Salmon and Mauve Jaldar Alternating Lattice, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

100% wool pile, hand-knotted at a fine gauge, with a natural fringe at both ends. The gauge is what keeps the small hooked arms and the rosette centres crisp at this scale.

A mid-toned salmon ground hides everyday marks reasonably well. The cream is the vulnerable colour — it fills the wide borders and the rosette centres, and it is the first thing to grey. Because the whole field is lattice with no open ground, soiling tends to blur the two medallion types together before it reads as dirt, so regular light cleaning matters more here than on a bolder design.

The field is a single continuous lattice — every diamond shares its edges with the four around it, so there is no ground between them, only the salmon showing through where the drawing thins. What fills those diamonds is the interesting part, because there are two different medallions and they take turns. One is a cruciform with a cream rosette at its heart; the other is a stepped figure with hooked arms reaching out to the corners and a pale grey square at its centre. They alternate in both directions at once, so every diamond is surrounded on all four sides by the other kind.

A checkerboard of this sort is harder to hold than a simple repeat. A single motif repeated across a field is self-correcting — if the weaver loses count, the pattern still resolves. Alternating two forms in two directions means every diamond has to agree with four neighbours simultaneously, and a single misplaced medallion breaks the scheme in both axes at once and stays visible for the rest of the rug. Pick any diamond and check its four neighbours: all four should be the other type, the whole way down.