The art of the rug

Every Persian rug begins with a knot.

Wool, colour, pattern, knot, time, home. Six stages, one object, and somewhere between six months and four years between the first knot and the last.

rug

0 months

of work

individual knots

pair of hands

A weaver ties between six and ten thousand knots a day. The rug in your room is, quite literally, a record of somebody's time.

The making

From wool to art

Highland fleece, hand-spun so no two threads are identical.

Madder root, indigo, pomegranate skin, walnut husk.

A cartoon drawn on graph paper — or held entirely in memory.

Row by row, tied and cut by hand, six thousand a day.

Months at the loom. Sometimes years. Always one pair of hands.

And then, quietly, it becomes the floor of somebody's life.

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Symbols

A seed, a cypress bent by wind, an eternal flame. The ancestor of the paisley.

Hover or tap a motif to redraw it

Glossary

Abrash: Bands of slightly different colour where a new dye batch began. A mark of hand-dyeing, not a fault.
Kork wool: The soft fleece from a sheep's neck and shoulder. Finer, more lustrous, more expensive.
Warp & weft: The foundation threads. Warps run the length of the rug and become the fringe.
Selvedge: The wrapped edge that protects the sides. Often the first part to need repair.
Pile: The cut ends of the knots — the surface you walk on.
Cartoon: The gridded drawing a workshop weaver follows. Village and tribal weavers work without one.