Wine Red Turkmen Gül Rug, Hand-Knotted Sherwan

100% hand-spun Afghan wool, naturally rich in lanolin, which gives it softness, a subtle sheen and a natural resistance to everyday dirt and spills. Hand-knotted in northern Afghanistan with a cream fringe at both ends.

A deep wine red ground is among the most forgiving colours a rug can have and hides everyday marks well. The cream inside the güls is the vulnerable colour and the first to grey; it is also what makes each emblem read against the ground.

Look at the outline of any gül on this rug and you will see it is a circle. That sounds unremarkable until you consider how it was made. A knot grid has no curves in it — every line is either horizontal, vertical or a staircase — so a circle has to be approximated in small steps, and the steps have to change length continuously as the curve turns. Most rugs of this design avoid the problem by flattening the gül into an octagon, which needs only eight straight runs. Here the weaver has taken the harder route, on every one of the many dozen emblems in the field.

It changes how the field reads. Octagonal güls sit as separate objects with visible corners; round ones have no corners to catch the eye, so the grid reads as a continuous surface of repeating discs rather than a set of tiles. The fine dark lines threading down between the columns reinforce that — they tie each column together vertically, so the field is organised into runs rather than into a checkerboard. The red itself varies in depth across the rug, as hand-dyed wool does; it is part of why a field this regular does not look mechanical.