8' x 9'6" Pakistani Chobi Rug | Wool | Beige and Gold

A Chobi knotted in Pakistan, 8' x 9'6" with a wool pile and a Ziegler-style all-over pattern. The field is a pale beige close to ivory, filled with large palmettes and leaf sprays in gold, brown and pumpkin, and the whole thing is framed by a gold border that is the strongest colour on the rug. Seen from across a room it reads as one warm neutral; up close the drawing is busier than the overall tone suggests.

Design

There is no medallion. Palmettes sit in offset rows across the field, joined by a thin orange vine that runs corner to corner and carries small rosettes and serrated leaves along its length. Larger fan-shaped blossoms alternate with rounded ones, and long curling split leaves push out towards the border. The main border repeats a leafy palmette with a pale centre, turned so that each repeat faces the one before it, and two narrow guard stripes of chequered blocks and small quatrefoils run either side of it. The corners are resolved rather than cut off mid-motif, which not every all-over border manages.

Colour

The ground is a soft beige with a faint ivory cast, light enough that the thin vine work shows clearly against it. Over it the weaver has worked a warm range: saffron and old gold in the flower heads, walnut brown in the leaves, pumpkin in the border ground, and small touches of rust red at the heart of the palmettes. A cool grey-mauve appears in some of the leaves and quietens the warmer tones where they would otherwise run together. Abrash is visible across the field in the flat photographs, a gentle lightening and darkening of the beige in horizontal bands.

Making

Hand-knotted, with a wool pile on a cotton-coloured foundation; the folded corner shows a clear, even knotting on the reverse and plain ivory fringes at the ends. The table records the rug as new and in perfect condition, with full pile throughout. It is a rectangular piece at 8' x 9'6", one of many hand-knotted rugs of this type coming out of Pakistani workshops that draw on the Ziegler drawing of nineteenth-century Sultanabad.