating.

Making

Hand-knotted in Tibet in wool with silk, the silk concentrated in the flower heads and leaves, where it catches light at a different angle from the matte wool ground and makes the motifs appear slightly raised. The close shots show the clipped outline around each petal that gives that carved effect. The rug is new and in perfect condition, with a flat even pile, straight sides and an overcast selvedge, as shown in the folded corner. More hand-knotted work is in the full collection.