Mauve and Salmon Herati Medallion, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

100% wool pile, hand-knotted, finished with an ivory fringe at both ends. A herati at this scale, with every leaf and rosette outlined, needs a high knot count and a closely clipped pile to hold its detail.

The mid-toned field is reasonably forgiving and it is drawn edge to edge, so there is no open ground for a mark to sit in. The salmon medallion and diagonal bands are the lighter areas and will show more. The borders are slim for a rug this size — under 30cm on every side — so there is not much plain margin between the pattern and the selvedge to absorb wear at the edges.

Where the blue sits on this rug is not where you would guess. Measuring blue wool in rings outward from the centre of the field: the innermost 25cm come out at 15.7% blue — that is the panel inside the medallion. Then it stops. Across the next band, from 25 to 75cm out, which is a third of the whole field, blue falls to between 0.17 and 0.83%. Effectively none. Past 100cm it climbs back to 8.1%, in the outer field and the guard stripes.

So the body of the field — the part that anyone would describe as the blue-violet ground of this rug — contains almost no blue at all. Sampled across the field as a whole, 68.7% of it is warm: reds, pinks and oranges. The blue is concentrated in two places, the centre and the perimeter, and those happen to be the two places the eye goes first and returns to. Between them lies a large expanse of finely mixed warm wool that takes its apparent colour from what surrounds it. It is a useful thing to know before the rug goes down, because it means the mauve is not fixed: in a cool room, or beside blue furnishings, the field will read considerably bluer than it measures; in warm light it will fall back towards the dusty rose it actually is.