8' x 10' Tibetan Wool & Silk Rug | Ivory Butterfly & Floral Transitional Design | Brand New, Never Used

This is a brand new, never used 8' x 10' Tibetan rug, hand-knotted on a cotton foundation with a pile of wool and pure silk. The field is a single sweep of ivory with no border at all, and the drawing floats across it: single blossoms, small flowering sprays, and large butterflies set at the ends. The flowers and leaves are worked in silk, so they sit slightly higher than the matte wool ground and shift from pale gold to deep copper as you walk around the room. It is one of the quieter pieces in our collection of modern and contemporary hand-knotted rugs, and it reads as an Oriental rug in construction and a piece of contemporary art in effect. Like every rug we import, it ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming the hand-knotted construction, the wool and silk pile, and the origin.

Design and Motifs

The layout is a loose grid rather than a repeating all-over pattern, and the weaver clearly treated each motif as its own small drawing. Down the center run 3 larger flowering stems, each with a spotted lily, a cupped rosette and long bending leaves. Flanking them are single stems carrying one blossom each: 5 and 6 petal rosettes, a scalloped pomegranate-like bloom, and small tulips with a single curling leaf. At both ends the design breaks into butterflies with swept upper wings, forked lower wings and 2 long antennae, 3 across each end. There is no border, no medallion and no spandrels, which is unusual in hand-knotted work and gives the eye nothing to do except follow the scattered botany. The silk is used for outlines, petal interiors and leaf veining, so each motif has a drawn edge that catches light, a technique that only works when the knot count is high enough to hold a clean curved line at this scale.

Ivory Ground with Rust, Salmon and Olive Accents

The ground is ivory leaning warm, closer to clotted cream and soft sand than to white, and the wool takes light unevenly across 8 feet so the field has gentle tonal movement rather than a flat printed look. Against that, the palette is deliberately narrow and earthy. The deepest notes are a brick and iron rust seen in the scalloped blossoms and in the upper wings of the butterflies, often outlined in a darker oxblood line. Mid tones run through terracotta, copper and a dusty salmon pink on the petal interiors. The leaves, stems and butterfly bodies are olive drab shading into a greenish taupe, with the silk portions reading as pale bronze or antique gold depending on the angle. There is no blue, no black and no high-contrast accent anywhere in the rug, which is why it settles so easily into neutral, linen and walnut interiors instead of fighting them.

Tibetan Weaving and the Quality of This 8' x 10'

Tibetan weaving is its own tradition, built on the Tibetan knot looped around a rod, which produces a dense, resilient pile and a back that stays flat and square, visible at the folded corner. The Himalayan workshops that still work by hand have become the main source for high quality contemporary hand-knotted rugs, and this piece shows why: the curved drawing of the lily petals and butterfly antennae is held cleanly, the silk inlay sits level with the wool rather than pulling at it, and the selvages and ends are finished tight with no distortion. The pile is thick enough to take real traffic and the wool has the slightly dry, lustrous handle that wears in rather than out. At 8 feet by 10 feet it is a true room-size piece, and buyers comparing 8x10 hand-knotted rugs will notice that this one has never been laid in a home: it is in perfect condition, straight off the roll.