7' x 11' Pakistani Bokara Rug | Wool | Slate Blue

A 7' x 11' rectangular Bokara knotted in Pakistan, with a pile of wool. Seen from across the room it reads as a pale blue field carrying rank after rank of small apricot medallions, held inside a wide stack of narrow borders that takes up nearly a third of the width at each side. The blue outer edge runs right out to the selvage, so the rug is framed in plain colour before the fringe begins.

Design

The field is a trellis of linked octagons, each one filled with a stepped cross and a pair of hooked arms, and the lattice that connects them is drawn in the same apricot and brown as the guls themselves, so the pattern reads as a continuous net rather than as rows of separate figures. Smaller eight-pointed stars sit at the crossings. Counting across the width there are six guls to a row, repeating up the length without a medallion or any break in the rhythm. The borders are the real event: roughly a dozen bands of differing width, among them an ivory band of paired hooked devices, a dark band of angular vine, several hairline guard stripes of dotted diamonds, and an outermost band of leaf forms on a tan ground. The corner photograph shows how cleanly each of these turns the corner.

Colour

The field is the slate blue named in the specification, a light, slightly greyed blue that the photographs catch as something close to ice. Against it the guls are worked in apricot and salmon over a tan ground, warm enough to sit forward of the blue rather than sink into it. Outlines and the narrow vine bands are a brown so dark it carries as charcoal black, and undyed ivory is used sparingly in the border devices and the small star centres. Rust red appears only in pinpoints along the outer band and in the weaver's cartouche at one end.

Making

Hand-knotted in wool in Pakistan, listed as new and in perfect condition. The pile is clipped short, which is what lets the drawing stay legible at this scale: the hooked arms of each gul and the dotted guard stripes hold their shape without blurring. The ends finish in plain ivory fringe and the sides in a blue overcast selvage. It is among the more closely drawn hand-knotted rugs of this type we handle, with the gul repeat small enough that the field reads as texture before it reads as pattern.