8'2" x 9'10" Indian Modern Rug | Wool | Lavender and Purple

A hand-knotted wool rug from India measuring 8'2" x 9'10", with an open lavender field held inside a wide, deeper purple border. There is no drawing in it at all: the whole effect comes from the colour and from the way the pile catches light, which in the full-length photographs shifts the field from silver-grey to violet depending on where the camera stands. It is one of the quietest things in our hand-knotted stock.

Design

The modern scheme here is a single band and a field, nothing more. The border runs roughly ten inches deep on all four sides and meets at a plain mitred diagonal in each corner, visible in the close photograph of the lower left corner where the two directions of pile change tone against one another. The field carries a fine horizontal striation through the whole surface, the mark of hand-dyed wool knotted row by row, and in the overhead shots this reads as soft cloudy banding rather than stripes. The ends finish flat and square with no fringe, and the sides are overcast in the darker purple.

Colour

The field is a pale lavender that runs towards silver where the pile lies away from the light, lifting to a warmer lilac when it lies towards it. The border is several steps deeper, a saturated violet with a rose-violet cast along the folded edge in the detail photograph, and close up it breaks into individual light and dark knots rather than sitting as one flat block. Against the pale centre the band acts as a frame and a weight at the same time, keeping a large area of near-plain colour from floating.

Making

Hand-knotted in India with a wool pile on a rectangular format of 8'2" x 9'10". The pile is clipped low and has a distinct sheen, which is what produces the colour shift between the photographs taken from different ends of the rug. The table lists it as new and the condition as perfect, and the close images of the surface show full, even pile with no thinning at the edges or corners.