7'9" x 9'9" Chobi Peshawar Rug | Ziegler All Over Floral | New Afghan Wool

This is a new hand-knotted Chobi rug woven in the Ziegler manner, 7'9" x 9'9" of hand-spun natural wool on a cotton foundation, finished with the soft antique wash that gives these pieces their mellow, already-lived-in look. The field is a wheat beige that carries visible abrash from the hand-spun yarn, and the drawing is deliberately open, so the rug fills a room without competing with furniture. It is one of the most usable proportions we stock, sitting right in the heart of 8x10 Oriental rugs, and it ships with our certificate of authenticity confirming the weave, material and origin.

Design and Motifs

The field is an all over floral design built from large lobed palmettes, olive rosettes with 8 petal centers, serrated leaves and long split vine scrolls outlined in a fine coral line. At the center sits a lozenge cluster of olive flower heads, repeated again toward each end of the field, so the pattern reads as a loose medallion arrangement inside an all over layout rather than a strict repeat. 3 borders frame it: an olive main border carrying ivory cartouches filled with brown and coral rosettes, a coral reciprocal band of hooked palmette heads on each side, and a narrow ivory and olive vine stripe running outside that. The corners resolve cleanly, the guard stripes keep their rhythm all the way around, and the ivory skirt and fringe finish both ends.

The Beige, Olive and Coral Palette

The ground is a warm wheat beige and ivory that shifts a shade lighter and a shade deeper across the width, the natural signature of hand-spun, kettle-dyed yarn. Over that, olive green does most of the structural work in the palmettes and the main border, running from a dusty sage in the field to a deeper moss along the edges. The accent color is coral: a soft rose red in the field palmettes, a brighter tomato coral in the guard stripes, with 4 deeper red palmettes anchoring the center line as seen in the close photographs. Brown and dark chocolate appear in the flower centers and leaf veins, with touches of peach, camel gold and pale grey-ivory in the small blossoms. Nothing here is harsh, which is why the rug sits comfortably with oak, walnut, linen and stone.

Chobi Weaving in Afghanistan and the Ziegler Tradition

Chobi, from the word for wood, refers to the natural plant and vegetable dyes these weavers use, and the Ziegler drawing refers to the 19th century workshop pattern books that first simplified classical floral designs for Western rooms. Afghan weaving families, many of them working to Peshawar market standards, are the people who kept that tradition alive, and today they produce some of the best hand-knotted work available at this price level. The quality here is in the yarn and the handle: tough highland wool, hand-spun so it takes dye unevenly and glows, knotted at an even, moderately tight density with a medium pile that you can see standing upright in the rolled-edge photograph. The back is clean and regular, the selvages are tight, and the rug lies flat. If you are weighing this against a city workshop piece, our guide on the difference between Persian and Oriental rug weaving explains what you are actually paying for.