Ivory and Camel Damask Ghazni, Hand-Knotted Wool and Silk Rug

Ghazni wool pile with silk, hand-knotted, finished with an ivory fringe. The silk sits in the ivory drawing rather than the ground, which is what gives the pattern its sheen against the matt camel around it.

The mixed fibre is the thing to plan around: wool and silk behave differently to water and to abrasion, so this rug needs to be treated as silk throughout rather than as a wool rug with a little silk in it. On colour, be realistic — the whole rug sits between ivory and camel with nothing darker anywhere, so there is no forgiving area at all, and with no border there is no plain margin at the edges either. This is a rug for a room where it will be looked at rather than walked through.

A damask is normally described as a pattern on a ground: the ivory is the drawing, the camel is what it sits on. Measure the two and that description turns out to be the wrong way round. The ivory covers 52.2% of this rug and the camel 34.5%, with the remainder in the transitions between them. The thing being called the pattern occupies half again as much of the surface as the thing being called the ground.

That is what happens when a damask is drawn this large. The repeat runs 21.3cm across the width, so a single rosette-and-stem unit is roughly the size of a dinner plate, and at that scale the motifs grow into each other until the camel survives only as the shapes left between them. The consequence is a rug you can read two ways, and neither is a trick of the eye — ivory forms on camel, or camel forms on ivory. Which one you see tends to depend on the light and on how far away you are standing, and the second reading is the more literal one, because those camel shapes are the larger part of what is not there.