Ruby Red Turkmen Gül Bokhara, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

100% wool pile, hand-knotted, finished with an ivory fringe at both ends. Güls drawn at this scale, with a repeat of under nine centimetres, need a high knot count to hold their detail — on a coarser weave the interior of each emblem would simply close up.

A deep ruby ground under dense drawing is among the more forgiving surfaces a rug can have, and the borders are woven a clear step darker still. The ivory inside the güls is the vulnerable colour and it is the one doing the most work, since it carries the whole internal drawing of every emblem. The fringe will show soiling well before the pile does.

The borders on this rug are not the same depth all the way round, and the difference is deliberate. Down the two long sides they run 56.4cm and 53.4cm. Across the two ends they run 32.4cm and 31.3cm. Each pair agrees closely with its opposite number, so this is not the weaving drifting — the long sides have simply been given a frame about seventy per cent deeper than the ends.

Work out what that does and the reason becomes clear. The rug itself measures 305 by 243cm, a ratio of 1.26. Had the border been an even 32cm all round, the field left inside would have come out 241 by 179cm — a ratio of 1.35, noticeably longer and narrower than the rug containing it. By deepening the sides instead, the weaver brought the field to 195 by 179cm, a ratio of 1.09, which is very close to square. So the frame is doing something beyond decoration: it is correcting the proportion of the panel inside it. A gül grid reads best on a field that is close to square, because the eye then takes the rows and the columns as equal partners rather than reading the pattern as a procession down the length. The border has been sized to give the pattern the shape it wants.